1. There is an ancient fear of mimesis, of that doubling of the world in which beings seem to appear in place of themselves. The mimetic power of art is suspicious because it seems to tear beings from themselves – they are no longer what it were; no longer, that is, bound to what we thought they were according to the principle of identity.
Plato’s Ideas are supposed to marshall simulacra; artists are to be strictly controlled since art is only an aping of the Idea, a vulgar repetition which threatens to set loose a power of differentiation without identity loose in the world. What is more strange and terrifying than a world become other than itself? Who is more terrifying than your double?
Of course, writing, too, is to be distrusted, even as Plato is condemned to write. It was the living presence of Socrates that made him, the young poet, give up writing; it was the same presence that called for writing, since Socrates, the purest philosophy, never wrote a word. How strange that his writing bore the historical Socrates away; that Plato emerges as an author only as he lets Socrates become a mouthpiece.
But then Plato thinks he can provide answers to where Socrates only posed questions – answers, that, although written, give him clear criteria to distinguish the real from the simulcral. He sacrifices his literary gifts at the altar of philosophy; he writes in service of the Ideas, even as, with the Parmenides, he allows the Ideas to be ridiculed. For the real reader of Parmenides can supply answers to Parmenides’ riddle that the young Socrates cannot: this text is part of an oral teaching, of those lessons that pass from mouth to ear to mouth without fear of contamination.
2. What happens with the fall of the Ideas? Heidegger differentiates being from beings, breaking the principle of identity. He also ends up think of this differentiation in terms of language, which, as the ground of all relation, cannot, as with the being of beings, is too close to the human being to be thought of in relation to the human being.
(Here, he is unlike Nietzsche, for whom music, beyond language, attests in its continuity, its lack of grammar, to the real. Heidegger can only think music through language – as language’s sonorousness, its rhythms and colours – as what, in language, outbids its formalisation. This musical materiality, this power of differentiation, is where mimesis reveals its play. No music without language; but it is the musicality of language that would allow language to be experienced.)
3. Levinas would break with Heidegger because of this fearsome differentiation: who knows what the world might become? Without form, without limit, the being of beings is terrifying. And what is poetry but the drunken celebration of limitlessness, the participation in the whole, which has no room for the ethical? (My account is too brief, too dense, but these are only scribbles in a notebook.)
The presence of the Other, the silent address of the Other, breaks through this wild power of mimesis, and all language. That is to say, language begins again and the world is given again with the commencement of speech, with my response to the Other.
(Given again – how is it I always think of Kierkegaard here, of his notion of repetition? Given again, retaken – Levinas never claims simply the relation to the Other is a priori. The a priori a posteriori – the encounter which only then reveals the conditions of living, of existence: what is this but the repetition in which being is given anew, given as it falls away from its absoluteness, its primacy.
Perhaps this a priori a posteriori is analogous to what Heidegger calls the experience of language, from which thinking, for him, is to recommence. Most thought-provoking is that we are not thinking – and we are not doing so because we have not been brought into the vicinity, the holy precinct of this experience.)
Blanchot does not fear the strange power of mimesis. Once again, the invocation of the presence of the Other, the address of the Other, but this time, it is indistinguishable from that strange mimesis that lets being appear in place of themselves. Indistinguishable, that is, on the same plane? Is speech, for Blanchot, the equivalent of that literary writing in which it is the image of the world that speaks as the image of language?
What speech and writing have in common for Blanchot is that sharing in which a relation to language is given. Given to the writer, and then to the reader; given to the one who responds to the silent presence of the Other, and then to the one who responds as he becomes Other in turn. Sharing – each time, it is a relation to the same as the non-identical. Each time a strange resemblance.
(Kierkegaard again: repetition as the thunderstorm out of which God does not speak; the retaking of the world, of language, by way of an experienced given by the Other. Given by him (or her), without he or she being necessarily aware of it. How does this happen? One day you spoke, and in your speech, I heard a kind of silence, a saying that was withdrawn from anything you said. You did not mean to speak thus. It happened; on that day, I was ready, and I heard it, and by way of your speech, that doubling of the world, of all things in the doubling of language that happened as your address. Repetition, retaking, but this time without the shattering of being. Its infinite extenuation.)
Plato feared writing was only the corpse of true speech, its lifeless proxy. For Blanchot, the relation to the dying reveals what hides itself in the vivacity of the living: the corpse is the image of the body. What happens when speech begins to resemble itself – when, that is, it silently withdraws, as saying, from anything that is said, becoming sheer address, giving itself as language – as language as language?
For Levinas, it is the Other who breaks into the world, and into the self-resembling of the world. For Blanchot, that self-resembling is experienced by way of the Other; it is shared in the relation to the one who addresses me, but also to the book I read in which language, likewise begins to resemble itself.
Wittgenstein: ‘the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world is not any proposition in language, it is the existence of language itself.’ The right expression for the uncanny doubling of the world is not a proposition, but the ‘there is’ of language; language that comes to itself and speaks of itself in speech and in writing.
4. Language is the condition of all possible relations of the human being with the world. Is it possible to relate to language, to be brought into relation with language? Only when language – the performance of language – is interrupted. Only by following language until it comes up against its limits.
Language as language, the world as the world, where, each time, it is a question of the Same (capitalised) and the return of the same. Each time, it is given as interruption – as a kind of silence (language), or uncanny presence (the world – but then language and the world must be thought together). But each time, its condition is a kind of sharing, for Blanchot.
But a sharing, a community, of a peculiar kind. The literary writer determines the indeterminable to realise a book. The relation, here, is between him and the indeterminable, it is true, but by way of the book, which opens itself to be read. Then the indeterminable is the ‘third term’ of the relation between writer and readers. The reader of literature is also brought into relation with the indeterminable in her encounter with the book, and she might, too, relate to the writer of that book not as a living person like her, but as one who determined that encounter, who gave it form.
(None of this, of course, is guaranteed – not all writers are brought into contact with the indeterminable, which is to say, to language as language. The same for readers. And even if they are touched by language as language, how can they retain this experience as what it is? This is the role of the Blanchotian critic, the philosopher – to know what has been encountered, and by way of the shared.)
Likewise in the case of the encounter with the Other, who becomes so only insofar as she brings me into relation with, once again, language as language, with saying. This encounter, with remains unilateral and dissymmetrical, may be redoubled for the other person in turn; I, too, can become Other. This is what Blanchot calls the Opening of community (his capitals).
(Once again, no guarantees. The encounter with the Other is elective; it happens by chance. And there are some relationships in which this encounter repeats itself with every meeting – in which it is the relation to language as language that is at issue in what Blanchot calls, remembering Bataille, friendship. Note, though, that he presents friendship in other ways, too.)
He also envisages collective bodies in which this sharing occurs. In the funeral march for those murdered at Charonne Metro station, each shares a relation to the dead. Among the students and workers in May 1968, each shares a relation to the revolution, just as, Blanchot writes to Mascolo, those in a seance bear a relation to a ghost. Each time, it is a question of silence, of an address, of the threshold of language.
5. Silence – but is this the word? What noise is made by the interdeterminable as it is made to resound in language? Nietzsche’s lament in the preface he added to The Birth of Tragedy fourteen years after its publication: ‘It should have sung, this new voice – and not spoken! How sad that I did not risk saying as a poet what I had to say then: perhaps I could have done it.’ To sing thought, to sing philosophy – what would this mean?
Silence is not sung, in Blanchot, but murmurs; there’s no getting rid of grammar, and the indeterminable rolls in the literary work like thunder. And doesn’t it roll between us, too – in what is held between us, in the relation of sharing?
(Thunder – not music. And no reference to those musical terms still found in Heidegger: fugue, tonality, echo, rhythm.)
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