Faux Pas

by Maurice Blanchot, Charlotte Mandell (Translator)

Published in France in 1943, Faux Pas is the first collection of Maurice Blanchot's essays on literature and language, consisting of fifty-four short pieces that were originally issued as reviews in literary journals, and one long introductory meditation that defines the trajectory of the whole volume. These essays―like those collected in the other five books of criticism published over several decades―have established Blanchot as the most lucid and powerful French critic of the second half of the twentieth century. Sober reconstructions of the main tenets of both classical and modern, both literary and theoretical texts, they have attained the status of model readings for authors as diverse as da Vinci and Kierkegaard, Melville and Proust, Molière, Goethe, and Mallarmé. However, the book is not a miscellaneous collection of exquisite essays. The first section of the volume, "From Anguish to Language," indicates the relative unity of its trajectory and its special moment in the development of Blanchot's thought. "Anguish" was a prominent notion for the existentialist philosophies of the period of his first work, and in this book Blanchot reflects on the necessary transition from the paradoxes of anguish to a focus on the paradoxes of language. He does so without ever betraying the affective tensions that attach themselves to linguistic utterances, but he also insists that the pathos of anxiety is, in the last resort, comical. Whoever writes "I am lonely" can judge himself to be quite comical, as he evokes his solitude by addressing a reader and using means that make it impossible to be alone. This comedy of language is retraced in Blanchot's intensely luminous essays on poetry and narration, on silence and symbolism, the novel and morals, the stranger, the enigma, time, and the very possibility of literature in the works of Blake, Balzac, Rimbaud, and Gide, Bergson and Brice Parain, Rilke and Bataille, Sartre, Camus, Queneau, and so many others.

Genres: France, Literary Criticism, Philosophy, Theory

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1943

About the author

Maurice Blanchot was a French philosopher, literary theorist and writer of fiction. Blanchot was a distinctly modern writer who broke down generic boundaries, particularly between literature and philosophy. He began his career as a journalist on the political far right, but the experience of fascism altered his thinking to the point that he supported the student protests of May 1968. Like so many members of his generation, Blanchot was influenced by Alexandre Kojeve's humanistic interpretation of Hegel and the rise of modern existentialism. His “Literature and the Right to Death” shows the influence that Heidegger had on a whole generation of French intellectuals.

Reviews

[Alyosha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blanchot writing on the writings of others. This collection of short reflections on writers, prose, poetry and thinking is headed by an introduction which reveals Blanchot writing in his finest form.
The subsequent essays are false steps, to be certain. They find Blanchot utilizing his penetrating reading abilities to draw unique thoughts from the works he writes on; but they always lack the step that takes them beyond. This, of course, is a step-not, pas. This is a step that cannot be taken, in this sense, through writing. The transgressive pas.
These writings, on writings, are no writings, in a sense. They lack something, which is of course nothing. What they lack is nothing. This lack moves towards the ends of each piece, beckoning onward, beyond, with a motion of transgression. But this transgression is never written, never made clear, except through the denial, the no, the fact that they do not say.