The Sphinx Within the Sphinx
The problem with symbolic art, says Hegel, is that its materiality is not adequate to the spiritual content it would attempt to express. But from a Blanchotian perspective, it is for this same reason that symbolic art is interesting, insofar as it points beyond itself not to the Idea that it would reveal via the work’s sensuousness, but, as it were, in the other direction: now it is that same sensuousness which affirms itself in its materiality – that is, as a universal empty of content.
From the classical art of the Greeks, where the work’s beauty answers to the life and practices of the community (Sittlichkeit); where message has achieved exemplary harmony with medium (the Idea being immanent in the Ideal), back to Egyptian art which presents in its opaque materiality what cannot be rendered formally; from philosophy, understood as the highest form of Absolute Spirit, through religion and to art, and then to the uncertain birth of art as it struggles to free itself from symbolisation: it is a materiality that struggles against form and which fascinates because of this struggle with which Blanchot is concerned.
The Sphinx is Hegel’s example of symbolic art. What Blanchot is after, as it were, is the Sphinx inside the Sphinx: a concrete universal – a universal concretised in matter that is voided entirely of what it might represent; a riddle lost in a riddle, that Oedipus does not solve when he answers ‘man’ to the Sphinx. This ‘other’ Sphinx attempts to struggle free of what Hegel supposed it to be attempting to represent, burrowing into the darkness of which it is made. It struggles – but this is not a flight into abstraction.
As with Bacon’s paintings, it struggles by means of what it might be supposed to represent; as it portrays the human, it also allows the human to become an adjective. The sculpture, the painting, wander in the corridors of matter, turning themselves from that light which would read them in terms of the form that is about to emerge. The form is blurred, and that is the point. Blurred – suspended – arresting the viewer’s gaze and drawing it into its darkness.
Do they put out our eyes? Rather, they draw them to what they cannot see, as if the whole of the eye were turned around and we gazed into the darkness of our heads. Or that we saw from our blindspot, blackness flooding outward from our pupils; in some sense, it is the condition of seeing that they allow us to see. The condition – but only if it is likewise an uncondition, revealing insofar as it conceals, losing light in darkness, all the way to the infinite.
The Negative Absolute
For Hegel, the Absolute is to be understood as the conceptual system which is contained by the phenomenal world as it develops and grants itself to human knowledge. Then the Absolute must be thought in its relation to the world, as well as the knowledge the human being has of this relation.
But with Blanchot, the Absolute is lost in the negative absolute, which is in no way to be understood as its dialectisable correlate. The phenomenal world is doubled; it becomes its own image. The absolute, now, is not the empty beyond Hegel criticised in the work of his precedessors; it is still given as an experience of the world, but of the world turned from the work, work turned aside from work and turned from the human being who would experience it. And turning the human being likewise aside. The ‘il’, the ‘it’, names the locus of this experience – the human being is doubled up, and, as double, each of us is joined to the work (no longer the determinable thing, the painting, the sculpture) as the double of ourselves. Joined at the level of a body without determination, as a life rather than the individuated life that was formerly enjoyed.
The work, then, as opposed to the painting, the sculpture. The stuff of which they are made – but not simply marble or paint. Matter as it struggles with form; Heidegger’s earth; lost substance, the absolute so negative it flees away from the light, drawing our gaze with it, and putting out our eyes. The Sphinx lost in the Sphinx, Bacon’s figures lost in their materiality, in the stuff of which they are made. And, too, showing us how our bland everyday might likewise we doubled – that the image of the world, as it falls outside what is recognisable or useful, comes forward in its mysterious density.
Coming forward, it permits of no disinterest; the viewer is implicated in what unfolds as the work and it means nothing without her. The work is a relation and not a thing; and the viewer is fascinated to the extent that it conveys to her not the living dynamism of what is ordinarily missed in the busyness of our lives, but to a dynamism of dying, of impersonal life – a negation of living immediacy that is never quite resolved, never lifted to a higher level.
Then dialectical movement is in some way stalled; glimmering darkly beneath the fnished work of art is what Blanchot calls the work, which draws the viewer’s gaze towards it all the way to fascination. With this word, Blanchot evokes the call of the singularity of the work, of the way in which it joins, in the viewer’s experience the excess of materiality over the binarism of matter and form, of the negative absolute as it flees from Idea and Ideal.
If Blanchot’s focus is on literature, it is literature become the lowest of arts – a literature made scarcely of words, but of words become things, like the great blocks in the desert. Now all of language is a riddle, and one which cannot be solved as Oedipus does by pointing to himself (the answer: ‘man’). The book is ruined in the work. Or the work is the ruin of the book, the desert that eats away the monument; the patience of blasting winds. And Absolute Spirit finds itself made continually to plunge into the past, to its earliest phases. All the way to when the first human beings appeared in the world, and, as they did so, bringing it to double itself, to wander in its own corridors.
The Preliminary Flood
No wonder, then, that the writer attempts to substantialise herself with reference to her books, to what she has made. She takes refuge in the finished even as the future opens uncertainly before her. It is never as an author that she can meet the work. For the work is the sacrifice of authorship, of all authority; it is postcultural, but only as it belongs to a time before culture – to the past as interruption, to the preliminary flood that is always about to return.
For the writer as writer, on the other hand, her position is never established; the books she has written are not yet the work. who is she? No one at all, if identity is to be understand in terms of what can be achieved. And the writer, if this names the one who holds the place of ‘no one’, of the ‘il’, the it, as this names the relation to the work in its worklessness, that is, as it cannot be produced or brought to the light.
Then the writer is linked to a past in which she, as the ‘il’ undergoes the experience of fascination in which she becomes wholly a writer. A past, then, that does not belong to the linear succession of time. A past that returns as the ‘to come’ which never arrives in time. A past, and a future which fall outside what can be directly narrated. This is what returns in the symbol and in the experience of writing as it is engaged by a materiality that fascinates.
The indefinite and the opaque; the concrete universe or the particular made abstract; the bad infinite of sensuousness; the doubling of the world: these are all names for what is experienced by the writer in her relation to the work. A relation that is without relation in the sense that its terms are each turned from themselves, the ‘I’ to the ‘il’, the finished book to the incompleteable work.
Existing wholly as writer, fascinated, the writer does not write a line. Only as she is drawn towards authorship, as she re-emerges into the light, do words appear on the page. Activity is also required if a book is to substitute itself for the work; fascination does not claim the author altogether. The writer, here, is a name for the ‘il’, the author for the ‘I’; the work which fascinates can never be realised in a completable book. But this means the writer as writer can never be done with desire. Writing is a task that is infinite. Fascination always returns to plunge the author into the uncertainty of the work.
The Work is the Measure
The same experience for the reader, to whom the work reaches through the book. But what kind of reader is this? The one drawn to reread a book without knowing why. To be held into the work. To become the double of all readers; to be read, in turn, by the book. And the one who refuses to let go of reading in the hermeneutic move – to demand that account be rendered, to ask the question ‘why?’ of the work, or ‘what?’ without letting them resound without answer.
The work is the measure, and it measures through the book, but by way of the book. By way of nothing other than its sentences, its paragraphs. By nothing other than character, than dialogue, than plot. But only as each is drawn to let speak the voice of the work, a narrative voice that cannot be reduced to the details of a story. For there is a hidden recit in even the most imposing novel. The work would speak of itself. The work, and by way of what speaks in the book. This is what fascinates. It is what goes out to meet the reader as the measure of reading. The rising waters of the flood; the annihilation of the world.
Language speaks of itself as the work. Matter speaks in the sculpture, the painting, the piece of music. Of itself, and only itself, without content. Language and matter-form are doubled. That there is language; that there is matter and form – this is what resurges in the work.
Discretion
Can it mean anything to speak of the authenticity of the writer (of the writer/author)? What does it mean to live in conformity with writing? Perhaps the reserve of the work, its withdrawal or discretion might be doubled in her own reserve, her own discretion. She might resist interviews and publicity photographs; she might prevent herself being caught in the scholarly industry, and resist offering her assent to particular interpretations of her work. There must be some kind of withdrawal, some disquiet about emerging as the author – or of privileging the author in the conjunction writer/author that she ‘is’.
I think of Blanchot here, of course; but isn’t something similar marked in Palace Brothers/Palace Music/Palace Sountracks – the very change of name resisting the stablisation of any particular authorial identity? And what about Smog, that become (Smog) and then plain Bill Callahan? Above all, in the realm of music, Jandek, Jandek above all …
The writer is also a reader. What might it mean to live in conforming with the doubling of reading (of the reader of the book/the reader of the work) in what Blanchot would call its neutrality (that is, insofar as this doubling cannot be undone, ne uter: neither one nor the other)? Another kind of withdrawal, another discretion. No longer the demand ‘why?’ or ‘what?” no longer the attempt to render account. No longer the presumption that hermeneutics is a tool rather than a moment in which the book offers itself to meaning even as it plunges, in the same moment, into the work.
Watching Corwood on Jandek, anger at the journalist who presumed to track him down. On a hot afternoon in Houston, she confronts him (that is the word: confront) asking him if he is Jandek. He won’t speak of it, he says. He tests her: how does she know his music? She tells him she saw his records in a certain record store. He nods. Yes, he knows the store. And then asks her if she drinks beer, and they go to a bar, and he speaks of everything but Jandek: how beautiful! everything but.
Allergies and food, movies, his job … but he will not speak of Jandek. And she, the journalist, the one attempting to render account is looking only for this. Long silences when she asks. He won’t speak. Let the work speak instead. The work through the records. But the journalist is deaf to the work. She finds his disappearance much more interesting than what he has done. Without realising that disappearance – the refusal to play live (until recently), to be interviewed, to give information about himself – belongs to the work and to the movement of the work.
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