But what is called speech in Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation? ‘To speak to someone is to accept not introducing him into the system of things or of beings to be known; it is to recognise him as unknown and to receive him as foreign without obliging him to break with his difference’. The unknown – but what does this mean? That which breaks with the idea that everything yields itself up to the measure of intelligibility, lending themselves to that great synchronisation through a world or cosmos comes to appear in its seamless continuity.
What does this mean? The relation to the Other is not part of those relations which measure the copresence of things according to the powers and capacities of human intellection. Heidegger voids the substantial subject, presenting instead the ecstatic leap into the future, the stretching out towards death. From where does Dasein leap? There is no ‘there’ understood as a substantial unity. Yet for Blanchot it is as though Dasein has to come to itself such that the leap might be taken, to assemble itself – to be assembled – into that site where existence itself would become possible.
The experience of suffering will always be Blanchot’s model for that experience in which this act of assembling is undone. Suffering should be understood negatively only from that perspective wherein what is most important is to preserve the unity of the self. But there is also a sense, for him, in which the suffering which marks the relation to the Other as it undoes that unity is the condition of hope: as though the interruption accomplished as this relation would permit more than the respiration of the Same as it comes to itself or the labour of identification through which the world presents itself as what is known and knowable.
In this instant (in the suspension it accomplishes), the place I assume gives unto an experience which cannot be gathered into a unity. Who am I? ‘il’: the he or the it: the impersonal ‘subject’ of a detour which will not allow itself to come to term; the suspension of that reflexivity of the self which redoubles that great reflexivity through which the cosmos grants itself to the measure of the Same. ‘il’: not a subject nor the Da-sein which has already and always leapt from its site. ‘il’: the one in contact with the unknown such that the measure of knowing is interrupted. ‘Locus’ of a pathein which cannot be borne by subject or recuperated in what Heidegger calls authentic existing.
Who is the Other? The one I meet in that suffering which turns me from myself. Whose alterity is such that it cannot be grasped in terms of a particular attribute (the Other is not masculine or feminine, not old or young, neither famous nor obscure …) Is this a simple mysticism or theophany: the appearance of the Other as God was said to appear to Moses? But the Other does not appear as to an intact subject; it is not part of that great rushing forward of phenomena which the phenomenologist understands to be met by the rushing of a constituting intentionality. The Other as enigma, as the interruption of phenomenology: concentrated in these formulations is a conception of a relation which may be said to be without relation since it deprives itself of a ‘subject’ term (the ‘I’) and a stable ‘object’ (the presence of the thing alongside other things).
‘il’: ‘place’ of an indefinite suspension, the suffering without term to which nothing appears. The Other is, to this extent, invisible, if visibility is the measure of phenomenon. This means the Other cannot operate as the ‘object’ pole of a relation. A relation without relation: the ‘il’ ‘relates’ to the Other as to the unknown, the outside, the neuter not because it is reducible to, say, another expanse to be worked and transformed into the world, the cosmos, not to a dimension beyond this one – a heavenly place – but to what resists the constituting grasp of consciousness here and now. Here and now the encounter with the Other cannot be grasped. It is marked as a kind of trauma, as the awakening of an impersonal ‘il’, a vigilance without subject. And it is met by what Blanchot calls speech.
With what speech can one associate the ‘il’, a ‘no one’ incapable of speaking? Impossible speech – an address which cannot be traced back to the will of a subject or to an animating consciousness. A speech which erupts to break those signifying practices which allow us to name and speak of things in their absence and to grasp each singularity as a particular which would lie beneath a universal. A speech then which marks the suspension of the speaker and of the theme of the spoken. A speech which, in turn, cannot itself become a theme.
The ‘il’ addresses the Other. There is speech, upstream of the decision to speak (unless speech is understood in terms of the decision of the Other as it were ‘in’ me). Speech which is not met by the Other speaking in turn, as if, here, it were a question of reciprocity of exchange. Blanchot will follow Levinas in claiming the relation with the Other is unilateral and resists symmetry – a resistance which is not that of the master before the slave since the Other is encountered as the one who is vulnerable, as the widow or the orphan, as the proletariat – these expressions to be understood only as they indicate the way the Other solicits not only the speech which would acknowledge the Other’s alterity but also the desire to negate and have done with that alterity.
It is true, for Blanchot, I can become the Other for the one I relate to as the Other, but this breaks with any notion of exchange. What is given in such a criss-crossing of unilateral and dissymmetrical relations, in this redoubled relation without relation in which both parties become ‘il’ and then the Other in turn, is a double interruption. One which is confirmed in those friendships as Blanchot remembers existed between him and Bataille where it is not the content of what is said that is important, but the seriousness of a speech in which each acknowledges the other person as the Other in turn, and both experience, albeit traumatically, which is to say, upstream of conscious individuality, the interruption of the continuity of the cosmos.
Likewise, Blanchot will even allow for such relations to multiply themselves between those who, in demonstrating against injustices, refuse the prevailing authorities and even the measure of power: those who maintain themselves outside the play of those relations which govern the social whole. The community opened thus cannot last or gather itself into a movement of social reform but permits something like a revolution to flash up for a moment. A utopia – but only as long as interruption is permitted its play, leaping from one demonstrator to another. Still, the model of the relation to the Other remains intact: there is nothing mutual or reciprocal with respect to relation in question, not even in its redoubling or multiplication.
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