Outside

Blanchot on the image, continuing from the post on dreams from a couple of days ago.

Just as the dream of which Blanchot writes has no content, the image is only an affirmation of what breaks through our ordinary dealings with things in view of particular projects. Like the dream dreamed at the heart of the dream, the image is an experience of the real at the heart of the real, the reserve which is the opacity of things which do not place themselves at our disposal. This strange correspondence between the dream and what awaits us in the day is not surprising for both bear upon the same enigma; if the essence of night and the interminable day are one, it is because they are concerned with what Blanchot calls the image.

How should one approach Blanchot’s notion of the image? In Nadja, Breton recalls a flea-market he used to visit to buy curios,

Again, quite recently … I went with a friend one Sunday to the “flea market” at Saint-Ouen (I go there often, in search of those objects that can be found nowhere else, outmoded, fragmented, useless, almost incomprehensible, perverse in short, in the sense that I give to the word and that I like).

Remembering this passage, Blanchot writes:

a tool, when damaged, becomes its image (and sometimes an esthetic object like “those outmoded objects, fragmented, unusable, almost incomprehensible, perverse,” which André Breton loved). In this case the tool, no longer disappearing into its use, appears. This appearance of the object is that of resemblance and reflection: the object’s double, if you will. The category of art is linked to this possibility for objects to “appear,” to surrender, that is, to the pure and simple resemblance behind which there is nothing — but being. Only that which is abandoned to the image appears, and everything that appears is, in this sense, imaginary.

Blanchot is also drawing upon Heidegger’s famous analysis of the hammer in Being and Time, where, after explaining how our relation to the hammer may be understood in terms of our involvement in making something fast, which in turn is involved in providing protection against bad weather, and ultimately for the sake of [um-willen] providing shelter for Dasein, which is to say ‘for the sake of a possibility of Dasein’s Being’. When the hammer breaks and we hold the broken shaft and head in our hands, it breaks itself from the totality of involvements, that network of references in in terms of which it was understood; it is no longer something which is part of the articulation of one of Dasein‘s projects, but is, like Breton’s perverse object, ‘fragmented, unusable, almost incomprehensible’.

Is this what Blanchot means by the image? Or is he indicating an experience which is far more wide ranging?

The image speaks to us, and seems to speak intimately to us of ourselves. But the term “intimately” does not suffice. Let us say rather that the image intimately designates the level where personal intimacy is destroyed and that it indicates in this movement the menacing proximity of a vague and empty outside, the deep, the sordid basis upon which it continues to affirm things in their disappearance. Thus it speaks to us, à propos of each thing, of less than this thing, but of us. And, speaking of us, it speaks to us of less than us, of that less than nothing that subsists when there is nothing.

How should one understand this? Recall the conception of the self Blanchot takes over from Hegel, Heidegger and Kojeve: the self as project, as a ‘temporal transcendence’ which leaps beyond itself and towards a future which it understands in terms of specific tasks. According to this tradition, the self is not a substantive and self-present unity, but an opening to the future, an ek-stasis or standing out which understands itself from what it will accomplish. The ‘I’ as the ‘I can’; the self as potentiality: all relations between the ‘I’ and the world must be understood in terms of the measure implicit in the ‘I’: it is as though the ‘I’ were the Ulysses of the Odyssey, adventuring, risking himself, but always in view of the task of returning to Ithaca, to his Kingdom. In truth, his adventures do not change Ulysses; likewise, the ‘I’ of projects and tasks itself remains constant in its dealings with the world.

Yet in the relation to the image, as Blanchot sets it out, something different occurs. No longer are things experienced in terms of a mediating self-relation. It is as though the relation itself were truncated or suspended – it can no longer reach the thing, the person as an object. Conversely, this relation can no longer be understood as the reaching out, the transcendence or ek-stasis , of a subject. In place of the self, the ‘I’ which would retain is reflexive self-identity, there is the place where ‘personal intimacy is destroyed’ and there is only ‘the menacing proximity of a vague and empty outside’. What remains? Blanchot will often reply: vigilance.

What does this mean? Levinas will always oppose Ulysses’s journey to Abraham’s: the prophet made an authentic voyage insofar as he was willing to give everything up in heeding God’s word. Understand vigilance as the exposure not to a word but to a noise without form which is delivered not from high, but from the heart of the real – a formless noise which does not commands but fascinates, claiming our attention while refusing to allow it to close on a particular, determinate object. Our attention is claimed and lost; no longer can we fix ourselves at a distance from the things in the world which would allow them to enter our schemes and our projects; no longer, indeed, can we determine a place for ourselves at all.

To keep vigil is, one might suppose, to watch over something, but Blanchot is not interested in the experiences of a subject which would be present to itself, able to integrate its experiences. No longer is it possible to synthesise what has happened. Outside the psyche, outside memory and the possibility of memorisation there is a ceaseless unfolding in which the ‘I’ is turned inside out. Who am I, in the experience in question? No one – there is no one there. Not only that, there is no world either, if this is understood in terms of a totality of involvements, a contexture in which things make sense in accordance with the for-the-sake-of-Dasein.

What speaks in the experience in question? ‘the deep, the sordid basis upon which it continues to affirm things in their disappearance’; of what does it speak ‘of less than this thing, but of us. And, speaking of us, it speaks to us of less than us, of that less than nothing that subsists when there is nothing’.

In Blanchot’s terms, there is no one there to be vigilant – but vigilance is there nonetheless. Does this mean someone or something else is vigilant in me – that I have been possessed as by an alien force? Rather, it points to a dispossession; I am occupied not by a subject or a substantive but by an impersonal streaming. It seems the ‘I’ always survives its encounters with things and with persons, leaping forth into the world and returning to itself. But there is always the chance of an experience which causes it to lose its position in the midst of this leap, stranding it among the things and persons towards which it would press forward.

In this instant, (but is it right to invoke a temporal punctum, a particular instant?) self-relation itself is broken; the self is torn apart like Orpheus by the Maenads. Torn apart – but something remains. Not the self, but something like an awareness of the river upon which the torn body of Orpheus was cast (an awareness of the river ‘in’ his dispersed body). Of the river which flows ‘in’ my place; the outside streaming inside of me. In this instant (but this is an instant torn from itself, a ‘now’ in dissension: diachrony) there is no longer the personal ‘I’, the one who is able to act in the world, but the exposition or unfolding of this ‘I’: the ‘il’, the ‘he’, the ‘it’. Vigilance refers not to a personal experience, a traumatic memory, but to the exposure of the inside to the outside, a turning inside-out.

Here it is not matter of positing a pure outside, of substantialising this term, rendering it an inaccessible thing in itself. The outside must be thought in its relation with the inside; exteriority and interiority are entwined and cannot be thought each without the other. Think the ‘I’ and the ‘il’, the personal and the impersonal together – recall the struggle at the heart of the ‘I’, that secret violence which joins and unjoins the unity of the self.

At the essence of the night, there is the dream. And in the interminable day, the image.