What does it mean when Breton and the Surrealists invoke the total human being ? It is linked, for them, to a certain power of language (nor a power over language …) They do not indicate, then, the one who can delimit, the Adam who first speaks and thereby separates himself from the things he would name, winning an abstract power over them. Instead, it is the one for whom this power is not possible – who speaks or writes without power and first of all without power over language. Is this Hegel’s slave – the one who has lost the struggle for her life and labours now at the behest of the master? But the slave has the consolation of work – of a struggle which will eventually free her and free the world. And the powerless speaker, the writer without power? Suffering: the inability to work, to struggle to the level at which something could be achieved.
Blanchot: ‘What threatens art, expression, and the affirmation of culture in the West? Suffering’. Levinas writes somewhere that to enjoy art is indecent – it is like feasting in the midst of a famine. But then Levinas wrote Proper Names, in which he celebrates those artworks which do deign to spread themselves before us like a feast. And doesn’t Blanchot show us a certain modern work of art is linked to a suffering born of an attraction without respite which takes the form of painting or literature – to what one might call the work? Suffering? But it is also a kind of joy, too – and perhaps one that is linked with what Breton would call the total human being.
The work? But to what does this refer? Not to the painting or the book that the artist accomplishes – not that, but rather to the demand which the creation of the particular work fails to annul. Begin again, begin over again and never will you have taken one step toward what cannot be yours. Never but you must try to step, even if this is a step (pas) that is not (pas) a step, but a movement in place – and not even that, not even movement (unless it is a movement which cancels movement, the opposite of a leap). Futility, repetition, failure. The modern work of art (Beckett, say, or Cezanne …) accepts futility. Failure is its destiny, or its non-destiny (for it is going nowhere …) Failure is its anxiety, its suffering, but it is also its joy (I will try and substantiate these remarks another day).
What is culture to the modern work? Everything it is necessary to refuse. This does not need to be said again. But to refuse in the name of what? Surrealism called it ‘total man’: the total human being, but here understood in terms of an automatic movement of language, an automatism without origin or limit, an infinite welling forth that cannot be stabilised or reduced. It is this which literary culture – the prestige of the novel, the fame of the author, the salon and the gallery – was too frightened to admit: the secret heart of every work is already eroded from within. This is why, for them, the novels which appear and keep appearing have nothing to do with the worklessness to which the work of art tends. Plot, characters, the omniscient narrator: all of this reveals, for the Surrealist, only a narrative complacency, the great satisfaction of the world with itself. But automatism is already beyond culture and beyond the world.
But there is a danger in linking automatism to failure. To claim that the book or the painting fails the work is to indulge in a kind of nostalgia for success measured in terms of the same literary and painterly values Surrealism would leave behind. The future is announced in a collective work – in an automatism which prevents the delimitation which keeps each of us separate from one another and from the world. Automatism is the principle of a new human being and a new society. But the future is not what will arrive in the course of things. Surrealism looks towards an event which cannot arrive unless the world is transformed – not negated, but suspended, separated from itself, interrupting the relationship through which we are bound to the world and to one another.
The total human being? The one who is given to a movement of writing without power no longer bound to the humanism of culture. For isn’t humanism, as Blanchot writes, ‘the idea that man must naturally recognise himself in his works and is never separate from himself’?
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