1. Higher than actuality stands possibility: the argument depends on a philosophy of action that allows the tasks and projects of the human being to make sense of its present. Today leans forward into a succession of days; this week falls into the next one. Time is an arrow that was shot from the past; your present makes sense as ecstasis; the future is the leap your plans and projects have taken ahead of you.
Tasks, projects – these must be understood against the backdrop of projection itself, the forward leap that is human temporalisation, and projection in terms of the ability to be, a freedom no one possesses, but that possesses each of us. An ability to be – this is what opens the milieu of possibility, in terms of which impossibility is to be understood. I may be said to be possessed by my freedom to which I am summoned by being – this imperative that, in advance, elects each of us to our mineness (Jemeinigkeit). Being becomes my own – I am obligated to be; in this way I am free.
From the first, Levinas questions the priority of the givenness of the self, seeing the ego as coalescing out of a prior field. Being gives way to a being; existence in general to an existent: against Heidegger, Levinas implies that being can be thought without the human being; that the latter coalesces or hypostatises from the prior field of the former. Or is this only, as I suspect, a way of speaking?
If, like Heidegger, Levinas allows the self a minimal ipseity, a minimal self-relation, it is one interwoven with a relation to a past in which the self has not yet come to itself. Isn’t Levinas trying to indicate another way of thinking the genesis of the self, such that it does not come to itself all at once – that something hangs back even as it might return in the manner of the deferred action, Nachtraglichkeit, of which Freud writes – unbidden, and awakening a disturbing sense of what has gone before. An unassimilable experience that has never quite begin – the repetition of an event that never seems to have rounded itself off.
This is what returns, Levinas argues, in an experience as simple as ordinary pain. Slam your finger in the cupboard door and you have undergone an experience from which you cannot flee into the future. True, you can try to distract yourself from the pain, but the pain is still there, drawing you back to itself. The instant thickens, the present congeals in such a way that it draws you back from the leap into the future as it is premissed on the ability to be that defines human existence, according to Heidegger.
Even the slightest degree of suffering vouchsafes what he calls dying, according to Levinas. Possibility, premised on the ability to be, falls into impossibility, the withdrawal of this measure. Dying is given in the impossibility of possibility, the inability to be able. Rather than a limit that can be situated in the future, to which the human being can relate so as to retrieve itself from its fallen existence as for Heidegger, dying is now, it is already here; the limit has congealed.
Then it is not the ability to be that is the measure of human existence. Like Moses, it stutters, it stammers interrupting itself so as to fold the past of existence in general into the present. The ego is always threatened with dissolution; the impossibility of possibility, like Freud’s death drive, threatens to tear the human being from its relations to the world.
2. Then this is nihilism; there’s no act by which death can be assumed and life can be made whole. But might there be a way of affirming the death drive, the eternal return of dying?
Hegel’s account of the ‘spiritual animal kingdom’ takes aim at those individual creators who are not content to self-effacingly serve the interests of Truth (like the scholar) or Justice (like the civil servant), but insist on creating something for themselves. In the ‘bourgeois zoo’, as one commentator nicknames this form of life, each is set apart from the others, attempting to create what will confirm them once and for all as creators. The trouble is, the ‘task at hand’ with which each is obsessed collapses as soon as something is made. The writer is never content with realising this book; in order to remain a writer, she will have to begin another, ad nauseum. What bad faith!
And yet something interesting reveals itself in Hegel’s analysis. For is it not by dint of her failure, her perpetual attempt to complete the ‘task at hand’ that the artist is able to affirm a relationship to the materiality of the artwork and, thereby, the eternal return of suffering? Does the repetition of her failure coincide with the eternal return of the past and ultimately allow it to be affirmed, changing its apparent polarity?
3. Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art – inexhaustible text – provides some important clues.
The origin of the work of art is not the artist, says Heidegger; rather, the work is the origin of the artist. To create, Heidegger argues, is to be engaged by the materiality with which you are creating. As a poet, you will draw upon the rhythms and sonorities of language, or as a sculptor, with the firmness and heaviness of marble – but it is this engagement, this way of being engaged by your materials that sets your endeavour back from you can achieve by yourself.
Then the creator is always a co-creator; it is the materiality of things, their ‘earth’ that is joined to the ‘world’ the creator inhabits. True, earth can never be severed from world altogether – but their interrelationship is often forgotten; language becomes mere information; matter disappears into useful forms. For Heidegger, it is this origin – what sets itself back in the artwork as earth – that fails to reach us. Origin, then, is a name for what is resurgent in the work of art.
Looking back to the Greeks, to the instigation of a Greek temple, Heidegger dreams of the artwork that could, today, draw together a people insofar as they are brought close by the artwork, to the materiality of the world: the earth that is always struggling against what opens itself as the milieu of human life and human possibility. Or again, reading Holderlin, Heidegger will dream of the poet who will let language struggle against itself such that it is no longer given to the powers and possibilities of human subjects, as we have become in this post-Cartesian epoch (just as we will lose even our subjectivity in the epoch of technics).
Each time it is a matter of bringing a people together by relating them to the unknown, the uncanny as it is given in the materiality of the work. And each time, this materiality as it originates in the work does so by testing the capacities of its creator. Writing of the unifying power of the Greek temple that draws a people into existence, a world, Heidegger dreams of a future in which, so to speak, the cages that separate each of us in the bourgeois zoo is unlocked: we might live again one day by way of the earth as it is given to us in the artwork.
Heidegger looks not to the overcoming of alienation, but to the bringing into relation the field of human possibility with what conceals itself as the earth. Earth will not be simply what resists us – the muddy road in which a cartwheel is stuck, the defective blade of a sword – but the material exalted in the greatest creations. To belong to the work, to the origin – a people is called to itself by the event of truth, for Heidegger, in a manner very similar to the way in which the self is summoned by being: it comes to itself, all at once, in its unity, its historicity.
4. Writing on Heidegger’s account of art, Levinas points to the work of his friend Blanchot as accomplishing a reversal of Heidegger’s account of truth. Levinas does not pursue this thought, but at issue, once again, is a kind of pain or suffering the artist endures. A suffering particular important for Blanchot, and discussed in his reading of Kafka.
As with Heidegger, the Blanchotian artwork sets itself back into the origin. As for Heidegger, it falls outside the economy of what is possible for a human subject. But in falling outside, it also carries artist and audience outside. The artwork disperses, rather than gathers; there can be no homeostais of world and earth in the inauguration of a people. Now it is the earth that is alienating, the earth that condemns all peoples to disperse. Or rather, it is the earth, the materiality of the artwork, that, held between us, founds nothing, and shows the nothingness of all foundations.
Still, it could be said that this is also Heidegger’s point, when he writes about Van Gogh: the painting of the peasant shoes discloses the interrelated contexture of a peasant woman’s world, he claims – but it is still measured by what was possible for the Greeks and what may be possible for us yet. Isn’t Blanchot, by contrast, affirming the destitution of the contemporary artwork?
Recall once again Hegel’s ‘Spiritual Animal Kingdom’ – for Blanchot, since the artwork engages the artist in an ‘origin’ that is always set back from him into the sonority and rhythm of words, he is not present to himself with regard to his task. Likewise, by letting this origin speak in the artwork, the artist is futural – because of the relation that binds him to the origin. A relation that separates him from others – he becomes Aristotle’s God, his beast – and from the world, by way of the artworks to which he signs his name. This is the relation which may lay claim to us, his audience, once again, by way of his artworks.
Of course the artist is also someone who lives in the world; the task of finishing this chapter or finishing a sculpture in time for an exhibition is the same as any other. The artist joins world and non-world – or rather, he suspends the system of relations that characterises the world by drawing it into relation with its outside. It is this unjoining, a relation that sets itself apart from all others that tests the artist, even to the point of madness.
5. Recall Kafka’s famous letter to Felice, where he writes that too marry him demands accompanying him in his solitary, cellar-bound labours, severed from all relations to other people. Of course Kafka is also saying to Felice, my writing will sever me from you – only when he meets Dora will he find a companion who he can stand to be with him when he writes.
Kafka may suffer this solitude, but it also grants him the joy of writing. He suffers – but, miraculously, this suffering is transmuted when he begins to write of it. This is the ‘merciful surplus’ of writing. But still, there is suffering. The artist endures a difficult solitude.
Now we can rejoin Levinas’s reflections. The suffering that relates the artist to the work, to the origin of the work is also what brings him close to dying. Dying – but why this word? Where death is, you are not, and where you are, death cannot be. But what of an experience that places in parentheses your relation to yourself as it passes through the world (which is to say, by way of tasks and projects that pass by way of the world)? What of a relation without relation – that is, a relation to the work that demands the sacrifice of all other relations?
What does Kafka give up in order to write? Ordinary human society; friendship; a good night’s sleep: all these he sacrifices willingly, without a thought. What matters is that writing to which Kafka links dying, claiming that he is happiest when dying with his characters. The impossibility of possibility – this is what Kafka seems to welcome.
6. Commenting on the relevance of Aristotle’s biography to his philosophy, Heidegger says tersely, simply, he lived – he died. The philosopher’s life does not matter – a claim which repeats that of Schopenhauer, who claims that to read of the life of a thinker is to admire the frame of a painting instead of the painting itself.
Blanchot inverts Heidegger’s formulation: ‘the writer dies – then lives’. Death comes first; it is dying that must precede the act of writing, inviting a new conception of thanatography which begins with dying, or rather the returning of dying, as something like the death drive.
The writer is the one able to welcome dying – to draw the primal scene into writing itself. Suffering is welcomed and affirmed in the finished artwork. It shelters there, and reaches us, to, its readers. We, too, are brought into dying – and we are also given the chance of affirming it.
7. But where does this leave us? Blanchot refrains from explicitly ethical reflection, says Levinas in 1955; and by inverting errancy over truth, isn’t he also scattering any notion of truth to the four winds?
But it is, of course, truth and justice Blanchot wants to seek by way of the collective project of the Revue Internationale. A collective of writers, of those who are able to affirm their dying (or rather, whose dying – relation (without relation) to the work – affirms itself in their books). The people of Heidegger’s great artwork relate to one another by way of what presses forward as the materiality, the earth of the Greek temple.
They relate to earth by way of world – to its concealment by way of the unconcealed, that is, the space of meaning the temple opens. The Revue is a community of those brought together by their experience of writing – by what has allowed them to endure dying. How is it possible to share their experience, which seems, like Kafka, to separate them from everyone else? How is it possible to work collaboratively?
Perhaps it is simply because their experience of the origin, of materiality – of the suspension of relations – grants them a perspective they could not otherwise gain, allowing them a distance from the world sufficient to discern its transformations. Then their experience, their dying involves not just an alteration of perspective, as though they had simply seen the world from another angle, but the unjoining of the world from itself.
This is what affirms itself by way of their work, their writing, although always in a way that is unavowed, never brought into the open. A secret dispossession, a secret detour of sense: dying names the way in which the relation to the materiality of the work is endured. A relation which singularises its respondent, separating him from the world, even as it may repeat itself in relation to a reader who is likewise singularised by what reaches her in the finished work.
But then, in this singularisation, aren’t we once again in the position described by Hegel – the bourgeois zoo in which each ‘animal’ is separately caged? How might we move from here to collective action? The solitude of the work, separating itself from the world, and drawing author and reader, likewise, from the world, seems the most lonely of all. But to be outside the world refers only to an experience of its limit.
An exteriority, then, that runs along the edge of the world like the lining of a coat. A liminal materiality – the thickness of that from which the world is made: this is what is allowed to affirm itself even as it is normally hidden. I should add that it is primarily of the linguistic work of which I am thinking; it is not that the limit of language is the limit of the world – but that the concealment which accompanies the disclosure of the world gives itself to be experienced – figured – in the distancing from the world that is specific, according to Blanchot, to a particular kind of literature. But I will not explore that claim any further here.
8. What is the relationship between writing and politics? How can dying be remembered, such that it might be acted upon, in the name of truth, of justice?
Fascinating that Blanchot condemns Heidegger as a writer, as though his failure were all the greater because he had passed through the experience so important to the author of The Space of Literature. The question, then, for the writers of the Revue Intentionale to affirm the experience which they had endured. To affirm a kind of destitution – the solitude of the work of art as it sets itself apart from the world.
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