French

Amour (or aimer), guerre, gloire, suicide, carnage: there could hardly be five better terms by which to define the nature, the function, and the effect of the pièce à machines in mid-seventeenth century France. Adding to the indispensable theatrical presence of love and war, the mechanical accoutrements of Desmarets de Saint Sorlin's Mirame and

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Blanchot often evoked the silence required for literary writing, a silence which must “be imposed” on a pre-existing murmur of language. This murmur itself is for him an originary ground of speech, including literary speech. Less often recognized are ways in which he locates this murmur in the realm of public, everyday speech, the rumor of speech spoken by no one/everyone, a realm he links with exigencies of publication and publicity bearing on literary works within modern societies, mass media and technically mediated communication. Blanchot thus points to an unexpected convergence, in these sonic images of impersonal flows of language, between literary language per se, and a language traditionally considered inauthentic, empty, mere chatter. This essay shows Blanchot’s anxious attempts to maintain the distinction he effaces.

The recent publication of André Bazin's Écrits complets (2018), an enormous two-volume edition of 3000 pages which increases tenfold Bazin's available corpus, provides opportunities for renewed reflection on, and possibly for substantial revisions of, this key figure in film theory. On the basis of several essays, I propose a drastic rereading of Bazin's most explicitly philosophical notion of "ontology." This all too familiar notion, long settled into a rather dust-laden couple ("Bazin and ontology") nonetheless retains its fascination. Rather than attempting to provide a systematic reworking of this couple along well established lines, particularly those defined by realism and indexicality, this article proposes to shift the notion of ontology in Bazin from its determination as actual existence toward a more radical concept of ontology based on the notion of mimesis, particularly as articulated, in a Heideggerian mode, by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. This more properly ontological concept, also paradoxically and radically improper, is shown to be at work already in Bazin's texts, and it allows us to see that far from simplistically naturalizing photographic technology, Bazin does the contrary: he technicizes nature. If Bazin says that the photograph is a flower or a snowflake, he also implies that, like photographs, these are likewise a kind of technical artifact, an auto-mimetic reproduction of nature. Bazin likewise refers to film as a kind of skin falling away from the body of History, an accumulating pellicule in which nature and history disturbingly merge. This shifted perspective on Bazin's thinking is extended further in reference to Georges Didi-Huberman on the highly mimetic creatures known as phasmids, insects that mimic their environement. I extend this into the dynamic notion of eternal return, an implicit dimension of Bazin's thinking, clarified here in reference to Giorgio Agamben and the "immemorial

Beginning as far back as the late 1960s, Maurice Blanchot's right-wing journalism became a subject of debate, even as the writer's reputation was rising. It continued to rise, as did the level of scrutiny given to his prewar politics, notably in the 1980s when, as with other figures such as Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man, calls were heard demanding an account of the past (Jeffrey Mehlman's work at that time is important in this regard). In recent years, a number of publications have shed light on the complex and ambiguous thing called "Blanchot's politics," including French editions of his postwar political writings, followed by a translation from Fordham UP in 2010, and Jean-Luc Nancy's Maurice Blanchot: Passion politique (2011), which presents a long letter Blanchot wrote to Roger Laporte narrating (rather evasively) his activities in the late 1930s. Cahiers de l'Herne on Blanchot, which includes a number of relevant documents, and an issue of Lignes (n o 43) entitled Les politiques de Maurice Blanchot 1930-1993, both appeared in 2014. The director of Lignes, Michel Surya, there published a long essay in two parts (or "séquences") entitled "L'autre Blanchot." This essay has now been augmented with a third section and published as a book under the same title. The book's subtitle ("l'écriture de jour, l'écriture de nuit") quotes a phrase that Blanchot uses in the letter to Laporte to describe his dual writing life, particularly in the 1930s, one for journalism and political engagement, the other for literature. Surya has stated in an interview that this letter is what motivated him to write the book. Why? Partly because, as a result of David Uhrig's persistent search for heretofore missing articles from the 1930s and the early 1940s, we can see that in that 1984 letter to Laporte, Blanchot tells an outright lie. He claims, emphatically, to have immediately and categorically refused Pétain and the Vichy regime, whereas we now know that in July 1940 Blanchot was director of Aux Écoutes, which under his name published editorials that were unambiguously pro-Vichy (or rather "maréchaliste" as Uhrig and Surya prefer to say) following Pétain's installation. Surya, a longtime intellectual supporter and friend of Blanchot, finds himself stung into the task of a densely argued-if at times somewhat rapid, breathless, and exclamatory-examination of Blanchot's political engagements as a whole, from his 1930s extreme-right nationalism to a postwar attack on de Gaulle in 1958 and a vindication of revolution and communism around 1968, to a final, more diffuse period after 1968 (these three phases corresponding to the book's three "séquences"). Surya motivates his discussion by turning Blanchot's own condemnation of Heidegger against Blanchot: "Il y a eu corruption d'écriture, abus, travestissement et détournement du langage. Sur lui pèsera dorénavant un soupçon" (13). Far from a simple condemnation, this investigation measures the weight of this suspicion, and pushes further into the difficult question of this major writer's refusals and responsibilities.