Weakness as a Form of Engagement: Maurice Blanchot on the Figure of the Last Man

The war of writing: French literary politics and the decolonization of Algeria

“…A product of language that in The Space of Literature (1955) Blanchot describes as one that 'does not speak any more, but is ' (1982 [1955]: 27), literature is a site of resistance to action and identity because it questions, as Blanchot suggests in 'Idle speech ' (1963), the heroism and authenticity of 'the resolute "I", laconic and heroic ' (1997b [1963]: 125). The role of literature is to suspend action and the identity of the heroic self and to create a literature of slowness and weakness as an alternative to the drive for mastery of the resolute self (see Just, 2008). If the declaration drew attention to the fact that alongside the actual war there was also a war of writing, it also made it clear, as Leslie Hill has pointed out, that the political significance of the kind of writing to which Blanchot appeals lies, again similarly to Camus, in the refusal of a certain type of language, a language that Hill calls 'authoritarian, self-assured, peremptory, repetitive, oppressive' (Hill, 1997: 215).…”