Somewhere, Deleuze says he dreams of accounts of thinkers which emphasise only their most fundamental concepts. But how difficult to find your way to that simplicity! Nevertheless, I will risk simplification by claiming that Blanchot’s thought, his writing, his life, is concerned with a problem concerning the notion of relation.
A problem that he pursues through his novels and récits, his literary criticism and his more cultural-theoretical and philosophical works. A problem, too (‘let us enter into this relation’) that makes itself felt in the fragmentary works and in the late works – the letters, occasional writings and other miscellany of Blanchot’s old age. And it is as pressing, too, in his political interventions.
Relation, then. Relation – an untustworthy Latinate term, that Heidegger, for example, cannot bring himself to use. A word from a degraded lexicon, which has already carved up the world into subject and object – themselves determinations of the Greek hypokeimenon, which meant, with Aristotle, so much more, and, according to the history Heidegger traces in ‘Age of the World Picture’ was translated subject (that which is thrown under) before subject swapped places with what was called object and came to name, after Descartes, the human being as the measure of all things.
Then the problem of understanding the relation between subject and object – the great epistemological problem – does not reach into the more complex whole Heidegger calls being-in-the-world; no surprise that it is an investigation of Aristotle that led to the composition of Being and Time: that it is the Greeks who constitute a bulwark against the incursion of the Latins. So Heidegger would come to draw more and more on the Greeks to make sense of the present. Recall his comments from the Heraclitus lectures of 1943: there’s no such thing as Greek religion. Religion – ugly, latecoming term; and couldn’t one also say that for Heidegger, as for the Greeks, that there is no such thing as relation?
I begin with Heidegger remembering the intellectual shock reading Being and Time was for the young Blanchot. But I think it may also be important to remember Rosenszweig too, not because his account of the relation between God and the human being, the relation of address, was a direct influence on Blanchot, but because it was The Star of Redemption that Levinas, who read Being and Time alongside Blanchot, encountered with such excitement.
Recall the preface of Totality and Infinity: the influence of Rosenszweig is omnipresent in Levinas’s great work. The address of one human being to another – the silence of the Other face to face with the ‘I’ repeats the address of God to the human being for Rosensweig. What matters is that this address is a relationship which keeps its terms apart: there is no fusion, subject does not become object; the Other is not assimilable to the Same.
This is what is meant by the appeal to height. The Other is, like God, the Most High, because the address reaches the ‘I’ from without. Whence the recourse to the extraordinary formulation, rapport sans rapport, a relation without relation, that is not mediated. Significant that it is upon this relation that Blanchot focuses, altering its sense, in his long discussion of Totality and Infinity in The Infinite Conversation.
Blanchot’s other great friend, Bataille, was also vitally concerned with the notion of relation. Subject and object do not fuse in what Bataille calls experience – this is what is distinctive about his atheological mysticism: the terms of the relation are kept apart, although it must also be said that they scarcely subsist as terms. The subject in glissement has come apart from itself as term; its sliding belongs to a movement which cannot be completed; the object will not be reached. rather, it reaches the ‘I’ of experience what draws it into its errancy, its sliding.
Nothing is mediated – extraordinary that atheological mysticism has this in common with Blanchot’s characterisation of Jewish mysticism. No mediation – and no confusion of terms. But when they meet in December 1940, Bataille having already begun to assemble the fragments that will comprise Guilty, Inner Experience and other works, Blanchot has already completed a manuscript which contains his own very distinctive account of relation. Thomas the Obscure, the novel with which he struggled for a number of years, writing it at night whilst working as a journalist by day, was published in 1941.
It cannot be emphasised enough that the central notions of Blanchot’s thought arrived more or less intact with the publication of that novel. Friendship, relation, the ‘other’ night, the ‘other’ death: it is all there, all at once, and this is remarkable. And it is all there in a work of fiction – this is something that requires lengthy meditation. Of what would literary research consist? What does it mean to think by literary writing?
In the years in which he wrote Thomas, Blanchot had drifted apart from Levinas – it took the advent of the war to bring them closer together, Blanchot taking Levinas’s wife and daughter to the safety of a monastery. Nevertheless, reading the short tales Blanchot wrote in this period, it is striking how close they were to Levinas’s early On Escape, and to the seminal Existence and Existents, begun in the work camp where Levinas was kept prisoner.
What was it that passed between Blanchot and Levinas when they studied together, when they read Being and Time together, and when Blanchot introduced his friends to contemporary literature? I have a photograph taken of the two young friends in my office, and wonder still how was it they came up with such extraordinarily rich notions.
But note, once again, that Blanchot introduced his ideas in his fiction – there first of all. In a letter written to a German critic in the 1970s, Blanchot emphasises that was in his fiction that his ideas came to him. Writing fiction taught him; he learnt by writing: then his literary criticism, his philosophical writings must be explored, as Michael Holland has advocated, from the perspective of his fiction (would that I had done this!). Bataille, comparing Levinas and Blanchot’s account of the il y a, the ‘there is’, argues that the latter cries what the former only discusses.
Thomas has a double, a companion, who undergoes experiences in his place. And Thomas will also speak – presumably allowing his name to name this obscure companion – of undergoing an experience in place of any and all human beings. Dying – the infinite movement towards the end: Thomas, or the ‘other’ Thomas, is the locus of this experience.
He dies in our place, each of us. He is there where we are not. Scarcely a locus, then, but a kind of nothingness. Scarcely an experience, but an event none can endure. Nevertheless, Thomas is also us; the ‘other’ Thomas is also Thomas, being bound to him by a relation that is distinct from that which secures for us a world, and a place in the world.
Security, place – these depend upon the power and the possibility particular to human existence; here Blanchot is like Heidegger and Hegel in presuming it is in action that one discovers human existence – that opening to the world that is also an opening of the world, its blooming forward for one who is always outside him- or herself, always ecstatic.
Being in the world, as Heidegger calls it, underlies any particular account of the relation between subject and object. Relation, then, is built into the human being from the start – the human being, as existing, is always outside itself, always in the world – the very notions of interiority and exteriority have to be rethought. Then all scepticisms have been overcome; epistemology has to be set back into an encompassing ontology, whose method is that phenomenological unfolding of the existence proper to human beings Heidegger unfolds in Being and Time.
Presumably, the word relation, for him, would belong to the epistomenological endeavour that is now displaced from its primacy for philosophy. If ontology is now called fundamental, it is orientated towards breaking through to what matters most for philosophical reflection, but also for human life: the being of beings.
Perhaps it was this that so shocked the young readers of Being and Time: our world was as though doubled: on the one hand, our pragmatic engagement with the world, overcoming the intellectualism that had understood our relation to things on the basis of theory. On the other, being as it was given in the absence of the pragmatic, in that fundamental mood in which the world presented itself divested of my interest – bare, naked, detached from my powers, my possibility, it was the sense of finitude that accompanied what Heidegger called the nothing.
Being, the nothing: these words, in their near equivalency announce what is vouchsafed to the human being who is aware that he or she will die. And in this awareness, already the sense that the world is given to us twice over: there is what we can do, and what reaches us by way of what we cannot do. There is the measaure of power, the ability to be able (Sein-konnen), and then what measures that measure.
Being and Time, above all, is not a pragmatism; phenomenology leads all the way to what is most concealed; ontology bears upon what is fundamental to all ontology. And the human being, Dasein, is led to that point where it is divested of its powers, its possibilities. Higher than actuality, says Heidegger, reversing Aristotle, is possibility; but higher than possibility – challenging it, contesting it, is the impossibility of possibility, that is, death.
But Heidegger will allow for a kind of retrieval to occur, for the confrontation with mortality to allow the human being to retrieve itself as itself, to attain its propriety, its authenticity. Thus the impossible has become, in a sense, possible; death is now something that admits of a kind of relation – a being towards death, as the English translation has it; a being for death. I will die – but meanwhile, there is the world that is given to the one who experiences the chance of this death. The one, now, who lives resolutely towards death, who does not seek to evade it.
Blanchot does not permit this chance. No authentic existence for Thomas, whose existence is more precarious. Thomas dies in our place – but the notion of dying is now, as for Levinas, as for Bataille, divested of it sense as the end of life. Dying reaches us, or intimates itself, in the most ordinary suffering, says Levinas, writing in a work camp. Dying is experience, atheological mysticism, writes Bataille, who takes long bicycle rides in this period, in the countryside of occupied France. Dying, as Blanchot seems to conceive it, is just that powerlessness, that impossibility, that comes to overwhelm the human being. And now Thomas is there, the ‘other’ Thomas, in our place. The companion endures what we cannot.
In a sense, Blanchot’s conception of dying needs less context than I have given here. Think of Hegel: the subject posits itself in what differs itself – that is, as object, before it retrieves itself as subject. That is, it posits itself in self-alienation as an object before it retrieves itself, and alienation and objectivity, at least for the moment are annulled. New alienations arise; and hence the new need to throw itself out of itself and draw itself back in order to overcome diremption.
A process that Hegel will allow can be compared to death, negation, and to life, sublation. One lives by dying; life involves death, absence, negativity: isn’t it the sense of a diremption that cannot be overcome to which Blanchot is pointing? A diremption, now, that involves the substitution of the first person ‘I’ for the third person ‘it’ as the locus (if that is the word) of experience. The ‘other’ Thomas is a dying that cannot be overcome.
But it is here that Heidegger can offer assistance. Doesn’t he write of suspension in What is Metaphysics?: isn’t Dasein no longer itself at the moment when it comes before the nothing? Bare, disinterested – but then Dasein, like Hegel’s subject, can nevertheless return to itself – it can draw this experience of finitude back into its life, and live from it. Such is authentic existence. The ‘other’ Thomas cannot be re-integrated into our ordinary lives. But how, in this case, is this dying Thomas, this ‘it’ joined to each of us? What is the relation between the first and third person, between Thomas and the ‘other’ Thomas?
Blanchot cries the ‘il y a‘, the ‘there is’, according to Bataille; Levinas only writes it. Perhaps one could make a similar point of Heidegger’s Being and Time – it does not let cry the experience of anxiety, as does, for example, Bataille’s Inner Experience (anguish, though, is not equivalent to anxiety …) The cry is not extra-linguistic, as though there were an experience simply outside language, but must pass through language itself. Isn’t this what literature, or at least Blanchot’s fiction, would achieve?
Blanchot takes fom Hegel the centrality of language (the linguistic turn – in 1807!). No experience is immediate, but is always linguistically mediated. Then the paradigm of the movement of the subject into its self-alienation is always also a linguistic alienation. Is there a kind of writing, a speech, that cannot be reclaimed by the subject? A language in glissement, language wandering, language ‘itself’, unbound from the powers and possibilities of human existence. This is the ‘other’ ecstasis – the one that draws author and reader into relation with what cannot be brought back to the world.
(Who writes? Who reads? Locus of language as it relates to itself. Locus of a relation that lives its tautology in the life of the writer, of the reader. Language itself; the same: you write, you read as a node of its self-relation, its auto-affection. It returns to itself; it streams through you, returning to itself through your life, and by voiding your life. Are you alive? It lives in your place. Lives by your dying; lives as you becomes the voided figure, no one at all, anyone at all, who writes, who reads without being able to.
It began with what you could not do, with incapacity. Began with the ‘other’ ecstasis, as language pressed back against you, who would use it to speak your mind. Errant speech, detour: now the path that searches for itself in your wake. Now the method that crosses itself out, language out over eighty thousand fathoms, language seeking itself and returning to itself, and through you, through what you write.
You had an idea – no, an idea obsessed you, claimed you and overtook you. Until to live forward was to live what sought to return to yourself through your life, through the sacrifice of your life. To die – for nothing. Dying – for nothing. The great arc of which you are part; the return that draws darkness around you and asks you to begin what you are incapable of beginning. And then it calls on another ‘in’ you; the companion comes forward to begin in your place.
He is here, and I am not. He is there, on the other side of the mirror. My weakness is his strength; higher than possibility is his impossibility. How does he survive there, where it is impossible to begin? Dispersed one, silent one, he comes close only when my hands drop by my sides, when I can do nothing. He is there – but is he there? By what relation is he drawn to me? By what suspending of relation?
I think I can only write of him. But I cannot write. And isn’t that the test of writing: to begin with what you cannot do. To write as writing fails.)
But is this ‘other’ ecstasis solely the preserve of literature? Is it only in literature that language wanders? Is Inner Experience literarature? Is Thus Spoke Zarathustra? What kind of boundary can be drawn between philosophy and literature, between the theoretical and the literary? Can Totality and Infinity be read as literature? Can The Star of Redemption? What work of philosophy can tolerate the alienation of writing – the written marks that may well outlive me – such that they cannot be reclaimed by their author? What philosopher can tolerate a writing that cannot be reclaimed? I don’t know how to answer these questions, except to say that with Bataille, as with Nietzsche, there is certainly an author who does not seek to draw back what he writes in his own name.
What might literary research mean? What path of inquiry might be specific to literature? What can be sought by literature, and discovered by it? Is it more appropriate to think of a literary research – a research that proceeds through an experience of language, via language ‘itself’ rather than literature per se? What is at issue when the word writing, bare and simple, is allowed to accompany the word literature for Blanchot in the 1960s? Difficult questions, but pressing all the same.
I think relation is this the red thread that runs through Blanchot’s work. That allows it to achieve its extraordinary effects. Let me say straightaway that I have only sketched what an exploration of relation here; I’ve said nothing. But couldn’t I also say that it was that notion of relation that has obsessed me here at the blog for some time, and that has allowed me to achieve what paltry effects of which this writing has been capable?
I wonder (another tangent) whether it is possible to narrate the life of an idea – or that a life might be understood in terms of an idea. Do not seek to account for Blanchot’s thought in terms of the times in which he lived, its upheavals, its challenges. Perhaps it is the notion of relation (is it a relation?), of literary research (is it a method of exploring relation? – a method: but that’s the wrong word) that lives in his place. But how to write of what is found by that seeking, my that movement of writing? How to write of what is found by writing, so that it becomes a cry and not a discourse?
Lars Iyer's Blog 