The Holy be my Word

Holderlin, from ‘Wie Wenn am Feiertage …’/ ‘As when on a Holiday’

Jetz aber tagts! Ich harrt und sah es kommen,
Und was ich sah, das Heilige sei mein Wort.

But now day breaks! I waited and saw it come.
And what I saw, the holy be my word.

Blanchot complains of the French translation: ‘Et ce que j’ai vis, le Sacré soit ma parole‘, ‘And what I saw, the holy, may it be my word’. Rather: ‘le Sacré soit ma parole‘. One does not speak the holy, the holy is speech – the poet’s speech. The holy: here it is a name for the immediate. But why is this? Consider Hart’s remarks on Blanchot on God:

For Blanchot, who is writing on behalf of literature, "God" stands for any immediate singularity, since that which transcends all concepts and that which falls beneath them are both ineffable. Literature wants precisely what it cannot have, the absolutely singular, and it cannot have it because this singularity is destroyed by the very conceptuality that makes literature possible.

Elegantly put. Desire: lierature’s desire to invoke what refuses to call under the generality of the concept. What, then, did the poet see? Perhaps, Blanchot comments, ‘nothing more than the present of this wish, this provoking resolution that gathers in an intimacy of belonging and through an already sacriligeous contact the holy and speech in the space of the extremity of desire’. The poem desires. But what does it desire? That the holy and speech might come together; that one might speak of the absolutely singular. But this is impossible to the extent that the language which the poet is obliged to use remains passes over the singular in favour of the universal. Then the desire of the poem must be without issue. Char: ‘Le poème est l’amour réalisé du désir demeuré désir‘.

Can you say what it is impossible to say? It is a question, here, not of rendering the impossible possible (naming it -), but responding to what withdraws from the possibility of signification. And yet the impossible does not lie beyond the possible in the manner of a frontier. Above all, the impossible is not a term. It is not ‘in’ the poem nor anywhere else. It is neither the one nor the other – it is nothing but the relation itself, desire reaching out to what it cannot possess.