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Introduction to “Letter to Maurice Blanchot on the Creation of the State of Israel”

The documents that follow attest to the intensity of the nearly lifelong friendship between Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas. They speak as well to the demand for integrity and purity that marked their relationship as much as their thought. The textual record of their mutual intellectual engagement can be read as a series of reminders in which each holds up a mirror to the other and demands a more stringent adherence to the core insights that shaped their respective philosophical and literary itineraries. First acquainted in 1926 at the University of Strasbourg, each barely in his twenties, Blanchot and Levinas were as different in background as they were in stature. In the couple of photos that remain from the period, Blanchot, a monarchist from a well-off family, appears impossibly pale, thin, and tall, as though he is already being bleached out of existence. Levinas, a Lithuanian Jew, who had come to France to receive a true European education, appears stout, polished, and full of steam. What they shared was a devotion to their respective intellectual ideals, ideals that would drive them both in their work and in their life. Together they honored a youthful pact to remain lifelong friends despite war, political and philosophical differences, and Blanchot’s years of seclusion. In their final years, Blanchot came to refer to Levinas as un ami lointain, a distant friend.1 Their correspondence surrounding the Israeli Declaration of Indepen-