The Pardon of the Disaster
Rent from DeepDyve
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- The Pardon of the Disaster
Who, in fact, could give us the right to forgive? Who could give whom the right to forgive on behalf of the dead, and to forgive the infinite violence that was done to them, depriving them of both a grave and a name, everywhere in the world and not only at Auschwitz? And thus everywhere that the unforgivable would have taken place?
— Jacques Derrida, ". . . . . . . ."1
"What else is there to say?"
Jeffrey Mehlman's The Legacies of Anti-semitism in France (1983) and his subsequent essay "Pour Saint-Beuve"(1996) are works of accusation. Emerging in the aftermath of a cultural crisis in which Paul de Man's articles for Le Soir and Martin Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism apparently left in jeopardy the claims of deconstruction, Mehlman's works (like several others, by Steven Ungar and Michael Holland in particular) scrutinize Maurice Blanchot's wartime journalism. Blanchot, as Mehlman writes in "Pour Saint-Beuve," "was about fifteen years Paul de Man's senior, [and] had a job during the war not all that different from the one Paul de Man had accepted with Le Soir in Brussels" (215). The implication of this analogy is clear. While de Man's articles for Le Soir have been recognized to be juvenilia – influenced by family attachments as much as political attachments, even they have prompted a re-evaluation of de Man's intellectual project, a critique of his teaching style, and in most cases condemnation of his choice to avoid publicly claiming his responsibility for these articles.2 Should we not, Mehlman implies, put Blanchot to the same test? Blanchot wrote the articles under consideration not as a nineteen-year-old, but as an adult in his 30s, and for this reason, if for no other, he must be recognized as the law would recognize him: a guilty adult subject. But what would such a guilt imply? What kind of outcome do these accusations serve?
Mehlman states that his aim is to reorient the focus of literary history by condemning Blanchot and revealing Blanchot's involvement with the collaborationist press, yet the volume in which Mehlman's essay appears – a collection of essays emerging from a 1993 conference – seems [End Page 85] concerned not to condemn Blanchot, but to exonerate him.3 Mehlman's "Pour Saint-Beuve" is the very last essay in the collection; it is preceded by a short letter from Blanchot to Roger Laporte. Blanchot's letter (Which Laporte read aloud at the conference) is both a thank-you note and an explanation. Having learned the enigmatic title of Mehlman's contribution, Laporte sought out the 1942 article to which it referred and sent a copy to Blanchot. That Blanchot's explanation of the article precedes Mehlman's essay makes for an anachronous reading experience that is not neutralized by two extensive translator's notes explaining why the letter appears in the volume, and why in 1992 (in the weeks preceding the conference) Blanchot is writing about a 1942 article.
The appearance of Blanchot's letter in advance of the essay that it treats can be understood as an effort at immunization. It implies that Blanchot had acknowledged, rather than evaded, his mistake, and that he did so prior to Mehlman's accusation. In other words, the effect is to exonerate. Yet, in the letter, Blanchot also claims to have no recollection of having written the 1942 piece, a claim both understandable (it is a fifty-year-old article, from a time when Blanchot wrote weekly reviews) and uncomfortable (how could he have forgotten?). This discomfort is due not to the assumption that forgetting releases Blanchot from responsibility for having mentioned collaborator Charles Maurras in a collaborationist journal (the Occupation-dominated Nouvelle Revue Française) but, rather, that Blanchot's admission leaves his role in his own misjudgment unclear.
In the letter to Laporte, Blanchot admits the "indelible stain" and "expression of dishonour" that accompany his mention of Maurras in 1942. Blanchot's gesture is not a clear offer of apology or excuse, just as it is not without acknowledgement of a mistake. Having stated that the mention of Maurras...
