Tradition et surréalisme. Manuscrit autographe et tapuscrit complets

Autograph manuscript by the author of 2 and a half quarto pages published in the December 23, 1943 issue of Journal des Débats.
Complete manuscript in very dense handwriting, with numerous deletions, corrections and additions. The complete typescript is included.
This article, one of the rare pieces to appear on the journal's front page, is an audacious critique of the traditionalist vision of Art, which, arguing for the necessary adequacy between Art and Truth, condemns Modernity. With implacable intellectual rigor, Blanchot demonstrates how this conception of "authentic Art" "joins exactly that of the surrealists" and cites one of the major principles of Surrealism as perfect demonstration of Hourticq's remarks. In a France obsessed with rejecting Degenerate Art, Blanchot reveals the contradictions of traditionalists: "they admit that art in general precedes science, and it is in the name of past science (...) that they condemn new movements in art."
Blanchot, under the guise of literary criticism, once again questions his era: (...) It would still be good to research whether precisely modern science does not recognize itself in the "deformed, decomposed, obsolete universe that art has made familiar to our eyes."

Between April 1941 and August 1944, Maurice Blanchot published in the "Chronicle of intellectual life" of Journal des Débats 173 articles on recently published books.
In half a newspaper page (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 will 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 critical thinking that will mark the second half of the 20th century.
Transformed by writing and by war, Blanchot breaks, through thinking 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 barbarity at the very heart of an "openly Pétainist" journal: "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 singular reflection, ever 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 beginning (...) 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.