As such, they play a key role in Blanchot’s development of his thought on literature.

Far from condemning the diary, these articles value diary texts precisely because they are situated right on the border between everyday language and literary language, and they therefore manifest the fundamental problems of writing. Lejeune’s perception is based on Blanchot’s 1955 article ‘The Personal Diary and Narrative’, but it is remarkable just how many of Blanchot’s earlier articles were devoted to specific diary works. His life is wholly devoted to literature and to the silence unique to it.’ Indeed, for Philippe Lejeune (the foremost French critic on autobiography and the diary), Blanchot was the leading figure in a ‘hatred of the diary’ in the name of a ‘Mallarméan mystique of literature’ that developed from the 1950s onwards. He also guarded an extreme discretion about his own life, beginning his books with this brief non-biography: ‘Maurice Blanchot, novelist and critic, was born in 1907. His work anticipated poststructuralist concepts of the ‘death of the author’ and a loss of the self in writing, concepts that are hard to reconcile with the inscribing of the author’s self in a diary. The idea of Maurice Blanchot as a promoter of diary-writing seems, on the face of it, absurd. If you would be interested in contributing to our blog, please email us at with a proposal. Today, we have a brilliant guest blog post by Dr Sam Ferguson that muses about the idea of Blanchot as a theorist of the diary form.

The Oxford Critical Theory Network (TORCH) is delighted to launch its blog.

Journal intime example