Le pèlerinage aux sources - Manuscrit autographe et tapuscrit complets.

Autograph manuscript by the author, 2½ pages octavo, published in the January 13, 1944 issue of the Journal des Débats.
Complete recto-verso manuscript, in very dense handwriting, with numerous deletions, corrections and additions.
Accompanied by the complete typescript, with one autograph correction in black ink.

Chronicle published on the occasion of the publication of Le pèlerinage aux sources by Joseph Lanza del Vasto.

This chronicle by Maurice Blanchot forms an astonishing echo to one of his very first published texts (1931), devoted to Gandhi's Memoirs, which already contained the essence of his thought from the 1930s. Published in the pages of Cahiers mensuels, a Catholic review close to the thinking of Jacques Maritain, Blanchot defended the idea of a necessarily spiritual revolution but also of a struggle against the impurity of foreign influences.
In "Le pèlerinage aux sources," Blanchot returns to Gandhi through a recently published work by Joseph Lanza del Vasto, in which the Italian philosopher analyzes "the hope of renewal that many Westerners seek, often lightly, in the profound secrets of Hinduism". But for Blanchot, Gandhi's action could hardly constitute a true example to follow: "Naturally, we all understand that Gandhi's politics tends not only toward a political victory, but toward a spiritual victory: he wants to deliver the people from their ills, from their ignorance, to make them live the truth; all this is quite clear; what is also clear is that among these ills there is first the presence of the foreigner and that the regime recommended by the Mahatma and with a view to which he brings into play spiritual forces is a regime of political, economic and social liberation. It is impossible not to see [...] in this rehabilitation of external action, the distortion of the spiritual ideal. Man is no longer asked to strip himself of himself, for nothing (without any formidable end being able to justify him in this total annihilation), but he receives the order to arrange the world, to conquer himself with a view to making reality better. It is an inglorious return to the most vulgar morality of salvation."

An interesting critique of Mahatma Gandhi's political action.

Between April 1941 and August 1944, Maurice Blanchot published 173 articles on recently published books in the "Chronicle of Intellectual Life" of the Journal des Débats.
In half a page of newspaper (approximately seven octavo pages), the young author of "Thomas l'obscur" takes his first steps in the field of literary criticism and thus inaugurates 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 first articles, Blanchot demonstrates an analytical acuity far exceeding the literary current events that motivate their writing. Oscillating between classics and moderns, first-rate writers and minor novelists, he establishes, 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 breaks, through a thought exercised "in the name of the other," with the violent Maurrassian certainties of his youth.
Not without paradox, he then transforms literary criticism into a philosophical act of intellectual resistance to barbarism at the very heart of an "openly Maréchaliste" 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 gathered 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, always more sure of its own rhetoric, delivered more 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.