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Maurice BLANCHOT (Nicolas-Edme RESTIF DE LA BRETONNE) (Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de SADE)

Sade et Restif de la Bretonne. Tapuscrit avec de nombreux ajouts autographes [Ensemble] Un livre vivant. Manuscrit préparatoire [ensemble] Les plaisirs et les jours, tapuscrit final.

S.n., s.l. 1948, 50 feuillets (21x27cm); 3 feuillets in-8 (12x22cm), un feuillet 13,5x10,5cm; 17 feuillets in-4 (21x27cm).

Original typescript of 50 leaves, comprising Blanchot’s collected writings on Restif de la Bretonne, which appeared successively in Critique n°22 in March 1948, under the title “Un livre vivant [A Living Book] ”, and Les Cahiers de la Pléiade n°4 in June 1948, under the title “Les plaisirs de la vertu [The Pleasures of Virtue] ”, and finally as a preface to Restif de la Bretonne’s “Sara”, published by Stock in 1949. This important collection is enriched with four manuscript leaves written recto and verso of the first outline, notes, and final typescript of “Plaisirs de la vertu”, annotated by the publisher.  The first leaf has a significant tear to head with loss, affecting the majority of the title. The other leaves have insignificant occasional small marginal tears.
The article was picked up again later, in 1986, in an essay entitled Sade et Restif de la Bretonne, published in the collection “Le regard littéraire” by the Brussels-based publisher Complexes.
Typescripts and manuscripts with numerous deletions, corrections and underlinings in ink.”
In 1948, during a period of intense literary activity which included finalizing the second version of Thomas l'Obscur,  Blanchot manifested, in response to criticism, a profound disenchantment “to the point of feeling its pointlessness” (Bident).
This feeling of doing things in vain nonetheless fed a blooming period of writing. Blanchot did not limit himself at all to the harsh effort of research, as witnessed by this important document, which unveils the development of his thinking on Sade and Restif de la Bretonne.
This astounding typescript, with several stages of writing and composition, is a unique example of Blanchot’s intellectual path while putting together this profound reflection.
A comparative study of the different versions and published articles makes clear that the document offered here for sale predates all the publications but that it nonetheless bears traces and all the elements of each.
Indeed, if the initial structure appears to be that of the preface to Sara, the additions, transformations, and reprintings of certain leaves and the renumbering of the pages correspond in part to the development of the two shorter articles that appeared before, and make up extracts of this preface.
Structurally highly complicated, the typescript reveals, through its re-thinkings, syntactical corrections, insertions, reinstatements and bits stuck on, the progress of Blanchot’s thinking and the chronology of the piece’s composition. The disparate nature of the papers that make up this collection make these breaks in the writing very clear.
The first five leaves of the ensemble, whose partially lacking title [Un...] refers to the first article “Un livre vivant”, concludes with what seems to be a sentence left unfinished in the middle and a line across two thirds of the leaf. This text appears again in modified form from page 20 onwards and this time is completed, to become the end of the preface to Sara.
This first unfinished version that begins like the short manuscript included in our collected would become the introduction of the article in the Cahiers de la Pléiade.
Blanchot started his article once again, with a new numbering for what would become the start of, and the preface to the Plaisirs de la vertu.
As with his novelistic work, Blanchot here presents a “long” version into which are inserted sheets with a truncated text partially modified for the composition of the two articles in between. The manuscript corrections on the long version, copied in type on the short version, leave absolutely no doubt as the chronology of the critical process. Thus, the conclusion of the Plaisirs de la vertu which is on leaves 16 to 18 finishes with Blanchot’s typed signature. Nonetheless, a second series of pages numbered 16 to 18 present the continuation of the thought. In the same way, from page 20 on, Blanchot reuses, with changes, the first pages, which he had abandoned, to work out his conclusion.
The complicated mass of these manifold reprises and corrections reveals the density and maturation of this palimpsest-like work. It should also be noted that various corrections were not taken up in the printed versions. This is also true for numerous manuscript notations and developments of notes that considerably enrich our knowledge of the author’s work and his personal research. “M. Bachelin was very angry with Remy de Gourmont who attributed 2 to 300 volumes to Restif (with [a certain] (deleted) lack of precision). Monselet counted 203 volumes…M. Bachelin himself found 61,000 pages, or 190 volumes, including repetition. But we must not forget those: for what else is as important?”
This is a very personal intervention from an author who so many times reused his own articles in critical essays and who was just in the process of re-writing his first novel.
One can also see that the manuscript which has come down to us is made up only of the first lines of the initial introduction (the one used in Un livre vivant), followed by scattered notes without any real sense of continuity.
Up till now, based on the documents we’ve been able to consult, Blanchot’s typescripts have generally consisted of a re-transcription of his manuscripts with few variants or corrections.
On the other hand, the minimalist, almost aporetic, quality of this manuscript and the wealth of corrections and reprises in the typescript would seem to indicate that, in this case at least, the typescript was the original working document on the basis of which the author’s reflections developed.
As well as the structural approach to the writing that this typescript allows us, there is significant interest in how the very heart of the story is distinguished by the omnipresence of the central themes of Blanchot’s life and work. The exceptional length of the text as well as the difficult work of its development bear witness to a remarkable intellectual engagement, an indicator of the very particular importance that the author attributed to the work of Restif as compared to that of Sade.
Just as with the critique of Sade ("Quelques remarques sur Sade [A Few Remarks on Sade]") written a few years before, Blanchot presents a portrait of Restif de la Bretonne that is at the same time psychological, social and literary. Blanchot does not fail to counterpoise the spirit of these two writers whom he held dear. “It is well known that incest always seemed to Restif a [particularly/very] pleasant passion. In l'Anti-Justine, he saw in incest the best antidote to the dark perversions of Sade.”  “Rather muted, but reasonable elegies: Restif is not immoral. He uses, as we have seen, morality in a rather singular way, but he has to do so. Compared to the philosophers of nature for whom there is neither virtue nor vice, he cuts a rather retrograde figure, but compared to Sade, he seems an abyss of truth ».
As usual, Blanchot tries to retrace intellectual kinships by establishing, sometimes working backwards, a genealogy of literary creation. Thus he makes a clever link between Proust and Restif around the question of memory: “Restif makes memory the creative faculty par excellence. ” ; “ It ’s that all stories are already invested with a memory…”; “With his Mementos, his memories and his stories, Restif is trying less to immortalize events that have already disappeared than to transform those still to come into moments already lived”, or even “Many of his books superimpose memories”.
Blanchot’s perpetual re-writing finds a surprising echo even in the analysis of Restif’s work: “His ideas come and go. He builds them up, they break down, he comes up with different ones. They do not have the logic of a system, despite the fact that he presented them several times in a systematic form” . What follows seems less personal: “ and [at each moment] (deleted) always threatened by the fantastical movement of a spirit not really made for thinking, they also lack both seriousness and intellectual conviction: apart from the seriousness of passion.” This passage, struck through in ink in the typescript, would end up appearing in its entirety in the printed versions.
The narrative reprises highlight the re-writings, borrowings and reformulations of Blanchot’s thinking, which seems to structure itself along the lines of analyses, as the reuse of the introduction to the previous theme shows. “ His ideas come and go. He builds them up, they break down, he comes up with different ones. They do not help explain his behavior at all, and if he moralizes about his slightest act, his morality consists of saying: here is the moment I turned base, there the time when I was honest still … “.
Thus, the great attention and power of the interpretation devoted to biographical anecdotes from childhood, family relationships and the awakenings of creative passions and impulses, seem to lift a certain veil on Blanchot’s legendary modesty when it comes to his own experience of paternal authority. “If it is true that children naturally harbor a stock of hated for their father, this antipathy in the case of Restif found itself displaced, and he was able to love his father perfectly while transferring the negative parts of his feelings for his family onto his much older brothers. “
Another central preoccupation of Blanchot’s, the question of morality and its reversibility – already present in his study of Sade, also reappears in this psychological analysis of Restif de la Bretonne. The critic, here, accuses him of a deep fascination for morally ambiguous and bankrupt personalities. “ the game of hide and seek that Restif plays with morality to his greatest delight is also characterized by the following: barely having [had he] (deleted) committed the greatest crime and feeling forever lost to depravity, he finds himself reborn and along with his innocence regained, comes the pleasant thought of being able to lose it once again. “
It is without doubt when he’s looking to shed light on the essence of the creative act that Blanchot achieves the apogee of his literary verve, studded with striking phrases that resonate like an echo of his own situation: “ He has the tendency of falling into bad ways that is particular to the self-taught. For them, learning is an unfettered adventure, and he adds to that the pleasure of making himself remarkable by committing himself to learning to love his errors, respecting his distractions, and eventually finding joy in his remorse, mixing in the strangest way virtue, pleasure, crime and regret. “. Or this important thought shot through with a confession of his intellectual connivance ” Since he always comes back to himself and the subject of all his books is his own life, seeing that life immediately transformed into a physical expanse of printed characters, he naively thinks of himself as a book, and even more than a paper book, a solid metal sheet, as firm as iron, an inalterable past inscribed in wood and stone. That illusion may strike us as strange, but without it, he could not have written. And which writer, alas!, has not found himself thinking like Restif in this respect at some time or other? “. 

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