Staging Blanchot

This paper explores the reasons I wrote a “critical biography” of Maurice Blanchot, reflecting on the occasion of its recent translation. Moving from the epistolary to the institutional, I analyze a letter I received from Blanchot about my project, recall the testimonies I collected from contemporaries and friends, and discuss the editorial resistance the biography encountered. At the time, I also worked on a documentary about Blanchot, with Hugo Santiago, a filmmaker drawn to Blanchot’s narratives, particularly The Most High and its questioning of state power. The novel emerges as one of the means that Blanchot invented to stage his political and literary life in the aftermath of the war.