"Le refus" et "Le grand refus": trajectoire d’un geste critique chez Maurice Blanchot

Abstract

In «Le refus», written by Maurice Blanchot in October 1958, there's an exigence of conceiving an unsubmissive principle of a political and literary gesture. First published in 1958 in the anti-Gaullist journal Le 14-Juillet, founded by Dionys Mascolo and Jean Schuster, and later, in 1971, in L’Amitié, Blanchot’s text sketches the features of this specific figure of le refus. The following year, Blanchot wrote «Le grand refus» in the Nouvelle Revue Française (1959), which would later become a chapter of L’Entretien infini (1969), ten years later. The figure of «le refus» now generates a kind of doubling of the first text, indirectly recalling it in order to make explicit its conceptual grounding. This article analyses the political and literary inscription of Blanchot’s « le refus » of 1958, linking it to its conceptual foundation, made explicit in “Le grand refus” of 1959, through theoretical developments in Blanchot’s thought.