The Truth of Suffering
Would suffering be greater in our time? A vain question. But we must not doubt that suffering weighs more heavily on us to the extent that our estrangement from religious consolations, the disappearance of the other world, and the breaking up of traditional social networks deprive the one who suffers of all distance and more clearly expose him to the truth of suffering – a truth that consists in withdrawing from him the space that suffering requires, the little time that would make his suffering possible.
And a little later, and also from The Infinite Conversation:
There is a suffering that has lost time altogether. It is the horror of a suffering without end, a suffering time can no longer redeem, that has escaped time and for which there is no longer recourse; it is irredeemable.
Suffering without relief, without redemption: in the absence of the old beliefs, suffering reveals itself in its truth. But a truth upon which the sufferer cannot seize, insofar as, without end, escaping time, the sufferer is disjoined from herself, being unable to collect herself into the first person and thereby let suffering be a discreet experience that might slip into the past. Suffering deprives the sufferer of self-presence and of the present; there is not even that 'little time' that would permit its integration into life, into the rhythm of a life.
But how then to think this experience? In the opening récit of The Infinite Conversation, one of the speakers mentions a 'weary truth', 'the truth of weariness', upon which neither speaker is able to seize. Truth, then, is not thought according to the model of adequation or correspondence. Or rather, correspondence is sent on an infinite detour, being forever able to reach its ostensible 'object'.
It is not by chance that this récit is concerned with this experience. Read in terms of my earlier account of the récit, it may seem that the experience of weariness the interlocutors discuss, all the while being unable, as they acknowledge, to reach it, stands in for the experience of the writer of this fiction.
Isn't the writer, for Blanchot fascinated by incapacity, by the erosion of the 'I can' as it is revealed in suffering, weariness and related moods? The Blanchotian writer begins with exactly this kind of mood. He begins, that is, where making a beginning is impossible without that 'merciful surplus of strength' that permits him, in his work, to bear witness to what cannot begin.
Perhaps one might even say that it is to the writer that one must return to indicate the 'truth' of suffering in a form that is adequate to it – not, that is, in the language of the concept, which allows one to grasp the specific in the general, but as the writer's language lets the interminable and the incessant return within it: that murmuring which does not give itself term.
Infinite Inadequation
Then it is exactly the truth of suffering that is revealed in the récit, and can only be revealed there in its infinite inadequation. A truth that cannot be reached directly, but only indicated.
At the outset of Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling, we find the following epigraph from Hamann: 'What Tarquinius Superbus said in the garden by means of the poppies, the son understood but the messenger did not'. Tarquinius, we learn from a translator's note, did not trust the messenger sent to him by his son. So he sends a cryptic message back: slicing off the heads of the tallest flowers in his garden with his cane. By this, the son understands he must kill the leading men in the city. Then the son understands the significance of Tarquinius's gesture because he understands the context that makes sense of it in the way the messenger does not.
Can we know, in an analogous way, what is being indicated by way of Blanchot's récit? A first response would be to say we can't be in the know with respect to the experience of weariness in question, since it would reveal its truth only in those circumstances Blanchot describes. To stand at one remove from the text as readers of this story is to stand too far away; only the weary know weariness, and even then to the extent that its truth escapes them.
A second, more sophisticated response would be to say weariness only stands in for the experience of writing with which the récit is obsessed. An experience that then doubles itself in the experience of reading as it likewise demands that we can never reach the 'object' that is being recounted in what we are reading. We might remember here Blanchot's claim to the effect that the récit does not simply represent an event that may have happened, but is the happening of the event itself. To read is to let this event happen again, as it happened, in a different but analogous way, for its author (this is the account I gave here).
(Open parentheses. Sinthome writes, reflecting on Deleuze's The Logic of Sense, 'the literary critic might wish to hold that sense is already there in the text waiting to be unlocked. However, if sense is only in being made, then sense is only in engendering itself. The sense of a text is something that is only produced in reading the text, where both the reader and text are engendered as products of that interaction, or after-effects.'
And again, with great lucidity, moving to psychoanalysis: 'we always want to treat the object of analysis as independent of our analysis of it and ourselves as independent of the object we engage with, not seeing the manner in which our engagement with that object produces it while it produces us.' Then critical commentary produces the commentator as well as what is commented upon; reading makes us, and I suppose unmakes us, and we are ourselves at stake whenever we read or think about reading. Close parentheses.)
But I wonder whether this second reading (which should be developed rather than gestured at) does not move too quickly, that the account of weariness is more than just a substitute for the real concern of the récit. Or rather, that this récit, and Blanchot'srécits more generally, are concerned not only with their own happening, but with other, similar events – that they are a way of exploring a range of moods and experiences in a form appropriate to them. The Blanchotian récit would also open a path of research, a way of thinking that is at one with a practice of writing that bears upon a truth specific to our time.
One might also remember that in his discussion of the work of Jean Paulhan, Blanchot allows that a récit need not be fictional in form – isn't everything Paulhan has written a récit in its own way?, he asks. A question that we can then turn on Blanchot, wondering whether his oeuvre as a whole is not comprised of a series of récits, each of which, in a different way, gives onto an experience of infinite inadequation.
Perhaps, in this case, there is a kind of thinking exhibited in the composition of fiction, critical commentary, and even a certain kind of philosophy which takes the form of a practice of writing. Isn't this what reveals itself in Blanchot's fragmentary works, which let scraps of fiction lie alongside philosophical crumbs and other meditations?
Then a book like The Writing of the Disaster is also a kind of récit, or, perhaps, an assemblage of récits, each resonating with one another, turning in themselves but also all together like the parts of a mobile. And then the thirty-six volumes that might, one day, collect Blanchot's oeuvre would be just such an assemblage, where matters is also that désoeuvrement, that worklessness that is another name for the experience of truth in its evasion.
Relation Without Relation
Casually, unrigorously, I want now to reflect upon one of the experiences upon which Blanchot focuses not really for any other reason than to lead myself to what deserves further reflection. Here, my focus is on those passages in The Writing of the Disasterwhere Blanchot reflects upon Levinas's Otherwise Than Being. Speaking of his close friend in an interview, Levinas notes Blanchot's ability to open 'unexpected vistas' upon philosophical ideas. I think one can do little with the twenty-five pages written in the margins of Otherwise Than Being unless Blanchot's comments are understood in relation to other parts of his oeuvre.
If Blanchot, like Levinas, was always concerned with the question of the ontological or extra-ontological of the relation to the Other, it manifests itself mostly in his fictional work, that is, until the publication of Totality and Infinity and later, Otherwise Than Being provides Blanchot with the occasion to translate his own researches into a more philosophical idiom.
What, then, is the unexpected vista Blanchot opens on Otherwise Than Being in The Writing of the Disaster?
The unrelated (in the sense that the one {I} and the other cannot be as one, or come together at one and at the same time – cannot be contemporaries) is initially the other for me. Then it is I as other from myself. It is that in me which does not coincide with me – my eternal absence, that which no consciousness can grasp, which has neither effect nor efficacy and is passive time. It is the dying which, though unsharable, I have in common with all.
What is Blanchot describing? Not simply a relation, or an ordinary kind of relation, since that would imply some kind of homogeneity of terms, that would allow them to be related to one another. The I and the Other do not occupy the same order of time, writes Blanchot; and we know from elsewhere that the Other is always 'higher' than me, that whatever relates us to one another (if we can even speak of a relation) does so unilaterally, so that before we can consider relations of reciprocity, there is first of all a nonreciprocal opening to the Other.
But who is it who opens thus? Who is opened, exposed, such that a kind of responsibility is assumed for the Other that precedes and escapes that responsibility I have for myself? The 'I' is altered by this opening; the relation to the Other absolves its terms of any of the qualities by which we might assume we could pick them out. Who is the Other? Anyone at all; but also, as Other, no one – neither masculine nor feminine; neither tall not short.
(Another thought: what if it is rather by one particular quality – a laugh, a tone of voice, a melancholy downturn of the lips that the Other is revealed as Other? What if it is by a quality, determinate, there, that the indeterminacy of the Other is revealed? Could this be one way of understanding what Levinas calls the face?)
And who am I? Likewise anonymised; likewise evacuated from any quality that distinguishes from others. If I am assigned a responsibility in the relation in question, this happens upstream of any simple self-awareness I might have; it belongs to a past that is severed from the course of time – the past as a name for what returns by way of interruption. The relation in question transforms its terms. It reaches across an interruption in time and via a 'height' that alters space. To call it a 'relation without relation' with Blanchot and Levinas is to attempt to mark the way it suspends my ordinary relation to the world.
Significantly, both thinkers understand this relation as happening through language. For both, it is language that allows me to relate to myself and to the world; my self-relation is such that it is always meditating; my relation to the world is unthinkable without language as it contextualises and orders my experiences. Yet Levinas, as Blanchot picks up in The Writing of the Disaster, claims the Other is given to me immediately. An immediacy, as Blanchot comments, which must somehow be understood in the past tense (or rather in that peculiar, impossible tense that marks the temporality of what he calls the disaster): that slips back from the course of time.
The immediacy of the Other is not simply extra-linguistic, belonging to another order. Rather, it is way of expressing the interruption by which it occurs – even its impossibility, if this is understood not simply as the opposite of the power of the 'I can' and the field of possibility opened to it thereby, but as the way power and possibility and the 'I can' of the self collapse as they are reached by the Other. In this interruption, I am other from myself; I cannot coincide with that 'eternal absence' without efficacy or effect that delivers me into what Blanchot (and not Levinas) calls 'dying'. A dying to the self I was – a becoming in which passivity, taking the place of the self, wanders eternally without return.
For Levinas, this experience is very ordinary, being the condition of our experience of the order and structure of the world. The relation (without relation) to the Other assigns us a responsibility, individuates me, making me irreplaceable with respect to the Other, just as an analogous relation has individuated all other normal human beings. This is what Blanchot refers to when he calls the I 'other from myself', 'eternal absence' is common to all; this experience is not sharable, since each time it occurs, it assigns to me a special, nonreplaceable responsibility to this Other at thistime, but it is nevertheless common; it is an experience each of us has undergone.
(Tangent. But what proof can be offered that this experience happened? Why should we accept, at such an enormous theoretical cost, that it occurred at all? For Levinas will also say that the structure of our ordinary, mundane experience depends upon responsibility: that it is the encounter with the Other, singular, non-repeatable, that grants our world order and light. Without the Other, there is the perpetual danger of collapse – that the self is not strong enough, that it will succumb to the horrors of what Levinas calls participation in which subject and object merge into one another.
As such, the relation to the Other (experience par excellence, Levinas calls it in Totality and Infinity) is the very root of our experience. The structure of our experience in general, the a priori, can be understood only if we engage philosophically with thea posteriori encounter in its singularity. The relation to the Other, then, is always upstream of the order of proof. It can only be deduced (although this is not Levinas's word) from its effects.)
(Second tangent. No intention to bring this account of Levinas, or Blanchot's reading of Levinas to life here. To do so, I think, means much more than simply explicating his thought in its own terms. Sinthome writes with great candour of his frustration (here I am understanding it in my own way) of those who are theoretically committed to x or y without living that same commitment, without their lives being risked by their 'work'.
This is what being a psychoanalyst means for Sinthome. Work without quotation marks: a suffering person to be diagnosed and, if not 'cured', then led to that point at which life is once again possible. Then what is the equivalent with respect to my brief and cursory reading? Certainly not to rest with a reading of some passages from The Writing of the Disaster. Isn't it a question, instead, of reaching through the recits, searching for the way in which Blanchot brought himself into proximity with Levinas's reflections? A different kind of work, it is true. To read, but without risk. But I think it is necessary to go further still. To write outside a book or a paper. To write such that writing sets itself back into the question of its own production.
In my foolishness, I sometimes wonder whether Theory also embodies something like this risk in a way that philosophy resists since its ostensible 'object' – that which the theoretical insights of X and Y are supposed to shed light – is, or should be the measure of those insights. But then it is more complex than this, because X and Y might constitute that 'object' differently, it being produced by the theoretical approach that might illuminate it.
Then perhaps it falls to philosophy to lay out the notion of 'production' that is at issue here, taking up a place at the head of all theoretical waters. But perhaps theory might respond that this position is itself productive, all too productive, and philosophy must plunge into those waters themselves, spreading out into a million different rivers. Must philosophy risk losing its name to keep the name philosophy?)
For Blanchot, the similarity of the relation to the Other with that of the writer to writing and to those who are afflicted, or suffer should be clear. Levinas writes of the trauma of the relation to the Other – I am exposed all the way to my viscera. My selfhood, Blanchot says is 'gangrened and eaten away, altogether alienated'. The approach of the Other is 'death itself'; it turns the self over to dying, to the anonymity of the body. Here, we find another kind of disaster. Alongside the suffering passivity (beyond passivity) of literary creation and of suffering, there is the passivity of the self with respect to the relation to the Other.
(And now remember again what Sinthome notes. We are produced, authored, by the problematic field of the encounter. Produced as, perhaps, Marx would describe. Only for Blanchot production, here, is thought of as worklessness rather than work. A worklessness that engages us and turns us aside to the infinite becoming of dying in the encounter with the Other.
A question that points beyond Blanchot, perhaps indicating his limit: doesn't the field of production encompass all things? Isn't the world – the field of encounters – already in worklessness? Then what is named by the disaster is everywhere, and at every level, from subatomic particles to the movement of planets.)
The Truth of the Event
Tired conclusion. Blanchot lays fragment alongside fragment inThe Writing of the Disaster, insinuating the belonging together of several experiences, rather than attempts to bring them together into a theoretical synthesis. And each time it is a matter of writing with the aim of conveying a certain truth – even if it is one we can never reach. Each time, with each term – thinking, writing, the relation to the Other – the order of experience (and experience is another of these words) is set apart from its interruption. Each time, it is a matter of preserving the play of 'neither one nor the other' – the ne uter of the neuter as it names the relation between them (and relation is yet another of these words).
This is why paradoxical formulations such as relation without relation are necessary – the 'without' here is a way of naming what is extraordinary about the relation in question; of course, it is the same with other words I have glanced upon in discussion. Friendship without friendship, egotism without egotism, thinking without thinking … Likewise, this is why Blanchot will use phrases that he seems almost immediately to withdraw: disclosure (that does not disclose), the impossible community or occasionally capitalise words ('the Opening of community). And it is why he can appear inconsistent, denying that friendship is linked to the gift on one page, and then placing Bataille alongside Levinas and Heidegger as a thinker of the 'gift of interiority'.
How to name the event? But even the word event cannot name what it supposed to name. For doesn't it carry with it a suggestion of the punctual, the delimitable …? Then there can only a play of substitutes, of non-synonymous proxies which begin to blur into one another, bearing a meaning – fixed, delimitable – only to let this meaning be swept away in the 'experience' to which Blanchot would attend.
It is in these terms, I think, that one must respond to the question, what is being indicated by way of Blanchot's récit?
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