The fourth volume of Blanchot’s war-time chronicles reflects a commitment to silence and a detachment from circumstance, as Germany’s occupation of France reaches its end. Convinced that disaster is now insuperable, Blanchot neutralizes the nihilism of that position through making it the basis of a new language of human relation.

Introduction by Michael Holland 1 The Mystery of Criticism 11 Return to the Source 16 From One Novel to Another 21 The Four Gospels 27 From Jean- Paul to Giraudoux 31 A Diary without Episodes 36 On the Subject of Language 40 The Romance of Mademoiselle Aïssé 45 The Joy of Storytelling 49 Outlawed Idols 53 The Art of André Dhôtel 58 Balzac’s Way of Working 63 The Gothic Novel 68 The Secrets of the Dream 73 A Novel by Jarry 78 Novellas and Stories 84 Chateaubriand’s Secret 88 Fantastic Novels 93 Air and Dreams 97 Joyce’s First Novel 102 A Secret Tone 107 The Literary I 112 Charles Cros 117 The Birth of Rome 122 William Blake 127 On the Various Ways of Dying 132 Pages by Paul Claudel 137 Narratives 142 Léon Bloy 147 Poems 153 The Concern for Sincerity 160 No Man’s Son 165 The Magical Experience of Henri Michaux 169 A Chronology of the “Chronicles of Intellectual Life” Collected in Faux pas 175 Notes 179 Index 195

“The time has come to attend to Blanchot’s early literary and political journalism (his missteps included) which, surprisingly, the first generation of his postwar admirers barely noted. It reminds us that this major theoretician of literary modernity has never been associated with academia: the newspaper was the site of his first critical exercise. Death Now provides a rich overview of the French literary atmosphere during the fateful final period of the Occupation. It is also unmistakably haunted by the ghost of a Blanchot to come.”—Denis Hollier, New York University By 1944, the days of Germany’s domination of Europe are numbered, and defeat seems no more than a matter of time. In occupied France, there is renewed activity on the political and the cultural fronts, in anticipation of the liberation that now appears inevitable. Already the author of two novels and a volume of criticism, Maurice Blanchot is henceforth fully established as a major figure in what will soon be post-war France. Blanchot’s position in this new order is problematical, however. Despite having discreetly supported the Resistance, he makes clear that his only true allegiance is to literature. Against the tide of his own emerging reputation, he is increasingly drawn to silence as the only valid response to what the world has become. For him, ruin cannot be reconstructed with the aid of literature, because ruin is the mode in which literature most authentically exists and with which the world has only now caught up. This grim and potentially nihilistic message seems to make Blanchot into little more than an anachronism in the emerging post-war world. Yet his attitude is the very opposite of aloofness. Silence becomes for him an intense search for a language commensurate with “circumstances that literature can still neither express directly nor distort”. Beyond this volume, which completes the English publication of his wartime literary journalism, his writing over the next fifty years will patiently establish a margin in which new forms thought will offer themselves to a new age. Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003)—writer, critic, and journalist—was one of the most important voices in twentieth-century literature and thought. Michael Holland is a Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford.

“The time has come to pay attention to Blanchot’s early literary and political journalism (his missteps included) which, surprisingly, the first generation of his postwar admirers barely noted. It reminds us, among other things, that this major theoretician of literary modernity has never been associated with academia. The discipline of the newspaper was his first critical exercise. This volume collects, in chronological order, the articles Blanchot published weekly for the literary page of Le Journal des débats during the year 1944 and, in doing so, provides a remarkably rich overview of the French literary atmosphere during these fateful days. It is also unmistakably haunted by the ghost of a Blanchot to come.”