Mystère de la critique. Manuscrit autographe et tapuscrit complets.

Autograph manuscript of the author of 2 and a half pages in-8 published in the issue dated 6 January 1944 the Journal of Debates.
Complete manuscript writing very dense, with many erasures, corrections and additions.
Complete typescript with a few deletions and additions autograph of the author is attached.
Inspired by the flowers of Tarbes Jean Paulhan, this short article is for Blanchot, the opportunity to reflect on the position and work of criticism. Well beyond literary analysis of a work, this column is probably a key to the theoretical work of Blanchot and wider confrontation with his creation.
The conclusion - the erased manuscript way - this is quite eloquent way:
"The usual criticism is a sovereign who escapes immolation, purporting to exercise authority without atone and wants to master a kingdom which he has safely; So there he is little more miserable and sovereign, for not having refused to be something closer to being nothing. "
Between April 1941 and August 1944, Maurice Blanchot published in the "Chronicle of the intellectual life" of the Journal of Debates 173 articles on recently published books. In a half-page newspaper (about seven pages in-8), the young author of "Thomas the Obscure" his first steps in the field of literary criticism and inaugurates a theoretical work that develop later Many in these essays, "The Share of fire" to "The Infinite Conversation" and "The Writing disaster." From the very first articles, Blanchot demonstrates a sharp analysis far beyond the current literature that motivates writing. Oscillating between classical and modern writers of the first order and minor novelists, he puts in his columns, the foundations of critical thinking which will mark the second half of the twentieth. Transformed by writing and by war, Blanchot breaks, over a thought exerted "on behalf of the other," with violent maurassiennes certainties of his youth. Not without paradox, then it transforms literary criticism philosophical act of intellectual resistance to barbarism at the heart of an "openly marechalist" newspaper: "Burning a book, write, are the two acts between culture which registered its oscillations opposites "(The Book, In Journal of Debates, January 20, 1943). In 2007, Cahiers de la NRF together under the direction of Christophe Bident all literary chronic unpublished volumes with critical analysis of the relevant work of Blanchot "novels, poems, essays give rise to a singular reflection, always safer his own rhetoric, delivered more to echo the impossible or the lure of extinction. (...) Not without contradictions or step aside, and the certainty of a feverish work begins (... ) these articles reveal the genealogy of a critic who has transformed during the chronicle necessity of thought. " (C. Bident). The autograph manuscripts of Maurice Blanchot are of great rarity.