Le baron d'Holbach. Manuscrit autographe et tapuscrit complets

Autograph manuscript by the author of 4½ pages in quarto published in the November 27-28, 1943 issue of Journal des Débats.
Complete manuscript with very dense handwriting, containing numerous deletions, corrections and additions.
Literary chronicle published on the occasion of the publication of Paul Thiry d'Holbach et la philosophie scientifique au XVIIIe siècle by Pierre Naville.
The complete typescript is included.
Far more than a critique of Pierre Naville's work on Baron d'Holbach, this long article by Blanchot is a veritable philosophical pamphlet against the materialist thought of the Encyclopedists, whom he accuses of wanting to « know the world in order to seize it. This is a notable expression of the bourgeois spirit. (...) Man can only dominate the world if the world is a collection of objects. »
But through this virulent critique of 18th-century thought, Blanchot identifies a more modern evil: « To make man a thing that can be studied (...) is to ensure that he can be used as a thing and exploited as a thing. All the social contradictions of liberalism are already in this assertion. And its starting point is the Encyclopedia. »

Between April 1941 and August 1944, Maurice Blanchot published 173 articles on recently published books in the "Chronicle of Intellectual Life" of Journal des Débats.
In half a page of the newspaper (approximately seven octavo pages), the young author of "Thomas l'obscur" took his first steps in the field of literary criticism and thus inaugurated a theoretical work that he would later develop in his numerous essays, from "La Part du feu" to "L'Entretien infini" and "L'Écriture du désastre".
From the very first articles, Blanchot demonstrated an analytical acuity that far exceeded the literary current events that motivated their writing. Oscillating between classics and moderns, first-rate writers and minor novelists, he laid, in his chronicles, the foundations of a critical thought that would mark the second half of the 20th century.
Transformed by writing and by war, Blanchot broke, through a thought exercised "in the name of the other," with the violent Maurrassian certainties of his youth.
Not without paradox, he then transformed literary criticism into a philosophical act of intellectual resistance to barbarity at the very heart of an "openly Maréchal-supporting" newspaper: "To burn a book, to write one, are the two acts between which culture inscribes its contrary oscillations" (Le Livre, In Journal des Débats, January 20, 1943).
In 2007, the Cahiers de la NRF brought together under the direction of Christophe Bident all the literary chronicles not yet published in volumes with this pertinent analysis of Blanchot's critical work: "novels, poems, essays give rise to a singular reflection, increasingly confident in its own rhetoric, more given over to the echo of the impossible or to the sirens of disappearance. (...) Not without contradictions or sidesteps, and in the feverish certainty of a work that begins (...) these articles reveal the genealogy of a critic who transformed the occasion of the chronicle into the necessity of thought." (C. Bident).
Autograph manuscripts by Maurice Blanchot are extremely rare.