“Journals are already books written with others. 
The art of writing with others is a strange symptom
which foreshadows a great progress of literature.
One day we will perhaps write, think, act collectively.”

Novalis 

Maurice Blanchot cites these remarks, which Novalis made about the journal Athenaeum, in his article published in the Nouvelle Revue Française (Blanchot 1964). Athenaeum was much more than just a review of literary criticism, it is the very stage on which the Schlegels, Novalis, Tieck, Schleiermacher and Schelling elaborated the Romantic project. Despite the short time during which the Schlegels published this journal at Jena (from 1798 to 1800), Athenaeum was the privileged site of an experiment in “plural writing”, opening the horizon of a work in common. But if the plurality of the journal can be seen in the diversity of the authors who contributed to it, this plurality must be first and foremost understood as the plurality already flowing from every single pen. The form which the genre of the journal imposes upon writing – a short, discontinuous, interrupted writing – brings forth a plurality of voices which was always present in us in a virtual state, like a profusion of discourses which make themselves heard one at a time. The break which calls for a resumption elsewhere and according to other modalities imposes writing by cut-up, spontaneous and circumstantial. The fragmentary and discontinuous form that Schlegel and especially Novalis chose, speaks to an attuned sensitivity to the multiple bursts of identity which constitute a signature – or to put it in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms: a single name already conceals a crowd.

To read this essay in the context of the great work The Infinite Conversation (1969), where it was republished, certainly helps us to sense the presence of Blanchot’s major themes, such as the absence of the work, the fragmentary and the erasure. But this carries the risk of masking the presence of a highly practical and political preoccupation in these reflections on the form that writing in a journal endorses.  It is this practical side which gradually absorbed the theoretician of the neuter in those years.

Blanchot sees the Athenaeum experience as a total experience in which writing does not retire to some ivory tower but extends its reach to the totality of human facts, in which it exposes itself without a safeguard to its world. Blanchot’s attitude towards “public” speech, and therefore towards journals in which issues are debated, remained extremely cautious. As is well known, he was more and more reluctant to write for political journals, after his political delusions in the 30’s which lead him into the spheres of reactionary or even extreme right journals like Combat. This self-imposed silence of the post-war period lasted until 1958, during which time he dedicated himself to literature alone. In 1958 though, and with the feeling that protest was necessary against General De Gaulle’s assumption of power he co-founded the collective 14 juillet with Dionys Mascolo, Jean Schuster and others. At that same time, he participated in the writing of the Manifeste des 121 to defend the right of insubordination in Algeria. In that context he met Jean-Paul Sartre, to whom he expressed his feeling that these initiatives were but the start of a wider movement for which new tools needed to be created. According to Blanchot, the need for a new publication venue was pressing and this despite his “revulsion at participating in this form of literary reality which constitutes a journal” (letter to Sartre, December 2^nd, 1960, texts in a special edition of the journal Lignes 1990, 220). Maurice Nadeau suggested enlarging his Lettres nouvelles to include societal debates, Sartre proposed to dedicate a larger part of the Temps modernes to literature. Blanchot retorted that these reforms, which would lead to a more political Lettres nouvelles or a more literary Temps modernes, were not on the scale of the radical transformation that was required. We have to bear in mind, says Blanchot, that an epochal change is at hand, a “change of the times”, which was not only a matter of the crises concerning France (the arrival in power of De Gaulle and the Algerian War), but which implies that “all of these problems are of an international order” (Lignes 1990, 179). Any journal would have to respond in its form and could not content itself with adding a few “foreign” sections. Taking further an intuition of Dionys Mascolo, Blanchot insists on the fact that the journal to come – of which neither the name nor the content were settled – would have to be international in an essential way:

“not only multinational, nor universal in the sense of an abstract universality, which would retain only the problems of a vague and empty identity, but a pooling of literary, philosophical, political and social problems, as they appear under the determination of each language and in each national context” (Lignes 1990, 181)

Elio Vittorini, who frequented the community of 5 rue Saint-Benoît assembled around Marguerite Duras, gave the project links to Italy; the German correspondents joined in. After several months, a committee was established by way of intense exchanges in letters and some visits. The French contingent included Blanchot and Mascolo of course, but also Robert Antelme, Marguerite Duras, Louis-René des Forêts, Michel Butor, Maurice Nadeau, Michel Leiris, and Roland Barthes. The Italian editors included Elio Vittorini, Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini, with Francesco Leonetti as secretary. The German committee attracted Uwe Johnson, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Ingeborg Bachmann, Martin Walser, and Günter Grass. Links were established with the United Kingdom (Iris Murdoch), Poland (Leszek Kolakowski) and even the United States. The organizers planned to find associates in Latin America and Africa. Thanks to the special dossier that Michel Surya put together in his journal Lignes we are now able to read a selection of letters exchanged among the authors which allow us to see the material and conceptual difficulties of putting together such a journal which cuts across nations and languages (Lignes 1990). Of all these preparatory texts, Blanchot’s without a doubt display the highest intensity and the most severe formal exigency.

“The journal is not a review [revue]” in the sense it would “submit items to review [passer en revue]” as if from a panoramic observatory, a review of the world of culture or in the world of politics sprinkled with a bit of literary criticism, but must be a “journal of total critique,” as Blanchot had already written to Sartre (perhaps inspired by Athenaeum). This journal would be total not because it would treat everything, but because “the Whole” would be at risk, or rather – to avoid being too quickly referred back to Sartre’s literature engagée – because it would be interested in that which lies “outside of the Whole” (Lignesin the world (the journal has to be a way of “saying the world”; Lignes 1990, 185) and at the same time set free from its cut-outs and from its topographies? 1990, 180). The journal must be a collective work, not because it would the central organ or the official vehicle of a certain kind of thought common to all, but being born from the deep conviction that it is by way of the pooling of resources and of the reflections of all that each would manage to go beyond his or her own thinking, thus freeing up a space of new virtualities. Geographic or linguistic extension is not yet in itself a sufficient condition for an effective opening because, as Elio Vittorini reminds us, if the journal were but the megaphone of a group with already established ideas, it would remain foreseeable, predictable (Vittorini 1964). How then to open a new space for such a journal? And how to conceive the form of a journal which could open new spaces? How to elaborate a space of a journal which would be at the same time in the world (the journal has to be a way of “saying the world”; Lignes 1990, 185) and at the same time set free from its cut-outs and from its topographies?

Even more than the set of authors, or of their affinities for one another, Blanchots holds that the translator would thus be, paradoxically, “the true writer of the journal” (Lignes 1990, 187). Transferring words from one language to another, the translator is also the one who possesses the most acute consciousness that one can never reduce the words of one language to the words of another. He or she inhabits a kind of space-in-between, a space of passage but also the gap preventing us from speaking in a single Pentecostal language. Since languages are never contemporary:

“how to maintain in the translation this difference of historic level? In the same way, the problem of dialects: literary German, especially in its poetic form, is often a dialect, but the problem of the translation of dialects has, it seems to me, never been happily resolved (In the same way, I think that the Italian language is not unified in the same way as French)” (ibid.)

At the heart of the journal, there will, therefore, be first and foremost the question of language itself, of the inability to find an adequation between words and things, but also of language’s ability to speak differently than just naming, in short, the “power without power” of literature as Blanchot puts it with this beautiful formula. Turning away from literature “engagée” as an instrument of political and social struggle, Blanchot makes Bataille’s idea his own by thematizing it indirectly: “This research of the ‘indirect’ is one of the great tasks of the journal, given that ‘indirect’ critique, by detour, does not mean only allusive or elliptic critique, but more radical critique, going right to the hidden sense of the root [racine]” (ibid.). Of all the participants, Blanchot displays the most acute sensitivity to the question of the form of the journal, which always stays for him problematic: “Critique of the journal in general […] how to reintroduce the ‘idleness’ [désoeuvrement], the lack of care for time in a periodical publication?” (Lignes 1990, 189)

In reading these lines or even more so in reading between them, one cannot shake the impression that the project was condemned to never see the light of day in the face of such extreme formal exigency and such intellectual overdetermination. Indeed, there were numerous factors competing to prevent the anonymous journal from becoming a reality: the difficulty of finding editors in the various countries; the particularly problematic situation of a divided Germany, which necessitated, according to Enzensberger, a journal centered on national questions; Italy, where Blanchot’s propositions seemed too detached from the social questions of the moment. Following this failure, Elio Vittorini and Italo Calvino decided to publish, despite it all, a few articles which were to figure in the edition “zero” of the review in their journal Il Menabò which appeared – on this occasion – under the name Gulliver (one of the names considered for the Revue internationale). The four Blanchot texts from 1961 appeared (“The Quotidian”, translated by Gabriella Zanobetti, as well as “The Word in Archipelago” (On René Char), “The Name of Berlin” and “The Conquest of Space,” translated by Guido Neri). Blanchot reprinted the first two texts in The Infinite Conversation, the fourth never appeared in French, while “The Name of Berlin” met with a curious fate. When Jean-Luc Nancy wanted to republish this text, he realized that the original had disappeared (Blanchot never kept originals, considering that a text sent off for publication no longer belonged to him.) Nancy’s proposition to retranslate the text from the Italian version with Hélène Jelen, to re-write, therefore, the text a second time, pleased Blanchot, who immediately consented. When the original manuscript was after all that found in 2002, it was published alongside Nancy’s version in Ecrits politiques.

Despite our research in the Italian archives, we have not been able to find the original of the fourth text (“The Conquest of Space”), which Blanchot sent to his Italian translator. Reassured by Blanchot’s backing of the “re-translation” of his text and encouraged by Monique Antelme (whom we would like to thank here for her support of the project ATOPIA), we resolved to risk the perilous exercise of “writing” (like) Blanchot and of presenting today for the first time to the French reader the fragment entitled “The Conquest of Space.” [an English translation by Christopher Stevens was already available].

This short text is remarkable in more than one way. Its phrasing, simple and powerful, attests to the care which Blanchot took to follow the daily course of things, current events and such, while he also detached himself from the world in order to privilege a more untimely reflection in a quest for deeper meaning. He reterritorialized problems, describing the construction of the wall as he had done in “The Name of Berlin,” or here with the flight of Gagarin. In so doing, he deterritorializes them to free up a dimension which goes beyond what ordinarily fits in the chronicle of an intellectual. By telescoping perspectives, the method meets up with the object; undoing the Site and its “rooting” power.  In the text written for the Revue Internationale, Blanchot insists on the necessity of producing a mode of reflecting on the “place” (Lignes 1990, 189). “The Name of Berlin” and “The Conquest of Space” would be examples of concrete application. In light of the descriptions that Enzensberger – and especially Johnson – offered of this division which was being materially constructed before their eyes (a reality which is far than being simply historic today, while others walls are being built in Israel or New Mexico, at Heiligendamm or at Ceuta), Blanchot senses that he has the authority to give an interpretation of the historical moment as sounding the death knell of a metaphysics of residence:

“Berlin is the symbol of the division of the world, a universal point, the place where reflection on the unity which is simultaneously necessary and impossible occurs in each person who lives there, and who, in living there, experience not only the site of habitation but also the absence of site of habitation.”

While in Berlin, the common space became the site of the erection of an untransversable wall, making certain materially the impossibility of habitation, the orbit of Gagarin the 12^th of April, 1961 would be the a-topic counterpoint. The idea was not, however, totally original, since Blanchot drew upon an article by Emmanuel Lévinas called “Heidegger, Gagarin and us.” The article which forms part of the so-called confessional work of Lévinas, and appeared in Information juive, contains nevertheless many decisive philosophical openings. Lévinas insists on the fact that Gagarin’s feat undeniably constituted a “magnificent Luna-park stunt which impressed the crowds”. But the true feat of the cosmonaut, more secretly, “is to have left behind the Place. For one hour, a man existed outside of all horizon – everything was sky around him, or, more precisely, everything was geometric space. A man existed in the absolute of homogenous space” (Lévinas 1961, 350).

In these few remarks, buried in the middle of what is a praise of Judaism as the religion of exile, we find the criticisms of the phenomenological concept of horizon, but more importantly a critique of Heideggerian rejection of contemporary technology. Technique as an instrument of  “standing-reserve” (Gestell) or “enframing” certainly constitutes a danger (Blanchot repeats it in his fragment), but this rejection is dangerously double as it leads to a nostalgia of some primordial earth, the lost Erde. Lévinas’s remarks are original to the extent they show that Heideggerian thought on this point displays less its proximity to Christian theology (a proximity too often emphasized) but all the more so to paganism, for how could we understand Heidegger’s program (Building, Dwelling, Thinking) other than as a return to sources, those sources which in all pagan beliefs are places inhabited by spirits? Lévinas has in any case the merit of explaining how it is possible to move from local spirits, the genii loci, to the site of spirit/mind.

Through this short, marginal text by Lévinas, as well as in the text by Blanchot that we are (re)publishing today, we can glimpse the exordium of a certain interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy which still marks to a large extent its reception in France. But on the other hand, we also find a reflection on the more concrete modalities of a “utopia of the non-place” (Blanchot, The Conquest of Space), which is elaborated, not against but with technique and the implications of which we are maybe able to understand today even more clearly.

Bibliography

• Blanchot, Maurice (1964): “The Athenæum,” in : Nouvelle Revue Française, n°140, août 1964, 301-313 (also in: L’Entretien infini, Paris: Gallimard, 1969, 515-527) [“The Athenaeum,” translated by D. Esch and I. Balfour, in: Studies in Romanticism 22 (1983), 163-72]
• Blanchot, Maurice (1961) : “Le nom de Berlin,” (now in: Ecrits politiques, 71-76) ["The Name Berlin,” translated by C. Stevens, in: The Blanchot Reader, edited by M. Holland, Blackwell, 1995, 24-25].
  
• Blanchot, Maurice (2003): Ecrits politiques. 1958-1993, Paris: Lignes, coll. “Essais”.
  
• Levinas, Emmanuel (1961) : “Heidegger, Gagarine et nous”, in : Information juive no. 131, June-July 1961 (also in: Difficile liberté. Essais sur le judaïsme, Paris, Albin Michel, 1984, 347-351) [“Heidegger, Gagarin and Us,” in: Difficult Freedom. Essays on Judaism, translated by S. Hand, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1990, 231-34]
• Lignes, no. 11 (1990), Special issue “Revue internationale”, Paris: Librairie Séguier, Septembrer 1990. 
  
• Vittorini, Elio (1964): “Premessa,” in : Gulliver/Il Menabò no. 7 (1964), Turin: Einaudi, 1964

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank the following for their help at numerous critical stages in the preparation of this dossier: Monique Antelme, Francesco Leonetti, Christophe Bident, Carmen Prestia, Fulvio Barbarino and Mike Holland.  

Translated by Melanie Conroy (Stanford)

Illustrations: Paul Campbell (New York)