Scholars trace transformations in Blanchot’s vocabulary – he places inverted commas around words here (‘presence’), he reformulates expressions there (changing worklessness to the absence of the work), ‘writing’ begins to supplant ‘art’ or ‘literature’: no doubt. Scholars give these transformations a kind of teleology: Blanchot is refining his conceptual vocabulary, they say; he is moving from the thought of worklessness to that of the neuter; he no longer speaks of an excess of being, but of an experience which is neither that of being nor nothingness; he loses all patience with ontology.
Some of this is true – there are patterns which invite such readings (even Derrida is tempted – see Resistances). But how can the scholar account for disruptions in these same patterns? The word ‘presence’ returns without quotation marks in the very late works; work and worklessness are mentioned on the last page of the same work (The Unavowable Community) not to mention the complex interlacing of terms in the fragmentary works (The Step Not Beyond, The Writing of the Disaster).
The scholar’s ruin: what is important is the way such words are kept in motion, never settling into the fixity of a system: the fleetness of a movement of research which never pauses to rest, which goes out into strange lands, taking on the customs of those places and giving birth to itself through them just as Vishnu was said to have taken on different avatars in which to incarnate himself. But is there a Vishnu who would remain the same in those same rebirths? Only if the god gives up his place and the possibility of taking place: if he becomes a vigilance that watches over a difference at the heart of thought. A difference which will not allow him, the god, to be grasped in his unity: not Vishnu, then, but Proteus – and not even a God, but a river, Cratylus’s, in which it is impossible to step even once.
Understand that each of Blanchot’s essays undoes itself into the same river, that it is not a question of remaining the same, of the stubborn attempt to preserve itself despite its encounters, like Ulysses returning to Ithaca. It is not Vishnu who is reborn in each essay-avatar but the dispersal the form of a god cannot preserve.
Who was he, Blanchot? Who is he? Only a kind of vigilance, a watching over a difference which required his withdrawal from the world – a retreat which was again a kind of vigilance, which bore witness then and now to the dispersal at the heart of the world, to the darkness of the river beneath the crust of ice. That is also what he was, Blanchot, besides the one who lived in retirement near Versailles and it is what remains of him, watching over us in his writing.
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