L'air et les songes - Manuscrit autographe et tapuscrit complets

Autograph manuscript by the author, two and a half pages in-8, published in the issue of May 11, 1944 of the Journal des Débats. Complete manuscript in very dense handwriting, with numerous erasures, corrections, and additions. Literary column published on the occasion of the release of Gaston Bachelard's L'air et les songes. Accompanied by the complete typescript.

« L'homme est d'abord rêverie, puissance d'imaginer avant d'être sensibilité et raison », Blanchot’s analysis of this new essay by Bachelard provides an opportunity to confront the philosopher with the uncertainties of his theory, which tends to fragment in the plurality of its forms. « Qu'est-ce pour lui que l'image et l'imagination ? On ne le voit pas nettement ».
Yet this sometimes severe critique is above all a device to highlight the true value of Bachelard’s work, which also coincides with one of the central themes of Blanchot’s thought: the creative power of poetic language: "L'image littéraire est un fait premier; elle est la poésie même; (...) se demander s'il y à en nous une poésie d'avant les mots, d'avant les images, un en deçà poétique, une blancheur et un silence que le langage essiaerait de reproduire, c'est méconnaitre l'activité littéraire qui une activité naturelle, originelle, correspondant à une action de l'imagination - faculté de produire l'irréel qui est la conscience même - sur le langage."
Autograph manuscripts by Maurice Blanchot are of the greatest rarity.

Between April 1941 and August 1944, Maurice Blanchot published in the "Chronique de la vie intellectuelle" of the Journal des Débats 173 articles on recently published books. In a half-page of the newspaper (the equivalent of about seven in-8 pages), the young author of "Thomas l'obscur" took his first steps in literary criticism, inaugurating a theoretical work he would later develop in numerous essays, from "La Part du feu" to "L'Entretien infini" and "L'Écriture du désastre." From the outset, Blanchot displayed an acuity of analysis far exceeding the literary news that occasioned the writing. Oscillating between classics and moderns, major writers and minor novelists, he laid the foundations, in his columns, of a critical thought that would shape the second half of the twentieth century. Transformed by writing and by the war, Blanchot gradually broke away, through a thought exercised "in the name of the other," from the violent Maurrassian certainties of his youth. Paradoxically, he turned literary criticism into a philosophical act of intellectual resistance to barbarism, at the very heart of a newspaper "openly maréchaliste": "Brûler un livre, en écrire, sont les deux actes entre lesquels la culture inscrit ses oscillations contraires" (Le Livre, in Journal des Débats, January 20, 1943). In 2007, the Cahiers de la NRF, under the direction of Christophe Bident, brought together all the literary columns not yet published in volumes, with this perceptive assessment of Blanchot’s critical work: "romans, poèmes, essais donnent lieu à une réflexion singulière, toujours plus sûre de sa propre rhétorique, livrée davantage à l'écho de l'impossible ou aux sirènes de la disparition. (...) Non sans contradictions ni pas de côté, et dans la certitude fiévreuse d'une œuvre qui commence (...) ces articles révèlent la généalogie d'un critique qui a transformé l'occasion de la chronique en nécessité de la pensée." (C. Bident).