Goethe murmurs of Romanticism: unfinished books, unaccomplished works. Blanchot responds:
Certainly it is often without works, but this is because it is the work of the absence of (the) work; a poetry affirmed in the purity of the poetic act, an affirmation without duration, a freedom without realisation, a force that exalts in disappearing and that is in no way discredited if it leaves no trace, for this was its goal: to make poetry shine, neither as nature nor even as work, but as pure consciousness of the moment.
Without works? But then it never tried to produce a work, but only to mark in the work, to the extent that it broke its ancient forms, what refuses its measure. Wrecked lives, broken works better to affirm a movement of research, a search for a poetic knowledge. Poetic consciousness: a thinking, a not-yet-thinking in which the meaning of poetry and art is itself transformed. Schlegel, Novalis, Holderlin know themselves, as they write, to be true philosophers, truer to philosophical research than the philosophers around whom later Romantics will gather (Fichte, Schelling). It is as though for these three names such research had to take on another name: the Work, writing, in order not to realise itself but to experience and attest to what cannot be realised in the Work.
Novalis: ‘The poetic philosopher is "in a state of being an absolute creator."’
Schlegel: ‘The history of modern poetry is a perpetual commentary on this philosophical axiom: all art must become science, all science, art; poetry and philosophy must unite.’
The Athenäum is a manifesto, not the first, perhaps, although it is absolute new in affirming, as its content, something like an awareness literature would have gained of itself. Blanchot:
The poet becomes the future of humankind at the moment when, no longer being anything – anything but one who knows himself to be a poet – he designates in this knowledge for which he is intimately responsible the site wherein poetry will no longer be content to produce beautiful, determinate works, but rather will produce itself in a movement without term and without determination. To put this differently, literature encounters its most dangerous meaning – that of interrogating itself in a declarative mode – at times triumphantly, and in so doing discovering that everything belongs to it, at other times, in distress, discovering it is lacking everything since it only affirms itself by default.
Literature lacking itself, in lieu of itself, makes itself responsible in the figure of the poet for keeping open an absence in the work. An absence? A kind of presence, too: presence which only literature can affirm. But what does this mean? If the Romantics are inspired by the French Revolution, it is not by the classical oratory of the revolutionaries, but by the Terror itself. Heads tumbled from the scaffold, death was everywhere.
True, the Athenäum warns us ‘You will not waste your faith or your love on political things, but reserve yourself for the divine domain of science and art.’ Science, art: it is a question of a responsibility which will not be limited by anything but the great Work itself. The Work which indicates an absolute freedom unknown to even to revolutionary politics. And yet it still bears a revolutionary inspiration – it is still a matter of a manifesto, a manifestation:
Art and literature, on the one hand, seem to have nothing other to do than manifest, that is to say, indicate themselves in accordance with the obscure mode that is proper to them: manifest, announce, in a word, communicate themselves. This is the inexhaustible act that institutes and constitutes the being of literature. But, on the other hand – and herein lies the complexity of the event – this becoming self-conscious that renders literature manifest, and reduces it to being nothing but its manifestation, leads literature to lay claim not only to the sky, the earth, to the past, the future, to physics and philosophy – this would be little – but to everything, to the whole that acts in every instant and every phenomenon (Novalis).
The whole: how should one understand this? There is, in the Romantics a kind of power that revels in itself – the work of furious negation, the denial of everything, the denial of God, the denial of nature. This is the Terror: write, negate the given, lift the world from its hinges, celebrate the power to name which grants the world to you as a writer, allowing it to be reborn in your words. Speak the whole, say the world and you no longer depend upon it; speak and the world might be destroyed but you retain the power to speak.
But know that words are never yours, that by writing you only play with the words that were there before you. To write: sham power, power over nothing. Ah but the temptation is there nonetheless: the whole is that space which spreads itself before the writer: the world become page, the page become the blankness before the creation, the writer as the revolutionary who will call everything into being anew. Lay claim, then, to the sky, to the earth, to the past and the future, lay claim to science and art – and lay claim to more than this: the world is yours, the world is reborn on those pages upon which you write. Write furiously, do not pause because then you will remember that this revolutionary movement is empty, that those words were there before you, that language itself is an impersonal structure whose power is lent to you and will soon withdraw. Live in the madness of the revolution, blood pouring from your pen …
Isn’t this to accede to humanism, to the supposition that each of us, any of us, can occupy the place once taken by God? Or is it to depose humanism itself, to restore power to the power of the language which streams through us and allows us to speak? By whose power do you speak? Your own? – Or is it a borrowed power – one which you will punished like Prometheus for stealing the divine fire?
The Romantic poet embodies Prometheus in his daring and in his punishment. For the dullness of the daily round, when words, dull words, steal you from yourself over and again, is the eagle which swoops upon the Titan, devouring anew the lobes of his liver. But there are moments in which the whole glitters before you like fire in heaven and you dream of the Work which would bring heaven to earth.
In the end, the writer has no power over the power of language; the poem must fail; literature falls short of the Work. What matters is only the trace of the Work in such failures, the break in the poem which indicates the whole.
Romanticism inaugurates an epoch; even more, it is the epoch in which every epoch reveals itself for, through it, the absolute subject of all revelation comes into play: the "I" that in its freedom adheres to no condition, recognises itself in nothing in particualr, and is only in its element – its ether – in the whole where it is free.
Romanticism understands the whole as all that is, all that was and all that shall be. And thereby the Romantics confer that great act of recognition which reveals the significance of those titanic creators of the past (Shakespeare, Dante, da Vinci …) and of the innocent splendour of classical art. But if this is its achievement, it also deprives it of consolation: romantic art is adrift from itself, from its classical certainties; its task is not to realise but to indicate, not to complete but to fragment. It is no longer constitutes a world or inhabits one, belonging instead to the whole which retreats from any possible world.
This is what Hegel understood when he proclaimed that art could no longer answer the highest form of Absolute Spirit: Romantic art is deprived of itself, in lieu of itself. But this is the point: by that stroke, a change of epoch has occurred: art becomes merely an object of aesthetic, literary critical contemplation. Art, literature become what they are, attaining themselves at the moment what is called art no longer belongs to a particular world but to the whole ‘behind’ every world. Art has died, but art lives from its death; it is dead, but its dying will become its sole content, understood as what resists, in art, every attempt to secure its meaning and its future.
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