Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography

Maurice Blanchot has long inspired writers, artists, and philosophers with some of the most incisive statements of what it meant to experience the traumas and turmoils of the twentieth century. Bident’s magisterial biography provides the first full-length account of Blanchot’s itinerary, drawing on unpublished letters and interviews with the writer’s close friends, while also providing a sophisticated genealogy of his thought. A journalist and activist, but also inclined to secrecy, Blanchot lived public and private lives that converged at some of the century’s most momentous occasions: He was nearly executed during the Occupation, participated prominently in the May ’68 revolution in Paris, and, more controversially, wrote for the far right in the ’30s. Even-handed throughout, Bident offers a much-needed fleshing out of a life too easily sensationalized.