OUTSIDE

How to write on Blanchot? Should one write on his work at all? If so, should this be the privilege of the specialist in literature, in philosophy, or in French cultural history?

Doing takes precedence over being, he reflects; one is never yet a writer – or one is so only by virtue of the writing. And yet what is produced – the work of words – is bound by a prohibition against that reading that would allow the writer to know what he has written. It is by work that the writer is produced and substantialised, that same work, once brought into existence, which dismisses him as its producer; the author is only that actor ‘who is born and dies each evening […] killed by the performance that makes him visible.’

Before the work, the writer is not yet a writer; after it, no longer one; his life is only that ‘interrupted becoming’ that is given in the experience of writing itself. But what of this experience? Is it in this we might find the secret of writing? But by creating characters, by making his text as a performance that would catch up the whole of his life, the writer has already shifted from the ‘I’ to the ‘he’ (that is to say, the ‘it’): the voice of narrative that does not issue from any source, not even the cool objectivity of the narrator of Madame Bovary.

Or rather, the narrative makes itself out of what is implied by the writer’s relation to language insofar as it is not exclusively instrumental – as it tears itself from refering to a real world, or even to a fantastic world the creation of which would still presume the mastery of a unified author, present to himself and authoritative.

Language relates to itself in the literary work – that is, the author who would shape language, finishing a book, is also used by language, insofar as words, turns of phrase, and finally the presence of language as it can no longer be made to make sense as a system of signs – sonorousness and rhythm, affect – have themselves a peculiar authority and strange fascination: that they draw the writer towards them only to wreck the vessel of the book, even as, at the same time, they do not prevent this vessel from arriving at its destination.

Sense happens, but something happens by way of sense – a kind of detour, an escape that, without breaking the universe of sense apart once and for all, nevertheless suspends its work, and suspends the intention of that author who would place language at his command.

Is writing, then, collaborative – the work of language and the work of the author? In a sense, and so long as the author is not understood as the sculptor who simply imposes form on bare matter. Matter – in this case, the presence of language, the double of sense – affirms itself against the maker of forms; the work enacts a kind of combat, where the angel of sense meets the devilish hordes of nonsense.

And now the maker is himself shown to be made; the work by which he would manifest himself as author is also a work against the one he is. The work also lets language speak of itself, giving voice to language in that narrative voice which no longer belongs to any unifying narrator. Thus, the act of writing likewise allows no author to be produced once and for all; its work is also an unworking – of the instrumental account of language, and of the conception of the author as a user of instruments.

Before the work, the writer is nothing yet. And after it – a writer no more. And during the work? The writer is also one who does not write, and feels the murmuring resistance of language. Who cannot link language to the act of his enunciation as writer. Then language, as Foucault comments, belongs to the OUTSIDE, to no previously constituted interiority. The point of enunication is no longer the ‘I’, the writer, but the murmuring of language that has abandoned subject and substantive. Abandoned them, and evacuated the form of the author, just as it will be made in the tales to evacuate the form of the speaker.

Language speaks. Language gives itself to be experienced, but now in the absence of writer and speaker, and of reader and listener, for it is also the presence of language which addresses them, too. By way of signs, of signification, language is more than signs or signification. And though it is so in many ways, it is literature that knows itself (in some writers) to be the experience of this surplus, which means also the questioning of the authorial self, to the extent that the author is the desert across which the question ‘who?’ resounds without answer.

Then who is Blanchot, as theorist of this account of language, of literature, but also as the practioner of this same experience of language, of literature? Who is this theorist-practitioner, this practitioner-theorist whose fictional writings cannot be dissevered from his literary-critical and philosophical ones?

There is the Blanchot buried with his sister-in-law in the family tomb in Paris. And then there is the Blanchot peculiarly alive in his work – that ghostly writer almost entirely enfolded by the experience of writing, and who reaches us only when we, too, are enfolded by the experience of reading (by reading his work and by reading with him). The ghost who can meet us only when we, too, become ghosts, folds in that great expanse that language becomes when it issues OUTSIDE. 

We must think the two Blanchot’s together, just as he asks us to think together the Ulysses who completes his journey to Ithaca and that other, drowned Ulysses on the bottom of the sea. As he asks us to think what a relation to language as it is instrumental, giving itself to our will, and as it is experienced (in this new, special sense of the term – as Erlebnis, perhaps, rather than Erfahrung). The one and the other – each time the ne uter whose play cannot be reduced – even by Heidegger, who – complex argument – presumes the human being in its relation is in some sense that locus of this play.

Like Levinas, Blanchot gives another account of the genesis of human existence and the relation to being, such that it is possible for him to speak as Heidegger cannot of dying as the impossibility of possibility, indicating thereby another name for that ‘intermittent becoming’ to which the writer, for him is linked.

No longer, then, is possibility – understood ultimately in terms of what the human being is able to do – the measure of impossibility, deciding what can or cannot be thought. The possible – the ability to be able – is now thought to arise out of the impossible, to be emergent rather than given in advance. The given – the es gibt – is no longer thought in terms of what is given to a human being; the given is now the il y a that streams without subjects, without substantives, and from which subjects and substantives emerge. Isn’t it this difficult thought that Deleuze leads us to think with his account of pre-personal syntheses?

Note, then, that what is named by the neuter for Blanchot is not a neither nor, a relation between two constituted terms, but a name (as good as any, which is to say, as good as none) for the given as it permits of emergence (of the subject, of substantives as emergent). The neuter that is the relation between these terms insofar as it absolves itself of its status as a relation, being measured by neither term in the relation in question. Or that reinvents the idea of relation, even as it becomes necessary to use such strange formulations as relation without relation.

How to write about Blanchot? As a philosopher? As a reader of literature? By tacking between the two, being neither one nor the other? By reinventing philosophy and literature, I would say, letting each become other to themselves, and perhaps in the way Blanchot claims happened between his work and that of Levinas. Not, now, in the name of an experience that might only be reached by mystical intuition, but by being overwhelmed by the claim of language, of being drowned like Blanchot’s ‘other’ Ulysses, and then rising, like Blanchot’s Ulysses-Homer to write the Odyssey as a story of his adventures. Of being drowned and surviving. Of dying and surviving dying, in that ‘intermittent becoming’ that is also an act of writing.

Once again. Another time. He is not a mystic, writing of a transcendent beyond. It is about matter he writes, and by way of matter, materiality – language. By unfolding language such that it cannot be measured by the position presumed by the personal pronoun – neither the ‘I’ nor the ‘you’ (as is presumed by certain dialogical thinkers).

He does not belong exclusively to literary writers or to critics of literature unless the OUTSIDE is understood as the ex-plication of language, that is, by way of some appreciation of the way Blanchot allies himself with some thinkers (Levinas on the il y a) or subtly distinguishing himself from others (Heidegger on language and being).

Blanchot’s work is also part of philosophical history. But even then it is a response to language that calls for a transformation of language, that carries him, and all of philosophy, into an experience of literature (and the other experiences of language that become important to him in his work). It is necessary to read him as a writer of fiction. But also as the one who carries out those ‘literary acts’ that encounter Levinas’s account of the relation of the Other. Of the essayist for whom the everyday is of paramount importance, and who writes, too, of gossip and rumour as presenting us with an experience of the OUTSIDE.

And what of his political interventions? His work is not an allegory of his adventure as a journalist on the Right in his early years; writing Thomas the Obscure ‘at night’ was an experience from which it took him some while to draw the consequences. But his later political activity on the Left is not the incidental supplement to his ‘activity’ as a writer.

The interhuman relation is also a relation to the OUTSIDE argues Blanchot with great patience. And to that extent, it offers us an experience of community, of a doubly dissymmetrical relation whose each term becomes Other. An experience of communism, too – albeit an uncommon communism, and one that exists alongside Marxism (alongside – or is it rather that from which the possibility of Marxism emerges?).

A kind of politics, then – and perhaps a kind of ethics, too. That means his work cannot be the exclusive focus of ‘Blanchot Studies’, however important it is to conduct that scholarly work that will allow his place as a thinker to become clearer. Some thinkers are rich enough not only to be contextualised by an account of their times, but to contextualise this account in turn (philosophers). Away with all historicisms … not, to re-emphasise, the patient, scholarly work that would reveal his place among French letters, but with the idea that this might be sufficient as a response to his work.

A plurality of approaches. Philosophical, literary critical, historical, all this. Of approaches – and not the romanticism that would claim Blanchot’s work cannot be written about. For there is a way of writing for others, Blanchot’s scholars, but also thinkers of all kinds, that permits of a kind of community of readers and writers, where the name ‘Blanchot’ is the index not of a particular individual, buried in a family grave, but of a watcher over the OUTSIDE whose vigilance (the vigilance of his work) we must, in turn, watch over, resisting historicism and psychologism, the fetishisation of his early politics, or the romantic appeal to the essential otherness of his work.