From Leaves of Hypos, trans. Jackson Matthews
Ce qui m’a mis au monde et qui m’en chassera n’intervient qu’aux heures où je suis trop faible pour lui resister. Vielle personne quand je suis né. Jeune inconue quand je mourrai.
Le seule et meme Passante.
What brought me into the world, and will drive me out of it, comes to me only at moments when I am too weak to resist. Old when I was born, She will be young and unknown when I die.
The same, the only Passer-by.
A few lines in the margins of Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation. When will I understand what he means by le neuter?
What are the characteristics of Char’s poetry? Blanchot lists: 1) There is the emphasis on the substantive ‘the absolute inextinguishable’, ‘the impossible living’, ‘pleasure’s moaning’, ‘Chilling’ [Transir], ‘Bordering’, 2) an extraordinary density of images, which multiply along the phrase, 3) ‘a tendency to paratactic order; when words having no articles defining them, verbs without a determinable subject (‘Alone dwell’), and phrases without verbs speak to us without any preestablished relations that organise or connect them’. These are all part of the articulation of a fragmentary speech [parole]
The fragment – not a negation of an existing whole, just as it is not part of that whole. Neither privative nor positive, then; one must think in terms of a separation and discontinuity and even an exile. In these terms, one must think the fragmented poem not in terms of what it does not accomplish, but in terms of an accomplishment measured by another measure. It is a matter of writing, of a questioning, or an affirmation linked to the multiple, to what lies beyond unity.
Is the fragment an aphorism? No, Blanchot insists: the aphorism has a horizon; it closes itself – it is bounded. By contrast, the peculiarity of Char’s poetry is the way it is composed of separate phrases each of which seems separate from the others – each isolated and disassociated to the extent one is obliged to leap from phrase to phrase across blank spaces of text. A peculiar arrangement. Here, it is not a question of harmony, unless this is understood by analogy to what Heraclitus thought as the invisible harmonia behind paired contrasts: that hidden harmonia linked to other enigmatic words to which he granted a new profundity: logos, aletheia, physis. As with Heraclitus, it is a question of what is disjunct, of a divergence or breakage which permits the opening to an exteriority beyond a simple signification. Is it possible to say that something is named thereby – that an indication occurs by dint of that relation which reaches beyond what can be signified, that, as with Heraclitus, there is a revelation of something that is common and hidden, which reveals and conceals?
Heraclitus often speaks in the neuter singular; one finds phrases like ‘the-one-thing-wise’, ‘the not-to-be-expected’, ‘the-not-to-be-expected’, ‘the-not-to-be-found’, ‘the-not-to-be-approached’, ‘the common’. What do they designate? Neither the Platonic idea nor the Aristotlean concept. The neuter – not a third gender so much as that which cannot be assigned to a genre. It is neither general nor particular; neither subject nor object. Does this mean it oscillates between the two, or that it awaits determination? It is, rather, a question of another kind of relation which escapes us for as long as we pass over what is specific to a thinking-poetry, a movement of research. Another relation? One which opens onto a height analogous to the one Zeus assumes when he measures with his scales the balance of forces at the Trojan War?
In Char’s poetry, an archipelagic speech permits the open sea to surge between phrase-islands. Something passes – but who passes? Does ‘the passing’ refer to the one who passes or to another movement? ‘How does one live without the unknown before us?’ asks Char. Poetry, the relation to the unknown. Not the not yet known, nor indeed the absolutely unknowable one would approach by means of a process akin to negative theology. Poetry: the relation to the unknown as the unknown, keeping it unknown, allowing it to remain under cover. It is a question of indication. Poetry: speech which indicates. It is, for Blanchot, the simplest speech. Why? Because its speech is the way the unknown is indicated, the way it is named and brought to language.
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