An enigmatic footnote from Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation: ‘Heidegger is essentially a writer, and therefore also responsible for a writing that is compromised (this is even one of the measures of his political responsibility)’ (437).
But why should Heidegger be understood first of all as a writer? Being and Time, after all, is a text of transcendental philosophy, one which commences with human Dasein in order to raise the question of the temporality of being. What changes with ‘What is Metaphysics?’? Blanchot notes that this text, delivered to a community of professors, questions the organisation of the faculties of the university. But does it do so in view of what might be uncovered through a practice of writing? No doubt Blanchot is thinking of Heidegger’s later texts, where it is a matter of speaking from Ereignis, and not about it; of performing the movement through which language, so to speak, is propriated or enowned by the truth of being such that it bears witness to a silence within language.
Heidegger will come to find the word metaphysics and even the word philosophy problematic. He will present his practice as a simple thinking – a practice that attempts to hold itself into Da-sein, into the site in which truth happens or has happened, which is to say, respectively, in terms of thinking and of a dialogue with poetising. It is a question of poiesis, of bringing forth.
How one should understand its relationship to the testimony of those whom Heidegger refused to acknowledge as such: the dead of the concentration camps? Blanchot writes:
Heidegger, this thinker of our own time, is so bereft of naivety that he has to have disciplines to put it into perspective, disciples, moreover, who can’t be called upon to excuse him from what happened in 1933 (but this last point is so serious that one cannot be content with an episodic allusion: Nazism and Heidegger, this is a wound in thought itself, and each of us is profoundly wounded – it will not be dealt with by preterition). (Our Clandestine Companion)
What was unthinkable and unforgivable in the event of Auschwitz, this utter void in our history, is met with Heidegger’s determined silence. And the only time, to my knowledge, that he speaks of the extermination, it is as a ‘revisionist’, equating the destruction of the eastern Germans killed in the war with the Jews also killed during the war; replace the word ‘Jew’ with ‘eastern German’, he says, and that will settle the account. (Thinking the Apocalypse)
A wound to thought – Blanchot will claim that Heidegger obviated a responsibility specific to writing. What does this mean? According to Blanchot, writing, although it seems to be irresponsibility itself, is indeed linked to a certain vigilance. It is here he draws on a formulation from Levinas: language is already scepticism, he writes in The Writing of the Disaster.
Scepticism – but of what? Of language as it constructs anything – as it lends itself to the act of negation that allows words to lift themselves from what they designate. An act of negation? Let me call this, too quickly, the work of death (I am thinking, of course of Hegel, and of the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit – but I have tried to write about this before). Contrast this to the murmuring of what Blanchot calls dying – of the suspension of the work of death, whereby it is impossible to complete a negation and to articulate a particular, determinable word. (There is an article at this journal which elaborates this point in more detail).
This is the meaning of the murmuring to which Blanchot frequently alludes in The Infinite Conversation. It does not refer to the letter of texts by Beckett or Sarraute, but to what reverberates through their texts. Murmuring has no specific content; it is formless: it is not yet this or that word. As a suspension of signification, it prevents the very formation of a word. One might think this suspense, in contrast to the work of death, as it is linked to a certain worklessness or dying. The word is, if I can put it this way, forever idled. (This does not prevent Blanchot from writing somewhat confusingly of the poetic word. But here he means only the reverberation of the murmuring of which I have written, which is not the Anklang of the truth of being.)
Language, in Blanchotian poetry, is scepticism. Strangely, it is through this scepticism that language is capable of a kind of testimony. But how is this bearing witness, this testimony, possible? Compare Heidegger: a certain kind of language (thinking-saying, poetry [Dichtung]) is able to witness the silence linked to the truth of being. For Blanchot, it is not the truth of being that is witnessed but, as it were, its errancy or non-truth. This may sound like nonsense; if it does, it is because I am writing quickly and schematically (I have tried to write more patiently and carefully on this topic elsewhere). Broadly, it means that nothing can be built upon the contentless murmuring of which Blanchot writes; no great work can be erected on what Heidegger might call in the language of the Contributions the site of Da-sein such that the truth of being can pass. Rather, murmuring unworks all such sites; it might be understood in terms of a limitless murmuring, a bad infinite that prevents the institution of Da-sein.
Murmuring, then, is that to which writing answers according to Blanchot. Heidegger is a writer insofar as he also attends, albeit in a different way, to what Blanchot calls murmuring or worklessness. But this is also what makes him responsible as a writer, according to Blanchot. If Heidegger is close to attending to what Blanchot calls murmuring, he is not close enough; he still emphasises truth – the possibility of an act of creation or institution that would happen as Da-sein – over untruth. Why does Heidegger neglect to condemn the Holocaust in its specificity – that is, without linking to the mechanised food industry or comparing its victims to German casualities etc.? For Blanchot, it is because he cannot attend to a kind of murmuring within language that one can find in the cry of the Other. Here, Blanchot has drawn very close to the Levinas of Otherwise than Being.
The cry of the Other: is this sheer hyperbole? Sentimentality? I will not reprise the argument one finds in texts by Caputo and Fotì that Heidegger passes over experiences of pain and suffering in his readings of the poems of Trakl and others. What allows Blanchot to link worklessness to the cry? It attests to something like the unworking of the power or the potential of the body. Then one might put the idled body alongside the idled word …
I will write quickly and schematically that the poet’s testimony is thereby related to the testimony of the concentration camps. Murmuring in some way joins them both. This opens the possibility of understanding Blanchot’s reading of Celan. Of course, I have explained barely anything here. I still, however, want to ask this question: what relationship does worklessness have to Heidegger’s history of being, the Seynsgeschichte? It indicates, perhaps, another kind of poietic thinking – another kind of bringing-forth. The task: read Blanchot’s fragmentary texts alongside those being published in Division 3 of Heidegger’s collected works. Might one understand their fragmentariness in terms of the incapacity of The Last One to Speak, The Writing of the Disaster and The Step Not Beyond to provide a site for Da-sein?
A little later, Guido Schneeberger (to whom Farias owes a great deal) sent me or had sent to me by his publisher the speeches Heidegger made in favour of Hitler while he was rector. These speeches were frightening in their form as well as their content, for it is the same writing and very language by which, in a great moment of the history of thought, we had been made present at the loftiest questioning, one that could come to us from Being and Time. Heidegger uses the same language to call for voting for Hitler, to justify Nazi Germany’s break from the League of Nations, and to praise Schlageter. Yes, the same holy language, perhaps a bit more crude, more emphatic, but the language that would henceforth be heard in the commentaries on Holderlin and would change them, but for still other reasons. (Thinking the Apocalypse)
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