No surprise that it is only by silence that a cut can be made into anonymous speech. Silence – to draw speech back to itself, to summon back its signifying power. Thus, when the call of conscience, for Heidegger, says nothing at all. Nothing: but it is said to a particular person, to you and no other, drawing you back from the ‘no one’ of anonymity.
Isn’t this the hither side of the fear of the masses as it appears in the twentieth century? Two anonymities – one that belongs to the quotidian, to the fallen world of rumour and gossip, and the other to the ownmost self, to Dasein as it is held out into the Nothing. Or, indeed, to the self elected to its responsibility by the Other who speaks without saying a word, who is pure address and nothing more (Levinas) – a silence that once again that is elective, that picks me out.
And it is there even in Blanchot, for all that he dismisses the distinction between authentic and inauthentic speech: the speech of anyone at all, the anonymous hubbub of the masses, is a cousin of the murmuring that echoes, for the reader in literary writing. Echoes and singularises the one who reads, ‘separating him from the others, from the world and from himself, leading him through mocking labyrinths, drawing him always farther away, by a fascinating repulsion, below the ordinary world of daily speech.’ A fascinating repulsion: because literature redoubles anonymity, gives it a thickness, and allows it to tremble in the ordinariness of the words it presents.
Two anonymities: this disjunction is there in Kafka’s Josephine. The mouse singer’s piping is no different from any other, it is anonymous, indifferent, but why is it also celebrated, why does Josephine’s voice alleviate, if only for a moment, the sufferings of the mousefolk? Because in some sense it redoubles the anonymity of their piping; because that anonymity is presented as such.
Strange ‘as such’ that has no substance; strange detour, in which speech wanders without cease. But wandering, now, that is separated from ordinary piping, that has silence all around it, preserved by a margin that sets itself around her piping. Her song is somehow rounded off, completed, even as it allows its finished form to tremble. Perhaps it is that the artwork, in the midst of anonymity, allows that anonymity to be experienced as by a kind of reduction.
Separated from the world, separating itself, set back from the will or the intentions of its creator, the work turns in silence like a salamander in the flames. In truth, it is only a piece of the world – the singer’s voice is no different from any other – that has been suspended from the world, that has changed its polarity. A piece of the world set back from the world – a fragment lost as it has slipped from use: but to what does it awaken me, the one who was called?
I think silence can only name the deterritorialisation of the voice. There are not two orders, speech and silence, but one. Silence fringes the voice as it is reduced to itself, that is, to the fact that it has no final determination, that it wanders in itself, just because it has no ‘itself’. That wandering sets itself apart from what is fixed and determined in the world, but also from the voice as part of the world. Then it wanders apart from determination: that is its adventure. And it carries me with it, that is mine.
But what kind of adventure is this? Silence surrounds me and unlimits me; what I am is no longer what I am. To what have I been awakened? Two anonymities. When speech found you, you also wandered, although this time by yourself. By yourself, but not yet come to yourself. To what does the second anonymity deliver you ? To the discovery of yourself as the place of your wandering.
Picked out to wander, picked out not to come to yourself: you will not reach what you are, as if being and becoming could be separated. You are already this: wanderer, exile, not simply deterritorialised from the world, but becoming with it, plunged back into its streaming. And silence all around you; silence crowns you, fiery nimbus. It burns at your edges.
I was set on fire by the song. I was set on fire by the book: set to silence, set to wandering.
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