Eden

You know the dream: a language of proper names, a unique word for each object. One might imagine Adam bestowing the name of everything in the world … In a marvellous book, Elena Russo contends that this Edenic language is what, in fact, many of my favourite authors seek.

Recall the scene in de Forêts’ The Chatterer where the garrulous narrator, who has suffered a beating the night before and is lying wounded in the snow, hears the singing of children:

At first I could have sworn that those voices were falling from the sky above, or that they came from the most remote corners of the earth, when in truth they were close at hand, sending wave after wave onto the icy air, a choir of such subtle dissonance, that it could have been mistaken for the racket of wakening wings.

The narrator envies the immediacy of the song, the fact that it means nothing, that it has no determinable content. Is it this blessed state he is trying to achieve through his chatter? Is it in this way he could recover his innocence in the plenitude of music? For Russo, he joins the narrators of other books in the attempt to reach the simplicity of silence beyond language, to find the mystical intuition that would restore the world in its immediacy.

Pure and secret incantation, just beyond the pale and heavy world we carry within us, graced by that special seduction of all that is untouched by the corrupted smell of sin, charming us, as can only the evocation of the words joy, sun, spring; coming forth out of a bloodless, sexless universe, . . . its aerian loveliness so unlike my wounded animal’s defeat; clear as a night freeze, fresh as a bowlful of spring water; ideal, at long last, like all things that suggest the existence of a harmonious world.

The dream of a self-expression which would return one to a pre-linguistic state – to an innocence before language: isn’t this what one finds in Blanchot: a stark choice between existence and representation? This is what Russo contends. I will venture a response here, although I know I will be returning to her book again and again.

Blanchot’s own brand of linguistic idealism is representative of a whole tradition, although it stems from contradictory presuppositions that have hardly any coherence at all in the eyes of anyone who has not completely surrendered to the seductiveness of mystical linguistics. Language appears to him alternatively as what separates us from reality (it is an abstract and reductive structure that we arbitrarily impose upon the world) and as an instrument of freedom and creativity that allows man to free himself from the fetters of daily reality in order to experience a more elusive and spiritual essence of things.

But perhaps the distinction between existence and representation in Blanchot is more complex than might appear. I will try, rather feebly, to sketch a response to Russo here.

Blanchot roots his account of language in the distinction between existence and existents as one finds it developed in Levinas’s early philosophy (see Time and the Other). Recall Levinas’s analyses: there is an existence without existents: the swarming of a pre-cosmos, the unordered chaos. This is the breakdown of the world which reveals itself in certain experiences. It is here that a future that seems promised to the human being is denied to it; the world no longer pretends to be fitted for human comprehension. What is ‘real’, here, seems closer to the Real of Lacan or Zizek, resisting an order which it can only present as a kind of excessive absence-presence, a looming reserve, a mark of a refusal to signify. Granted, the world only gives itself to be experienced thus in a certain suffering or pain. You cannot flee upstream from that pain: you are riveted to the spot. In this experience you encounter being in the raw, so to speak. There is no escape, no evasion.

What has this got to do with language? In a sense, the power to speak is to negate particular things, to take them up into an ideal existence. When I speak, I can determine the world; my power to speak bears witness to this power of determination. Granted, I can fall into talking in cliches, in stock expressions, merely passing the word along as Heidegger puts it somewhere – perhaps it is more appropriate to note that the power to speak confirms the power of the human being (I’ll come back to this) …

But there are experiences in which it is impossible to name anything, in which I am no longer able to wield the power that belongs to me as a speaker, as the animal endowed with logos. Heidegger, for example, places great emphasis on those times when the word will not come – when I cannot find the word. It is as though a tool is broken. Then there are particular uses of language, call them rhetoric or poetry, which, according to the ancient figure, circulated from Aristotle through Quintillian, clothes the naked body of language. Sometimes, the way I say something, the way I intone a particular sentence for example is more important than the content of that sentence. Is there, at the ‘core’ of language, a simple mirroring of the world? There is, rather, a movement in language towards opacity, as if one cannot detach the clothing of thought from its body, the external form from the internal content.

Language, according to Blanchot, exhibits two contrasting movements – it moves towards purification, transparency and towards idiomaticity, which it displays through an emphasis upon rhythm and sonority. It is not, then, a lost immediacy for which Blanchot yearns, over against the idealism to which he is condemned by language. There is no edenic experience in which things are given in immediacy. To be sure, there is a way the thing resists our grasp (how do I write of this blooming, radiating tree before me?) – but it has its correlate in the way language, too, is resistant.

Existence without existents – is there an experience of language deprived as it were of negation? A language in which negation, which Hegel will also call death, cannot complete itself – in which a kind of dying or becoming resounds in the place of particular words, particular meanings? I venture that there is a peculiar doubling – there are two experiences of streaming, two rivers into which one cannot step even once. Edenic plenitude remains a myth. Language does not simply separate us from the ‘real’ world, but nor is there the idealistic correlate of this apparent realism. Language can drift towards idiomaticity – towards its own refusal to signify…. Contra Russo, I contend that there is a redoubled refusal in Blanchot’s writings in which a certain refusal within language and a refusal in the opening of the world seem to echo one another. Abyss calls out to abyss, vortex to vortex.

This what Blanchot foregrounds, I think, in the essay on The Chatterer. At issue in Des Forets’ book is a chattering without content, to the undoing of the form of language and the form of the world. The author is not God, or a replacement for God – but nor is the author the devil. Non serviam is the devil’s motto: but it is not simply that the author is devilish, deforming the world, but because the language of the poem echoes a movement in the world towards the unformed, towards what cannot be formed. The poet has caught out the world’s secret, its hidden manicheism: that it was made by God and by the devil. There was no Eden, no sensory and immediate access to the things. Yes, the word as it negates the thing is a simulacrum of that thing; the word becomes a thing in its turn, with its own life. But that is not all that language does. There is a rebellion against negation: an excess or dying which reveals itself in a murmuring below the level of formed words.