The Call Outside

I’m indulging myself in writing some notes on Blanchot and Judaism. This continues from the last posts.

Speech, in this sense, is the promised land where exile fulfils itself in sojourn since it is not a matter of being at home there but of being always Outside, engaged in a movement wherein the Foreign offers itself, yet without disavowing itself’. To acknowledge the relation to the Outside in the relation to the Other prevents me from taking the Other to be another like myself.

Speech opens the Jew to the promised land in which one might live without that land becoming one’s own. There is no dwelling for the Jew.

To speak, in a word, is to seek the source of meaning in the prefix that the words exile, exodus, existence, exteriority and estrangement

are committed to unfolding in various modes of experience; a prefix that for us designates distance and separation as the origin of all “positive value.”

The last phrase, positive value, is to be contrasted with the values which are impugned in nihilism. At the outset of the essay, Blanchot has already claimed the question of what is specific to Judaism receives answers which determine the Jew negatively – as in the case of Simone Weil, in terms of a deficiency with respect to the clarity of Greek thought. He wonders whether this fear to affirm the words which begin with the prefix ‘ex-’ is that of ‘playing into the hands of nihilism and its most vulgar substitute, anti-Semitism’.

It is true that a certain anti-Semitic rhetoric will suspect what they take to be the deracination of the Jews – one which Blanchot will present in terms of a relation to what he calls the origin rather than the beginning, using the former word to refer what separates the Jew from the interiority of any particular state. The origin is what breaks any myths of the place – the same myths, of course, upon which Nazism would draw – returning each time as a call outside, as the experience of an insecurity which disrupts the relation to being in a place, to dwelling.

The call outside, God’s call, breaks not only the relation to the place, but also the mediation which would allow experience to be measured according to the security of this place. To contrast, as Levinas does, Ulysses to Abraham, is to separate one who remains himself throughout his vicissitudes, who seeks only to reach his birthplace and his wife and his son from the one who simply goes outside, who passes into the desert, that ‘between the shores’ which escapes interiority.

The response to the call assembles a people who are joined in a limit-experience, in the border that broadens and becomes desert. Above all, for Blanchot, it maintains ‘that Jewish thought does not know, or refuses, mediation and speech as mediating’. And again: ‘Judaism is the sole thought which does not mediate’. How should one understand this? The Writing of the Disaster:

Granted, Hegel is the mortal enemy of Christianity, but this is the case exactly to the extent that he is a Christian: far from being satisfied with a single Mediation (Christ), he makes everything into mediation. Judaism is the sole thought that does not mediate. And that is why Hegel, and Marx, are anti-Judaic, not to say anti-Semitic.

Judaism maintains a point of indifference between the ordinary notions of interiority and exteriority, the inside and the outside and the ‘other’ exteriority and the ‘other’ outside. It watches over this difference. 

What is refused with speech is the possibility of what will be called the master and slave dialectic which permits the mediation of the struggle between two self-consciousnesses such that a form of society is possible and eventually even the triumph of a universal state which bestows recognition upon all. Blanchot will grant ‘the dialectical fulfillment is at work, and this is necessary’ even as, alongside the dialectic, there is the relation to the outside which Judaism maintains. ‘My relation with the Other is irreducible to any measure, just as it excludes any mediation and any reference to another relation that would include it’. And it is so because it is also a relation to the outside, to the ‘other’ exteriority.