Maurice Blanchot, l’obscura
An extraordinary collection of photographs of Maurice Blanchot in his family circle

Exactly twenty years ago, in the discreet manner that was his hallmark, the greatest literary critic of the twentieth century passed away. Or should we rather describe him as the most unclassifiable of novelists? Some have seen in him the most deeply committed of thinkers, others the most elusive. All, however, would likely agree on at least one superlative: “the most mysterious of writers,” for on 20 February 2003, there quietly disappeared the most enigmatic of the great intellectual figures of our time—Maurice Blanchot.

It was only five days later that the newspapers, alerted by a neighbour, reported on the death of the ninety-five-year-old writer. They were unable to illustrate their obituaries with any image: Blanchot had refused all his life to be photographed, “not in order to exalt [his] books, but to avoid the presence of an author claiming a life of his own.”

On 25 February, Libération commented on the event as follows:

“The most secretive of French writers died at home, near Paris, last Thursday, at the age of 95. For a long time, one feared that Maurice Blanchot would push discretion so far as to make his death go unnoticed, to erase even erasure itself, as he once put it. […] For him, the man behind the writer was of no importance; only the work was real and worthy of commentary. As he writes in Après coup, ‘if the written work produces and proves the writer, once completed it testifies only to his dissolution, his disappearance, his defection and, to put it more bluntly, his death—though never definitively attested: a death that cannot be certified.’ […]
Tall, blond, thin. Of Blanchot, only two distant photographs are known. The first, taken surreptitiously by a paparazzo for Lire magazine in 1985, shows an old man in a supermarket parking lot, beside a shopping trolley and a white Renault 5. The second appeared in 1987 in François Poirié’s Emmanuel Levinas: Blanchot, aged 22, beside the philosopher. It was removed from the 1992 reprint.
His friends described him as tall, blond, slender, gentle. This refusal to be ‘envisaged’ is of course coherent with Blanchot’s theories on the effacement of the author in favour of the text, the disappearance of the subject in the act of writing.”

Yet Blanchot was not opposed to the photographic art itself, and although he succeeded in shielding his image from media exploitation, he did not entirely avoid the camera. In fact, he often enjoyed posing for his brother, in strikingly expressive and symbolic situations.
Edition-Originale.com now reveals this astonishing and unique photographic corpus of a writer who has not yet finished revealing his secrets.

“For years, Blanchot challenged photographers and caricaturists of the literary press. Across so many decades, illustrations remained minimal and exceedingly rare: in 1962, L’Express showed a hand holding a book, printed against the background of the page; in 1979, Libération featured a blank square in the centre of the page, bearing only the name Maurice Blanchot and a quotation from The Infinite Conversation (‘a void of universe: nothing that was visible, nothing that was invisible’).”
— Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot

In 1986, on the occasion of an exhibition of portraits of writers, Maurice Blanchot requested that his portrait be replaced with a short text expressing his wish “to appear as little as possible—not to exalt [his] books, but to avoid the presence of an author claiming a life of his own.”

A photo taken without his knowledge by a paparazzo in a supermarket parking lot long served as the writer’s only known image, until his friend Emmanuel Levinas revealed a few rare portraits from their youth.
That Blanchot did not object to their publication, that the gesture came from his closest friend, may be explained by what Bident called “the spacing of unease”—the untimeliness of the images echoing the deferred publication of L’Idylle, The Last Word, Death Sentence...

Only a handful of photographs gathered in the central pages of Les Cahiers de l’Herne devoted to Maurice Blanchot (2014) complete the visual archive of the most secretive writer of the twentieth century.
In his chapter The Inconvenience of Secrecy, Christophe Bident devotes several pages to the near-total absence of imagery of this “invisible interlocutor”, questioning the intellectual and psychological motivations of a writer who was nevertheless aware of the inevitable revelation to come:

“All must become public. The secret must be broken. The obscure must come into the day and become day. What cannot be said must nonetheless be heard. Quidquid latet apparebit—all that is hidden, that is what must appear.”
— Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

Blanchot generally refused to be photographed, even in private settings, as confirmed by the family of his sister-in-law Anna, who, in a letter to her nephew, stated they had taken no pictures of the writer, out of respect for his wishes.
And yet, the photographs taken within his close family circle show a Blanchot not only consenting but engaging with remarkable subtlety with the image he offered the lens—typically held by his brother. We discover an elegant man posing confidently on a boat dock or along the banks of the Seine; or more elusive, playing with light in the corner of a bare room. These images reveal a true photographic mise-en-scène and a symbolic reappropriation of his image, especially in the astonishing seated portrait of Blanchot cradling in his arms the death mask of the “Unknown Woman of the Seine”—the plaster face of a supposed drowning victim, reproduced and adored in artists’ studios after 1900. A true romantic legend, this mysterious posthumous smile lies at the heart of Aragon’s Aurélien, and haunted the work of Rilke, Nabokov, Claire Goll, Supervielle, Céline, Giacometti, and Man Ray, who photographed the mask at Aragon’s request.

Blanchot once described the mask as

“an adolescent girl with closed eyes, but alive through a smile so faint, so fortunate, […] that one might think she had drowned in a moment of extreme happiness.”

This photograph of an impassive Blanchot cradling the white mask of the “Mona Lisa of the Seine” appears as a true deconstruction of representation and a hauntingly apt image of his literary project and the “silence that is proper to him.”

Many other images testify to the same symbolic play with representation: a full-length portrait of the writer dressed in black merging into the vanishing lines of the buildings behind him, with only his forehead caught in a stark light that seems to radiate from his skull; or another in which light falls on half of an empty room, splitting the photograph in two: a shadowed space where Blanchot stands hands clasped behind his back, and a luminous void broken only by one foot of the writer stepping into it.

These photographs, taken by his brother, display a refined understanding of the image and its artistic codes.

Other more conventionally composed photographs offer precious and unique testimony to Maurice Blanchot’s life and his family relationships—the hidden side of the writer and his only true anchor in the physical world.
Blanchot, who communicated even with his closest friends almost exclusively by telephone, spent the greater part of his life within his family. First in the family home in Quain, then with his brother René and sister-in-law Anna, in whose home he would remain even after both had passed away. His correspondence with his mother and sister Marguerite is among the most voluminous (over 1,400 letters), sharing with them the full scope of his intellectual, political, and social life. His niece Annick, and her son Philippe, were among the very few ever allowed into the apartment where Maurice, René, and Anna lived out their lives in seclusion.

We discover the slender silhouette of a man whose fragile health kept him dependent on his family, yet whose domestic life was serene and grounded. He is seen beside his mother, holding his nephew’s hand, dining in the garden, or conversing in the salon. His bearing in these images is that of a tranquil man, unafraid of the camera, sometimes even adopting an intentionally dandyish pose. In several images, Blanchot appears alone in the foreground, elegantly still and out of sync with the setting and figures in the background. This repetition of the same posture across varying backdrops lends him a spectral, almost unreal presence.

These photographs also reveal, as much as possible, something of Blanchot’s private life—his travels, his relationships, his daily world within the family, and the various stages of his life. The collection begins with sepia albumen family portraits taken before his birth, and concludes with colour prints on Kodak paper: Blanchot, serious and seated in a velvet chair, stares into the camera from below; elsewhere, playful in a green garden, he hides his face behind a cat held tenderly in his arms.

And finally, as if to close this unique album of the only writer who succeeded in making himself invisible throughout his life, one photograph shows a radiant face emerging from the depths of a uniform black sweater, as if smiling at the trick he played on his contemporaries.

Apart from a few identity photos and travel snapshots taken late in life, this rare and complete archive constitutes the only coherent photographic source of Maurice Blanchot, of his places of life and his family—the intimate circle he kept hidden from public view, and which remained the foundation of his complex relationship to the external world.

But more than a peripheral documentation of the writer’s life, the photographs gathered here testify to a real mastery of image, of framing, and of reflective presence.

Like a final gift from the author of Thomas the Obscure, these rare traces of his passing suddenly summon the one who vanished behind his work—achieving, at last, the miracle of his Toma (his “double”): to be, and not to be.

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→ Original photographs of Maurice Blanchot available at Edition-Originale.com