Photographie originale de Maurice Blanchot

Original photograph of Maurice Blanchot.
Vintage silver gelatin print.

"Blanchot long defied photographers and caricaturists of the literary press. Minimalist and extremely rare, over so many years, are the illustration sketches: in 1962 in L'Express, a hand brandishes a book, against a page background; in 1979, in Libération, a blank square in the middle of the page, bearing as sole caption the name of Maurice Blanchot and a quote from L'Entretien infini ("un vide d'univers: rien qui fut visible, rien qui fut invisible" ["a void of universe: nothing that was visible, nothing that was invisible"])" (C. Bident, Maurice Blanchot).

In 1986, on the occasion of an exhibition of writers' portraits, he requests that his photo be replaced by a text manifesting his desire to "apparaître le moins possible, non pas pour exalter [ses] livres, mais pour éviter la présence d'un auteur qui prétendrait à une existence propre" ["appear as little as possible, not to exalt [his] books, but to avoid the presence of an author who would claim a proper existence"].
A photo taken without his knowledge by a paparazzo in a supermarket parking lot, would long serve as a portrait of the writer before his friend Emmanuel Lévinas revealed some rare portraits from their youth.
That Maurice Blanchot did not oppose this disclosure, that it was done by his closest friend, could be explained by what Bident calls "l'espacement de l'inquiétude" ["the spacing of unrest"], the untimeliness of the revealed portraits echoing the delayed publications of L'Idylle, Le Dernier Mot, L'Arrêt de mort...).

Only a few photographs gathered in the central pages of the issue of Cahiers de l'Herne devoted to Maurice Blanchot complete these unique shots of the most secret writer of the 20th century.

In his chapter "L'indisposition du secret" ["The Indisposition of the Secret"], Christophe Bident devotes several pages to the almost total absence of images of this partenaire invisible [invisible partner], questioning the intellectual and psychological motivations of the writer conscious nevertheless of the inevitable revelation to come,
"Tout doit devenir public. Le secret doit être brisé. L'obscur doit entrer dans le jour et se faire jour. Ce qui ne peut se dire doit pourtant s'entendre. Quidquid latet apparebit, tout ce qui est caché, c'est cela qui doit apparaître ..." ["Everything must become public. The secret must be broken. The obscure must enter the day and make itself day. What cannot be said must nevertheless be heard. Quidquid latet apparebit, everything that is hidden, that is what must appear..."] Maurice Blanchot, L'Espace littéraire)

Provenance: Family archives.