Friendship (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Friendship Bridget Conley Maurice Blanchot, Friendship. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. 309 pages. In an August 1997 review of Maurice Blanchot’s Friendship in Library Journal (122.13, p. 90), Robert T. Ivey expressed his perplexity at the regard with which Blanchot is increasingly held among literary theorists and philosophers. Giving Blanchot’s text a grade of “C,” he wrote that those seeking commentaries on friendship such as Montaigne offered readers will be disappointed by these “rambling, disjointed essays . . .” I agree. Without reservation. It is true that such expectations would only be disappointed by these pages. But perhaps such a reader should be first referred to Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, which carefully elaborates a shared mourning for the friend that characterizes both Blanchot and Montaigne. The contemporary political stakes that Derrida unravels in his extended engagements with classical texts on friendship are illuminated in lightning flashes of brilliance in the literary, cultural, and philosophical essays gathered together in Blanchot’s Friendship. Many of the essays are immediate responses to other texts, although several, less identifiably related to other writings, examine, among other subjects, translation, war, literature and transgression. While these writings testify to an amazing erudition, what consistently brings them together is the generosity of Blanchot’s thought and the elegance of his expression. I will not try to speak directly of each essay from this book—an attempt that would greatly exceed the limitations of a book review—but rather will focus on a few that punctuate the currents of thought that run throughout the various pieces. The text opens with lines borrowed from Georges Bataille: “my complicitous friendship . . .” he writes. Amicable collusion marks each of these essays. The writings gathered together here, ranging from responses to Lascaux, the atomic bomb, Kafka, Leiris, Lévi-Strauss, and Bataille (to name only a few), are loosely tied together. Perhaps more accurately I should write they are brought into a common space by the dispersal of Blanchot’s thought into complicitous relation with these other writers, these other texts. It is the rhythm and cadence of Blanchot’s generous language offered in response to other texts that performs a community of friendship in the twenty-nine essays that compose the book. This collection is neither Blanchot’s confessions or meditations, nor is it his examined presentation of a theme. It is, as he writes, a record of exposure that cannot be addressed with the razor precision of calculated relations: And to speak coolly of the works of friends, ignoring the shadow that has withdrawn into them and that they throw on us, would be a movement without truth, and moreover beyond our power . . . it is the manner in which they are close to us, the pain that proximity introduces in our thought every time that, in turning toward them, we come up against the presence of resistance that is proper to a work already closing itself up, and we cannot help it to close itself up (or to undo itself) by valuing it or by putting it in the service of an intellectual strategy. (188–89) [End Page 1180] Georges Bataille, his death, writings, and friendship, haunt this text. From the opening pages to one of the most beautiful essays in the middle, to final thoughts that achingly confess their own poverty of expression, Blanchot’s book most poignantly responds to the thought of friendship in relation to his contemporary. In the short opening paragraph of “Idle Speech,” Blanchot writes of a conversation he and Bataille were having shortly before Bataille’s death. The discussion addressed their common sense of being overwhelmed by Louis René des Forêts’ Le Bavard. Bataille, we are told, having lost his desire to write, asks Blanchot if he would speak of this text some day. The essay opens with Blanchot’s acceptance of this task: “I kept the silence. It is to this silence, common to us today, but that I alone remember, that I must try to respond by giving, as it were, a continuation to this conversation” (117). Understanding friendship as relation, not as an object to be analyzed, Blanchot writes within the silence that...