Le souci de sincérité. Manuscrit autographe et tapuscrit complets

Autograph manuscript by the author of 2 and a half pages in-4 published in the March 2, 1944 issue of Journal des Débats. Complete manuscript with very dense writing, containing numerous strikethroughs, corrections and additions. Literary chronicle published on the occasion of the publication, in the new collection of Gallimard editions devoted to "La Jeune Philosophie," of the work "Le souci de sincérité" by Yvon Belaval. The complete typescript is included.

Under Blanchot's pen, philosophical criticism acquires its own autonomy which makes it impossible to distinguish between Belaval's original thought and the luminous interpretation that Maurice Blanchot offers of it, in a few pages.

« L'homme sincère veut rompre avec la solitude où l'ont enfermé à la fois la réflexion et la faiblesse. Il rêve d'un retour au "nous" primitif, mais il se contente de le rêver : il s'enchante de ses scrupules, il ne parle qu'à soi-même et ne parle que de soi, il échoue et jouit de ses échecs. » ["The sincere man wants to break with the solitude in which both reflection and weakness have confined him. He dreams of a return to the primitive 'we,' but he contents himself with dreaming it: he is enchanted by his scruples, he speaks only to himself and speaks only of himself, he fails and enjoys his failures."]

No concern for sincerity, therefore, in Blanchot, but a rigorous intellectual mechanism which does not fear to free itself from the limits of the text studied to deploy all its philosophical potential.

Between April 1941 and August 1944, Maurice Blanchot published 173 articles on recently published books in the "Chronique de la vie intellectuelle" of Journal des Débats. In half a page of newspaper (about 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 twentieth 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, these 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, always more confident in 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). The autograph manuscripts of Maurice Blanchot are extremely rare.