WORLD WORLDWIDE FRANCE News Journal Update - (en) France, OCL, CA: Life on the ridges by Daniel Blanchard (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 See online: Life on the Ridges - Editions du Sandre

http://editionsdusandre.com/editions/livre/205/la-vie-sur-les-cretes
---- On the verge of his 90th birthday Daniel Blanchard remembers his
companionships with some luminaries of contemporary political thought
(Castoriadis, Debord, Bookchin, Baudrillard...) but also with a number
of more or less anonymous people. Everyone has in common that they
"passionately explored and tried to make the possibilities of the last
half century come to fruition". A powerful, poignant and profound
autobiographical essay.
*****
"One radiant morning in May, a jet of blood betrayed the secret of this
betrayal of matter deep within me. A jet of blood opened my eyes (...)
We only see and hear his death up close.» On the cusp of his 90th
birthday, it is this all against death that encourages Daniel Blanchard
to enlighten us with his glimpses of life in an autobiographical essay,
pregnant, poignant and profound.

In 2001, in "Here" , he already invited us to follow him between lived
and inhabited places, but in a pessimistic story "that of a failure
(...)[which]collides almost everywhere, breaks on the violence, that of
war and modern society, and rubs shoulders with confines where I tried
to gain a foothold but where, in some way, the ground failed me . There
is already the origin of its new title: "My gaze leaves the ridges which
so excited my childhood imagination when I followed the exploits of my
father and the partisans, the ridges where freedom reigned, the heroism,
friendship.»[1]These Herbez crests in the Southern Alps, which sheltered
the Barcelonnette maquis during the Second World War.

In 2023 Daniel Blanchard tells us about his life, a collective adventure
made of encounters, friendship, ruptures and loyalties between "numerous
and diverse passengers of the possible (...) met or accompanied, who all
passionately explored and attempted to bring about the possibilities of
the last half century.»[2]This is perhaps what gives "Life on the
Ridges" a less resigned tone than Here , as if the ground was no longer
lacking, but abounded with a compost on which to take feet and roots, a
humus made of exchanges with "the other" , of sharing with anonymous
people and celebrities, a multitude of friends who have in common the
search for a free and autonomous humanity, always to be constructed in
its singularity.

He therefore offers us an ontological, poetic and political quest for
reality and its possibilities marked by two "nothings": the void before
birth and that after death. Emptiness that is not made of nothing, but
of words. Words which precede the "I" , then constitute it in the
moment, then perpetuate it in writing. But words which in Blanchard
always bring back to the material, to the stone that this marble worker
from his childhood engraved, to the stone engraved with "the young
mother of beasts" from the village of Angles, to this stone from the
threshold of his house " Beating, sleeping"[3]which he restores to
better open the doors of his thought to us. Because "there is in the
nature of words, which we treat with such casualness, the requirement to
be grasped in the materiality of the world"[4]

He also invites us on an ethical quest that explores life and "treats
reality - nature, other human beings with "sober senses" as Marx would
say" , and which relentlessly asserts itself against the "machinic
delirium of capital who ignores, who represses our mortality" and in
doing so denies life. A human life, which critical thinking will have to
refocus around the fundamental but repressed question of knowing "se
questo é un uomo"[5]if we want it to become possible.

These sober senses, this sobriety of the senses, this "common decency"
as Orwell would say, means that Daniel Blanchard remains humble and
modest when he tells us about his companionship with some luminaries of
contemporary political thought. With Cornélius Castoriadis and the
members of Socialisme ou Barbarie. With Guy Debord who co-signed rather
than wrote with him the "  Preliminaries for a definition of the unity
of the revolutionary program  " . With Murray Bookchin of whom he was,
with Hélène Harnold, at the origin of the introduction of the thought in
France. With Jean Baudrillard and the Utopie editorial committee . ..
Sober even when a few excesses of words lead to a luxuriance of language
which stands out at a time when the diminishment of language often
reflects an impoverishment of thought.

On the left Daniel Blanchard in "Critique of separation" film by Guy
Debord, 1961.
On the coffee table are the magazines "L'Internationale situationniste"
and "Socialisme ou Barbarie". This scene is commented on p. 204 of the
book puts Debord's nostalgia and quest for truth into perspective: "we
will never again drink so young..."
This sobriety undoubtedly comes from a preserved contact with reality,
Ariadne's thread which guides him in his multiple lives: the Alpine
childhood, the years of restriction after the war, the search for a
permanent confrontation with nature or matter, the thirst for doing and
not for the sole satiety of saying. This sense of reality is initially
experienced on the ridges: in mountain races, with the resurrection of
the village of Ceillac... But also in the maintenance of Claire's loom,
the "do it! "» of the American counterculture practiced in Vermont, or
even in the handling of the machines of the Imprimerie Quotidienne .
Because Daniel not only writes or translates books, but also learns how
to make them. This sense of reality was also sharpened in his
participation in the construction of Guinean independence in 1960, or
during these few days of life in the insurgent city of Oaxaca in 2006 .
With between these two dates, as a high point, the active participation
in the March 22 Movement, the uprising and the relief of May 68 which
finally made the criticism of daily life audible, intelligible and
relevant, and founded fruitful friendships still very much alive.

These bursts of life , Daniel Blanchard restores them not by walking
chronologically, but inviting us on his path of crests, with its ascents
and descents, backs and forths, which always explore and reproduce "the
figure of meaning that had imprint on[him], at ten years old, the spring
of 1944: the flight into the mountains, the generous solidarity of the
Raynauds in Herbez, the stories of[his]father, Goletto... which was
summed up in life on the crests... Some variations, in short, on the
same theme, of which[he is]not the author. This, freedom?»

This essay is the product of a brilliant but discreet life. Daniel is
not one of those artists, intellectuals or activists hungry for the
stage, the circle or fame. He gives us a rare and precious testimony, a
rich and profound reflection on a bygone era, that of the revolution at
hand, but whose critical thinking sharpened in the scrutiny of crises
still provides us with weapons to combat "the constraint of a new regime
of state power that the ecological crisis (...) establishes: obedience
or cataclysm.»

Fight, resist and affirm that there is indeed an alternative through
"the proliferation of reality, its essential, perpetual incompletion
which opens up the next day for us and establishes utopia deep within
us. (...) The awareness by a vast majority of the world population that
we have the means to respect the balances and mechanisms of nature
without sinking into poverty and hunger, provided of course that these
resources are exploited (...) outside of capitalist logic. And - let's
push the utopia even further - we can imagine that treating nature with
attention, with care, is a source of intellectual enrichment, even of
sensual pleasure, for humans. (...) Thus, the ecological movement, the
conscience, the ecological scruple would free itself from this shadow of
guilt, of bad puritan conscience which afflicts its origins and which
alienates so many "simple people".»

And it is a return to Herbez, to "simple people", the Raynauds who
closes the work and invites us to reconquer the care and passion
essential to humanity to deal with nature and finally achieve Liberation.

Philippe

Notes
[1]Daniel Blanchard.- Ici, Sens et Tonka, Paris, 2001

[2]Daniel Blanchard.- Life on the crests, éditions du Sandre, Paris, 2023.

[3]Title of a collection of poetry by D. Blanchard, Sens et Tonka,
Paris, 2005

[4]This and the following quotes are taken from Life on the Ridges

[5]"If it's a man" Testimony of Primo Levi on his survival at Auschwitz.

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article3995
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