This lecture has developed the aporia of personal literature, in particular around the figure of Maurice Blanchot who, following the modern path that links Mallarmé to Valéry via the Proust of Contre Sainte-Beuve, challenges the foundations of any relationship between a life and a work, and brings to a climax the questioning of biographical reading.
Literature, according to Blanchot, is situated on a different plane from ordinary life, that of the verb: it is "true life" according to Proust, that of "pure poetry" for Mallarmé and Valéry. Literature, conceived as the poetic assumption of language, ensures not the identity of the self but the absence of being, the not-me, in a movement that petrifies real presence in the impersonal. In this way, the work denies the reality of both the speaker and the speaker: life and writing, the self and literature, are antinomic. Despite all that separates Blanchot from Brunetière, who defended classical literature in its universal scope against the Romantic individualist tradition, both advocate an impersonal literature that runs counter to the Romantic credo.
Blanchot discovers this experience of depersonalization marking the transition to literature in Kafka: he notes in his Diary that it is by renouncing to say "I" in favor of an impersonal "he" that the writer enters literature; in so doing, he adopts a language that addresses no one, and which, in Mallarmé's words, "belongs to another time and another world" to situate itself in an exteriority in relation to all lived experience. Blanchot's implacable condemnation of life writing is far more uncompromising than that of Benda or Brunetière. He denounces what he calls the "journal trap" in writers like Maurice Barrès and Charles Du Bos: "Happy compensation for a double nullity," he writes, "he who does nothing in life writes that he does nothing. And here's something done all the same Condemning some for this inclination towards a kind of performative nullity, he saves others, the "real" writers like Kafka or Virginia Woolf, by arguing that the diary is a safeguard against literature and its demand for impersonality, with the writer feeling the need to maintain a relationship with himself as his writing becomes more literary, more impersonal. In this case, the diary is less a confession or self-narrative than a memorial, all the further removed from Amiel's "meditation of the zero on himself" that it appears legitimized by the existence, alongside it, of a great work. The opening words of Blanchot's book Faux Pas caricature the inaugural phrase of all self-writing with the paradoxical formula "je suis seul" ("I am alone"), which denies itself insofar as it postulates the existence of a "you" who would be its recipient. According to Blanchot, intimate writing is a comedy of the absurd, perfectly illustrated by Pascal's phrase, which in turn points up the aporia of a language doomed to performativity: "Thought escaped. I wanted to write it. I write, instead, that it escaped me".
