Blanchot and Gandhi

Abstract

It was Romain Rolland who first introduced Gandhi to France. At home, Rolland had been a bête noire of the nationalist right since his pacifist declarations during the First World War. A major adversary was Henri Massis. For Massis, as for Catholic nationalists more generally, French civilisation was the foundation of the Western world, which is to say, of humanity itself. In their eyes, Asia and its representatives (Gandhi, Tagore) were the agents of an assault on the West, which had been fatally weakened by what he called the “historical break” of 1917. Beginning with a close reading of Massis’s Defence of the West (1927), this study argues that the perceived threat of Asia in the 1920s, typified both politically and spiritually by the figure of Gandhi, was exclusively an issue for the Western mind. While appearing to adopt a historical and geopolitical perspective, Massis’s book is entirely in thrall to phantasmatic vision. The “historic break” it refers to lies first and foremost within the idea of the West and the Catholic notion of the person that provides its subject. The study moves on to contrast the total absence of Massis’s phantasmatic fears in the generation of young Catholic nationalists for whom he becomes a friend and mentor. In various ways, Gandhi is taken seriously by them and respected. Tracing the developing response to Gandhi in the writing of one of them — Maurice Blanchot — the study seeks to show how the mysticism without Christianity which Blanchot initially attributes to Gandhi evolves, between 1931 and 1944, into a mysticism without mysticism which becomes the basis for Blanchot’s narratives. These establish themselves at the very heart of the phantasmatic processes which produce the grand narrative of Western decline, and by harnessing them in language, effect a dispiriting of the mind which breaks with the Western idea entirely.