Thanatography

The Experience of Writing

A child's questions, says Freud, give ultimately unto the marvel that anything exists at all. Perhaps it is the same with the question we want to pose a writer: how he came to write this imposing work or that, whom he admires among his contemporaries or his forebears, what books he keeps close to him – it is first of all the fact of the work that is marvellous. In the end, the gift that separates him from us is that he has written those pages, and everything else in his life that seems significant to us is so only because of his gift.

In the case of Blanchot, something more is at issue, for his activity as a writer is as it were doubled upon itself, taking as its concern the possibility and impossibility of writing itself, and endlessly let its own wellspring return – and that of all literature – in his literary criticism. He explores the relationship between the writer and inspiration, the work and the book; he explores the 'light, innocent task of reading', and he links the fate of the writing with the end of civilisation of the Book. But these are questions he also asks with his life, and it is for this reason his biography is not merely the incidental supplement to a dazzling oeuvre.

How was Blanchot able to pursue these questions, to live them? For some time, I've wanted to write a short biographical essay on Blanchot: a simple task, but one I have found very difficult. Surely it would require the summarising of the main points of Bident's excellent biography, supplementing it with a few marginal reflections of my own?

But then there is the question of remembering the experience Blanchot insists are particular to the writer. Didn't Blanchot say in his correspondence that his fictions usually preceded his theoretical reflections, as if they were a kind of laboratory in which he formed his hypotheses?

Experiment, experience – but I don't think there can be an absolute division of genre in Blanchot's oeuvre, whatever he might suggest. The fictions, like his more theoretical essays, are magnified by the same event, the same experience passing through its field. What does it mean to write? In what does the experience of writing consist? Let us follow the course of Blanchot's own meditations on writing and upon in his own authorship.

The Spiritual Animal Kingdom

Prior to the work, the work of art, the work of writing, the work of words, there is no artist – neither a writer nor a speaking subject – since it is the production that produces the producer, bringing to life or making him appear in the act of substantiating him (which, in a simplified manner, is the teaching of Hegel and even the Talmud: doing takes precedence over being, which does not create itself except in creating – what? Perhaps anything: how this anything is judged depends on time, on what happens, on what does not happen: what we call historical factors, history, without however looking to history for the last judgement). But if the written work produces and substantiates the writer, once created it bears witness only to his dissolution, his disappearance, his defection and, to express it more brutally, his death, which itself can never be definitively verified: for it is a death that can never produce any verification.

That from the opening of 'After the Fact', written to accompany the publication of two early stories. Blanchot sends us to Hegel – I think to that section of Phenomenology of Spirit called 'The Spiritual Animal Kingdom and Deceit, or the "Matter in Hand" Itself', the first part of which gave Blanchot the title of the essay eventually collected as 'Literature and the Right to Death.'

It is a certain kind of work which produces the individual, according to Hegel. It is conditional on the appearance of a class of skilled labourers, whose work is in an important sense an expression of their individuality. A class whose work is valued for exactly that reason.

Yet the world of such specialised creatures ('animals', Hegel calls them, finding them deficient in what would make them whole human beings) is not yet a world. Each is separate; each paces separately around their own cage taking himself for an individual real in and for himself even as each is only a fragment. A fragment, though, busily occupied with the 'task at hand': that labour in which she disinterestedly relinquishes selfish gain from her task. Her accomplishments are now measurable by public approval; his talents and skills are recognised by others and by society at large.

Hegel reserves the merchant class for special ire because they have busily translated all value to a monetary measure. 'Currency must be honoured, but family, welfare, life etc., may all perish'. The problem, for Hegel, lies in the fact that merchants do not embody a universal class; they seek to serve only themselves. The true universal class would work for the Good of society as a whole; compare the civil servant who would aim at Justice in general, or the scholar who aims at Truth.

What happens when the bourgeois animal fails to receive this recognition? When the conceit of one's self-worth is mismatched in the work produced? When the book you have written seems to fall short of the talents and skills you are sure you harbor? Begin again; start over again – write more books. Here is a strange cousin of hedonism where what compels you is not the sense of success but of failure. 'Next time I'll get it right'.

Inadequacy

Consciousness, for Hegel, is the act of relating to oneself; it is for-itself. The world appears to stand apart from this self-relating as what is in-itself. But the in-itself and the for-itself interpenetrate; the talents, strengths and abilities of the individual unfold through her actions.

In the spiritual animal kingdom, being is no longer the obdurate in-itself to which you have to accommodate yourself, but is what is given to you in your labours. Once again, there is the chance of passing from the darkness of possibility to the light of presence, from the abstract in-itself, inert being to the transformation of the world in view of the completion of a goal.

Here, your existence is a projection into the future, actualising what you will and expressing what you are. As such, the reality of the in-itself can no longer be opposed to the individual. The ability to act is all; the world only unfolds what exists in potential. Action has no beginning; it is the ever-changing response to situations; the individual seeks the means to unfold its potential, to translate what is interior to what is exterior; to act. It is not that you have a blueprint which would tell you what to do in any given situation; rather, you learn what you are through your works, that is, your deeds. To act is also to learn what one is.

So does individuality discovers itself in the world; its work is ultimately the expression of the individual. What we are reveals itself outside of us. The in-itself is always mediated; action is to be understood as negativity, as what has already overcome the given. Such overcoming, the ongoing transformation of the world, is the joy of consciousness. To test your strength! To know your powers! To receive, through engagement with the world, the confirmation of what you are – this is the marvel! The transition from potential and possibility to work is experienced as joy; the individual spreads her wings and contemplates her glory in her work.

But what happens when the work is finished and the work of negation done? True, the self moves on; it will find itself in a new situation requiring the mobilisation of different means in order to achieve its goal. But this movement means there is a kind of lapse in the work of self-expression. Action itself is always in lieu of a complete and final self-expression. Of course, there can be no masterwork in the face of which the individual can lay down its arms.

Consciousness is to be distinguished from its works; it can be said to transcend them. So does a diremption open between what consciousness takes itself to be and what it does. Being and action no longer coincide. Then what I have made falls short of what I am; my deeds do not express my individuality. Work, which appeared to say so much, is only a limitation of what I am; it appears merely particular and contingent.

Once again, as before the reconciliation effected by the spiritual animal kingdom in the Phenomenology of Spirit, there is the mismatch between the individual and the world; once again does reality appear as abstract Other, as the inert and impenetrable in-itself.

The work lies before others; it is there for others to see and to experience. I do not recognise myself in what I have done; the work is the thing that lies beyond me, alien and obscure. What can I achieve? What can I do that would express what I am? Of course, for Hegel, there is a way of overcoming the diremption to which the spiritual animal kingdom leads – an attempt to work for the common good, rather than your own. But the movement of the dialectic is stalled for Blanchot's writer, who is able to express himself by means of the work once a particular book is finished. The work itself seems to loom ahead of the book; the writer can never seize upon that which would give him substance. This is the writer's sadness.

(Sadness? But why not joy, since the adventure of writing, perpetual inadequacy, is still open?)

Rejection

Why is Hegel's account of spiritual animal kingdom so appropriate to the situation of the writer? After all, it seems to describe a situation familiar to anyone who attempts to create something without a blueprint.

Sinthome tells us how he recoils in horror when he is asked what is philosophy, or what his research is about. 'To ask what someone's research or philosophy is, is to ask them to simultaneously formulate a proposition and state the sense of that proposition. Yet I can say what I mean or mean what I say, but I cannot say what I mean and mean what I say.'

Wonderfully put: I only know what I'm working on once I've finished work; the preface to a book, making sense of the project as a whole, comes after the book is complete. I can only know the pro-ject as a re-ject, as Sinthome says; which means that it is forever impossible to know on what it is one is working.

This might remind us of Hegel, and the adventure of reading The Phenomenology of Spirit: the course of the dialectic is not given in advance; its onroll, totalising as it may appear does not emerge into clarity except as its particular phases come to an end. Can Hegel ever say the sense of what he says? Zizek's Hegel (For They Know Not What They Do) perhaps cannot; to say the sense of what he says means the dialectic is kept perpetually open. This is what means to say with Sinthome that all philosophies are lived – that thinking is experiential and experimental, a projection into a future whose course is unknown.

Then philosophy, like writing (understood as writing obsessed with writing itself, its own 'act') discovers what it is as it proceeds. Philosophy, like writing – but how can the two be kept entirely apart? Perhaps because the former is obsessed with the condition of its possibility, the fact the work exceeds the book. But isn't this the obsession, too, of the philosopher, who discovers the sense of her work only in retrospect?

For the Blanchotian writer it is language itself that is of concern. Language itself – the fact of communication, rather than what is communicated. A fact from which we cannot stand apart, since it grants the very possibility of communication. But for this reason, it can also become invisible, necessitating a kind of doubling up – an experience of communication as communication, such that it can be thought at all.

Perhaps the philosopher can only plunge into this experience by becoming a writer, or by allowing the question of writing to return in and as her work. That is, the exploration of communicativity must begin in a performative use of language. Use – or being used, for to engage with language is also to be engage by a natural language in its peculiarities and idioms.

But perhaps this engagement reaches more deeply still. For is it not also what might be called the materiality of language which fascinates the writer – its rhythms and sonorities, its grain? Perhaps every writer has something in him of the poet, for whom every word must also sound. But further still is not what sets itself back into this materiality – a kind of heaviness or density of language that is the writer's concern? As though language were so emburdened it can say nothing at all. As though the writer were crushed, from the first, by what he can never say.

Until the words the writer is able to write point beyond themselves; they are symbolic, as Hegel said of the Sphinx and the Pyramids, and as such, riddles. Like the statues of Giacometti with their massive plinths, words are attached to something much heavier than they are. It is that they're drawn perpetually across the event horizon that paralyses the movement of sense, idling every word, and joining every work to worklessness.

This is the burden of the writer who, like an astronaut close to a black hole, ages more slowly than the rest of us, or rather, is close to that first step out of infancy when a child struggles to speak a first word. But the writer, falling back to earth, emburdened with making sense of what flees from sense, is also older, having known, almost at once, every kind of defeat.

Admittedly, this failure seems forgotten as soon as the finished book is brought into the light. There is the temptation to revel in attention, to take pride in your own name as author. But isn't the writer, as writer, always in relation to some kind of lack, some absence? The writer as writer has always been dismissed, if not the author he also is – that man who might believe that he is his own best reader, the source of the meanings of his books, which is only his expression. But the writer as writer grieves not in silence, but by reaching out to begin all over again, in the perpetual innocence of beginning.

Then the writer cannot discover what he has achieved even as what Sinthome call a re-ject, since he cannot present what he has done thetically, that is, as a theoretical position or argument. For the writer's own work is like Hegel's Sphinx which symbolises without meaning, even to those who assembled this and other obscure monuments in the desert. It is the riddle he cannot solve, but to which his life as writer is also bound.

Who is he? This question, too, is unanswerable, for he will never learn what he has achieved: never, that is understand the project that has unfolded through his life. Is it even his project? Did he initiate the course of writing? In the end, it is as though he were the completed circuit through which the current of writing could pass, seeking only to relate to itself, to be translated into a work that trembles with what it cannot say.

Author, Actor

It is in this way, I think, that we can understand the opening of 'After the Fact', which I reproduce again here:

Prior to the work, the work of art, the work of writing, the work of words, there is no artist – neither a writer nor a speaking subject – since it is the production that produces the producer, bringing to life or making him appear in the act of substantiating him […] But if the written work produces and substantiates the writer, once created it bears witness only to his dissolution, his disappearance, his defection and, to express it more brutally, his death, which itself can never be definitively verified: for it is a death that can never produce any verification.

Dissolution, disappearance and defection name the rejection of rejection in the relation of the author to his oeuvre. Death is another name for the failure of the finished book to correspond to the work that would communicate communication as he dreams. But one must go further, for dying is a name for the experience of this perpetual feeling of inadequacy.

Why does Blanchot introduce the idea of verifying and verification? Why this epistemological register? Perhaps because truth has been understood traditionally as a correspondence, an adequation between a statement and a state of affairs. In attempting to realise the incompletable work, indeed, being dependent on this work for his very self-understanding as a writer, the author is given to a kind of error, to the infinite movement of errancy.

Let us follow Blanchot's argument a little further:

Thus, before the work, the writer does not yet exist; after the work, he is no longer there: which means that his existence is open to question – and we call him an 'author'! It would be more correct to call him an 'actor', the ephemeral character who is born and dies each evening in order to make himself extravagantly seen, killed by the performance that makes him visible – that is, without anything of his own or hiding anything in some secret place.

The conclusion of this phase of Blanchot's argument should now be clear: the author is never author enough; the writer has not attained the work, dying before he can lay claim to what he has completed.

Then the questions we might want to ask the writer belie the fact that the imposing books we admire fall short of the work he would attain. The gift that, we assume, separates him from us, is also a burden (but why not a joy? The infinite task of writing – one book after another, falling short, happily short, of realising the work). The talent, strengths and abilities it took to realise the books are only partially his; for all his ability to act, he is dependent upon a passivity in which he is voided of what allows him to write in his own name.

To be is to do, to exist is to act – but what does it mean when you can do nothing; when your work falls into worklessness? You have fallen out of being – but who is it that has fallen? This from an excellent collection edited by Leslie Hill:

Invited in 1975 to lend his support, in the form of unpublished or other material, to a special issue of the journal Gramma to be devoted to his work, Blanchot declined, courteously but firmly, explaining his reluctance to be seen to authorise that project, and thus limit its freedom and independence, with the following words: 'My absence [i.e. from the issue],' he wrote, 'is a necessary step rather than any decision on my part. I would like nobody to be surprised nor disappointed by it. Publishing is always more difficult. Publishing on the basis of my name is impossible. 

Blanchot's absence from the review parallels the absence he was so scrupulous to maintain, refusing to meet scholars, to attend the celebration of his work and avoiding being photographed or, except on one occasion, being interviewed.

Was it because he sought to save his work from being bound too closely to a man, an author, and not the writer as writer? Was it to allow the name 'Blanchot' as much blankness as possible, erasing the particularities of his life from the public record? Then the attempt to narrate Blanchot's life must also pass through an account of that dying upon which his work depends. A biography, a thanatography – but what kind of account can be given?