That Merciful Surplus of Strength

<Draft of chapter one of Lars Iyer's Blanchot's Vigilance (Macmillan, 2005) . 25,000 words. >

Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering. Kafka to Janouch[i]

Poor Kafka has to work; he cannot find enough time for writing. He lacks time, he is never solitary enough, there is always too much noise, he is always too weary. Then, becoming ill, he realises that there will never be enough time, that time is not time enough and writing requires something else from him. But what is this demand? Blanchot compares his predicament to Kierkegaard’s.[ii]

Abraham, according to Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Silentio, must sacrifice not only Isaac, but God – his faith in God. For Isaac is the bearer of God’s future on earth. Isaac is the promise, the future, and it is the future of God’s chosen people that Abraham must sacrifice. Abraham must act without guarantee; he does not sacrifice Isaac in the faith that all will be returned to him in the afterlife. Isaac himself is hope; it is the future – God’s future, the future of the chosen – which must be destroyed. But Abraham, we know, will receive the future through his willingness to obey God’s command. This is not a simple resignation to a higher power. Kierkegaard distinguishes between the knight of resignation, who, seeing no alternative, obeys God, and the knight of faith – Abraham – who can maintain his faith in what appears to the unbeliever to be simply absurd. What faith does Abraham maintain? That Isaac is the future. That God requires him to sacrifice the future, then, in order to receive the future.

Some say Isaac is a version of Regine, the fiancée whom Kierkegaard renounced in order to write. He had to sacrifice her – but to receive what? Another future; one no longer lived in the ethical sphere of existence, but in the religious one. But what of Kafka? If he sacrifices his engagement, what then? He will not enter the religious sphere; he will not receive the future by placing it at stake. And if he gives up work in order to write, if he does nothing else but write? Kafka links the demand of writing to his own salvation. He is a bachelor; he will have no attachments because his attachment to writing is greater than anything. Writing, for Kafka, is a way of being.

Kafka does not choose to sacrifice everything to writing; he has no choice. But for what is his life sacrificed? What does he sacrifice by writing? Read his notebooks. Kafka begins story fragments again and again; he does not complete or trouble to rewrite them. They begin and break off. It appears that it is not completion he wants, but something else – that what he writes will never be of any worth and his hope lies in an impossible writing that demands he complete none of his stories. They are sacrificed to a still greater demand. He seeks to unwrite writing as he writes it. It is the attempt to realise worklessness, to put it to work to which his life will be sacrificed.

‘I cannot write’ – ‘you must write’ – ‘I cannot finish a story’ – ‘it is by this incompletion that you will be sacrificed to writing’. Comparing Kafka to Abraham on Mount Moriah, Blanchot notes, ‘For Kafka the ordeal is all the graver because of everything that makes it weigh lightly upon him’; then writes, ‘What would the testing of Abraham be if, having no son, he were nevertheless required to sacrifice this son? He couldn't be taken seriously; he could only be laughed at. That laughter is the form of Kafka's pain’.[iii] It is the laughter, one imagines, of Kafka’s family, his colleagues: ‘you have produced nothing. You are wasting your life’: incredulous laughter. Worse: there is the pain of the fiancée he deserts and the disappointment of those around him.

Compared to writing, everything for Kafka disappoints. He falls short of his vocation and this is why, in what he writes to his friends and lovers and in his diary, it seems he is always in lieu of his own existence. But one should not be too quick to understand the privation to which he seems bound by his desire to write, nor indeed to interpret his Diary or even his literary writings as being marked by despair. His life is lived in the shadow of writing; he remains in writing’s space, in literature’s remove even when he does not write. This is already a great deal.

Kafka sets himself an impossible task: to pursue a story across days and nights, to maintain that prolific energy which allowed him to complete a story in a single creative gesture. Of course this energy failed him; his stories were botched, he thought, and could not find their way to a conclusion. And if he had time, all the time in the world, would he be able to write? If he needed no sleep and just wrote, one day after another, would he create a work which would allow him to answer his vocation? Kafka is like that man from the country who asked the doorkeeper for access to the Law. The doorkeeper says he can’t let him in now. ‘Later then?’, asks the man. ‘It’s possible’, says the doorkeeper, ‘but not at this moment’.[iv] The man waits for days and years, until, in the last moments of his life, he realises that no one else has ever asked for admittance to the Law. Why?, he asks the doorkeeper. 'No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended for you. I am now going to shut it'.[v]

It is, perhaps, something analogous to the entry to the law that Kafka seeks as he pursues the story night after night. Does he realise that its essential characteristic is to be interminable and that to write lines on a page is already to betray the peculiar absence of time which marks the work? That the work he seeks to realise would not be commensurable with those tasks he accomplishes in the world?

Kafka suffers from what Blanchot calls the day: the opening of the world as a field of tasks and projects as it is measured by what is possible for the human being. Kafka wins an important legal case, but this, for him, is only the interruption which compromised the composition of his ‘Metamorphosis’. He brings documents home to work on cases for worker’s compensation, but this only prevents him clearing his desk and writing, as he does every night, from eleven o’clock until three in the morning.

‘Were it not for those terrible nights of insomnia I would not write’. Kafka suffers from the day, his job, his family; he writes to discover that peculiar absence which unbinds time from itself, that disarticulation which breaks him from the chance of even beginning to write words on the page. Writing is a pseudo-task, the simulacrum of a project: you can’t complete what does not even allow you to begin and you can’t begin a task which seems to require that you relinquish the very possibility of setting out.

How to understand the strange drama of writing, this demand which sends you on a great detour before you ever write a line? Kafka’s letters, notebooks and diaries allow him to mark time with respect to the absence of time, to find himself just as he begins to lose himself; they save him, but what can we expect from them but despair? As soon as he writes, he is lost. And when he writes about losing loss, when he writes about writing, his loss is redoubled.

Doubly lost, and commenting on the great refusal to which writing is linked, Kafka comes closest of all to the condition of writing. For isn’t literary writing a lament for what it is not? Isn’t it an experience of a detour without issue, pointlessness itself? Whence the temptation to ally writing to a great political cause, or to give up writing altogether: one to which Kafka often resorts in his diaries and letters, setting out his plans to emigrate to Palestine or telling Janouch of his new habit of undertaking two hours of manual labour each afternoon. But he does not yield to this temptation; writing saves him. From what does it save him? From a life lived outside writing. But isn’t writing precisely the door which will not admit him? Isn’t the way barred by the great doorkeeper with his Tartar beard? 

Kafka waits. He is eminently patient. And whilst he waits, he writes with a writing which is not yet the writing he seeks. With one exception (‘The Judgement’), it disappoints him – but that story disappoints him because it raises the bar too high. Still, at least the vocation of writing allows him to keep before him what his book is not: the absence of the book it designates in vain.

*

What does Kafka want? What is at issue in this knot of patience and impatience? There is a clue in the following disingenuous remark:

I have never understood how it is possible for almost anyone who writes to objectify his sufferings in the very midst of suffering them; thus I, for example, in the midst of my unhappiness – my head, say, still on fire with unhappiness – sit down and write to someone: I am unhappy. Yes, I can even go beyond that and with the various flourishes I might have talent for, all of which seem to have nothing to do with my unhappiness, ring simple, or contrapuntal or a whole orchestration of changes on my theme. And it is not a lie, and it does not still my pain, it is simply a merciful surplus of strength [Überschuß der Kräfte] at a moment when suffering has raked me to the bottom of my being and plainly exhausted all my strength. But then what kind of strength is it?[vi]

What, in the midst of unhappiness, allows one to write ‘I am unhappy’? A peculiar strength – a merciful one, in which I am permitted strength enough to report my unhappiness. But what does it mean to invoke mercy? Does the capacity to write mean my unhappiness is any less complete? That I am any less unhappy than I thought?

A surplus of strength: at least I can ring changes on my suffering, at least, using my talent, I can begin to write. But does it alter my basic situation? Does it offer therapy or cure? If it allows me to take distance from my suffering, it is the same distance which causes me to lose my suffering anew. Does the fact that I can add flourishes to my writing – that I can orchestrate it, transforming it, perhaps, into a fiction – transmute that suffering? One cannot protest that such flourishes are lies whatever their beauty. For Valéry, Pascal's despair was too well-wrought to be believable. But what Valéry has misunderstood is the surplus of strength which gives birth to writing: the way writing solicits a writer as soon as she writes ‘I am suffering’. For that ‘I’ is not the ‘I’ who suffers; to write is to discover the strength of creativity – of the power to generate sentence after sentence. A merciful strength makes writing possible even as suffering seems to make everything impossible.

The merciful surplus in question does not merely bracket Kafka’s suffering as if he had entered, with literature, into a space which had no relationship with his ‘empirical’ self. Suffering is transmuted – but what has it become? The merciful surplus of strength has generated another self: the agent who rings changes on the suffering it reports; the poetic self who is creative, articulate and generative. Who is this other self? Not simply the negation of the first, suffering self who took up his pen to write of his suffering. The literary self is still bound to suffering, but in the manner of a surplus; now it is possible to ring changes upon suffering.[vii] Literature is born.

Suffering becomes literature. Yet literature, too, is suffering. Kafka to Janouch: ‘Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering’. But why this new suffering? Is it because the changes one must ring upon suffering cannot be sustained from now until eternity – because, soon, the writer will fall from the surplus of strength and become once more incapable of writing, mired in the suffering with which he began? It is the gaps of non-writing within writing that are frightening. What appears to be the second suffering, the suffering of art, arises from the sense that the literary work must be endless if it is to prevent the return of the suffering from which the writer began.

Write to escape suffering. Suffer because you can never write enough. This aporia, if it sums up the relationship between Kafka and writing, is dependent on the fact that neither the empirical self nor the poetic self is ever satisfied with what has been written. Writing itself does not alleviate suffering; this is clear enough from the pages of Kafka's diaries where one finds over and again remarks like ‘wrote nothing today’.

Contrast this with the 'surplus of strength' of which Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo to describe the state of mind he was in when he wrote The Birth of Tragedy. It becomes, this surplus, the strength to comprehend the affirmation of life. It is the 'ultimate, most joyous, wantonly extravagant Yes to life', the 'highest' and the 'deepest' insight. But Kafka's fictions do not change his dissatisfaction. He once wrote to a correspondent that he was made of literature. And it is true, when borne on the draft of a merciful surplus of strength, that writing is his, or that he is sacrificed all at once to writing – 'The Judgement', after all, was written in the course of a single night. But when he is not? When that strength fails him? Kafka suffers because he can never hold onto literature.

*

Blanchot meditates on the paragraph I quoted:

I am unhappy, so I sit down at my table and write, ‘I am unhappy’. How is this possible? This possibility is strange and scandalous to a degree. My state of unhappiness signifies an exhaustion of my forces; the expression of my unhappiness, an increase in my forces. From the side of sadness, there is the impossibility of everything – living, existing, thinking; from the side of writing, the possibility of everything – harmonious words, accurate exposition, felicitous images. Moreover, by expressing my sadness, I assert a negation and yet, by asserting it, I do not transform it. I communicate by the greatest luck the most complete disgrace, and the disgrace is not made lighter.[viii]

My unhappiness is such that nothing is possible and yet I write, finding appropriate images and embellishments. A merciful surplus! If I suffer, now, it is not because this surplus cannot be sustained, but because it will never allow me to have done with its demand. One sentence is not enough – the description is incomplete; a second is still not nuanced enough; a third is necessary lest the first two appear too definitive, and so on. Measured against my suffering, writing is infinitely inadequate. Measured against literature, it is a success.

Writing begins; sentence follows sentence; this is how books are made – but this is how books are unmade, too. The possibility of writing has its price. I suffer, I want to write, but I write words, and the whole medium of language is, as Hegel argues at the outset of the Phenomenology of Spirit, universal; by writing, I negate the situation I want to present. As Hegel argues, the ‘this’ of self-certainty ‘cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness; that is, to that which is inherently universal’. Concrete experience has been lost in its particularity.

There is a second loss: as soon as I write I address the virtual presence of an audience; what I write is public and hence addressed to others. The author may claim her aim is merely to express herself: to write, for example, ‘I am lonely’ and to let her loneliness resound. But as soon as she writes, she is no longer alone; her loneliness is destroyed. Does this mean her loneliness is thereby sublated, as Hegel would have it: that the universality of language lifts what she would write about the singularity of her loneliness? But it is this singularity that is sacrificed by writing. The condition of possibility of writing about loneliness is the sacrifice of what is experienced as loneliness. Yet at the same time, the writer remains alone; her loneliness cannot be expressed even as it is expressed. Writing fails her; what she writes of her loneliness mocks that loneliness; she has said nothing of her loneliness even as she evokes it. But what would exist of that loneliness had she not evoked it? Is it that she first experiences what she comes to call loneliness and then attempts to express it? Or that what she experiences as loneliness is given first of all in terms of an idea she could attribute to a source no other than that of language?

Perhaps there is another way of understanding the suffering to which literary writing is linked. She feels an estrangement with respect to the feeling she knows as loneliness – one which makes the word insufficient with respect to what she would name. She writes to render this word less bare, less inexact, to set it into motion, to compose flourishes on her loneliness. But she must fail since she only has words at her disposal. She is estranged. She suffers not only from the infinite inadequation between what she feels and what she is allowed to call loneliness, but from the bareness of the word loneliness itself. A suffering which does not disappear no matter how many words she marshals, even if these words, and her facility at marshalling them, provides her with another kind of pleasure.

Blanchot:

The more luck I have, that is to say, the more gifted I am in making my unhappiness felt by description, embellishments, and images, the more the bad luck this misfortune reports is respected. It is as if the possibility that my writing represents essentially exists to express its own impossibility – the impossibility of writing that constitutes my sadness. Not only can it not be put in parentheses, or accommodate it without destroying it or being destroyed by it, but it really is possible only because of its impossibility.[ix]

Writing is possible for our author only insofar as it prevents her expressing her sadness. That is to say, it is possible even as writing denies itself to her as a means of expression for the concrete singularity of her mood. What begins as soon as Kafka writes is the infinite task of answering this singularity. The writer suffers from the distance between singularity and particularity. Kafka's literature is born in the infinite inadequation between the possible and impossible.

*

‘Adam’s first act, which made him master of the animals, was to give them names, that is, he annihilated them in their existence (as existing creatures)’.[x] In ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, Blanchot recalls Hegel’s account of the naming of the animals in a draft of the Phenomenology of Spirit. It is through the negation of things in their real existence, their ‘death’, that they allow language to come to life. But this death brings with it the birth of the world and the birth of the human being as the one who can articulate the world.

For Hegel’s Adam, the world is born again to the human being whose humanitas resides in his ability to speak. Language lends itself to the power of human causality, to the ability to act. It depends upon the representation of being and is founded upon the consciousness to which being is presented. It is through the feat of commencement by which a human being posited itself as the origin of language that it is able to secure a grip on the future. The world is named and thereby possessed for Adam’s descendants, but this possession depends upon the distance that opens between real and ideal existence: between the thing named and the abstract generality of the name.

This already presumes that the humanitas of the human being has been posited as the origin of the origin: as the one to whom the world is already bestowed. But this positing depends in turn upon on a preliminary annihilation. For Hegel, death is the condition of possibility of the human being as the animal who speaks; it is the power proper to the humanitas in question. But this means that there can be no return to life before language. As Blanchot writes, ‘man was condemned not to be able to approach anything or experience anything except through the meaning he had to create’.[xi]

To name is to be able to control and manipulate what is named; things are in a certain sense put into our possession. I learn the word ‘lonely’ and am able to name the desolation I feel; I am comforted by knowing that loneliness is not an emotion only I experience. But the power to name, to label, presupposes a kind of annihilation of what is named even as it seems to bring it into our possession. What, after all, remains of my loneliness once it is called loneliness? This question might seem naïve: after all, since it is a word, a linguistic convention, there need be nothing actually called loneliness other than what the word loneliness is culturally enfranchised to pick out; to that extent, my loneliness is what the word loneliness permits being lonely to be. But what is called loneliness might be ambiguous, more complex than the word itself seems to allow. I might write in order to try to reach what I have lost even as I learn this word. But even as I do so, I am committed to using words to explain a particular word; a whole system of words opens and with them I begin an infinite detour through language.

This detour has already occurred for Hegel’s Adam. ‘The meaning of speech […] requires that before any word is spoken there must be a sort of immense hecatomb, a preliminary flood plunging all creation into a total sea’; things enter language deprived of their singularity, their particularity.[xii] What is named is reborn in signification which can operate even after the destruction of the particular thing. This means that the words I write will still have meaning after my own destruction; they will continue to speak after I die. This holds, too, of the word ‘I’ itself. If I write, I am lonely, I experience not only a disappointment with the word loneliness but with the word ‘I’, too. After all, what does it mean to capture myself, my position as a speaker with this word? I speak as a universal subject yet when I pronounce the word ‘I’, I have already been separated from myself in my singular existence. As soon as I say ‘I’, Blanchot writes, ‘it is as though I were chanting my own dirge’.[xiii] To write that the word ‘I’ annihilates me in my real existence might sound ridiculous: after all, words can’t kill anyone. But it is my singularity which is thus annihilated. An annihilation, even a death, which I cannot escape since it is the condition of possibility of language. Death is the condition of possibility of sense, of signification; ‘without death’, Blanchot writes, ‘everything would sink into absurdity’: without death, that great labour of death upon which language depends, there would only be a chaos of singularities, a silence in which nothing could be determined.[xiv] So it is that language must begin with the void, with absence. A kind of ‘death’, which is to say, the idealisation of particular things, is the condition of possibility of sense.

This means that the power that would first affirm the humanitas of the human being is divided at its source. It is possible to name the world, to grant it an ideal existence. The humanitas of the human being is given in a leap of language that permits the opening of the world as the opening of the human being to itself. It depends upon death, but death is not wholly in the power of the human being.

On the one hand, the mobilisation of death permits the great acts of the literary imagination: the epic, the Bible, the medieval Summa and finally, the novel: books that would say everything. It answers, for Blanchot, to the desire implicit to Western civilisation to recount its history and its experience, recapturing and thereby determining its past. The drive to unify, to relate everything back to a point of origin, is an inherent movement in telling. It is possible to invoke a grand narrative that unifies all other tales – a broader, deeper story that maintains a reassuring order. Lyotard tells us that the age of the grand récit has passed; but the greatest tale of them all, the tale that is retold in the elaboration of any tale, still exerts its dominion.

On the other hand, there is another tale, a detour that tells of another side of the origin, which no longer celebrates Adam’s capacity to speak. There is an experience of language before speech that interrupts the opening of a field of power and possibility. It is here one might discover the originating leap that grants language and the humanitas of the human being. Language is not a tool of which one can dispose freely; naming does not occur by human fiat. Adam speaks not with a language but from it. We inhabit language – or rather, language inhabits us. Language is a field that opens through us and opens the world to us, determining what it is possible to say and not to say. But it is, for this reason, never the ‘object’ of our awareness; it does not spread itself before us in its totality. Or rather, even as it appears to determine what will be experienced – to set the limits of sight, of what can be seen, it dissimulates another experience of language. This is the experience to which Kafka’s suffering leads him and that we suffer in turn as we read his books.

Language appears to open like the day itself, opening the world in the opening of the humanitas of the human being – but this humanitas is bound up not only with what can be said, but with what cannot. Lost in Kafka's writing is the singularity of his despair. Literature begins even as it fails to express its concreteness. Whence the mercy and the surplus: as entering literature, Kafka is given over to the experience of language without end. Sentence must follow sentence; one can never write sufficiently clearly; more images are required, more embellishments.

Some authors have been tempted to wreck the ship of literature – to plunge it into meaninglessness. But literature must mean if it is to be literature; the text cannot become an obdurate thing, closed in upon itself, but must open itself to its readers. Other authors have sought to end everything in silence, the blank page. Yet the page itself has significance; it belongs to literary meaning. Some, still further, have sought to leave literature behind; Mishima supposes it is the interior of the body that is lost to writing. He becomes a bodybuilder, a martial artist; he forms his own militia. In the end, he commits ritual seppuku, opening his interior regions as to the blazing sun. The literary writer, born of literature, cannot escape writing; there is no death; the literary writer wanders like Gracchus.

Whence the dream of leaving literature behind. Kafka dreams of Palestine. What will he do there? Renounce writing; like Rimbaud or Mishima, he will have left the world of writing behind him in order to step into the world of action. Renounce writing? Renounce, rather, the impatient renunciation which would measure the demand of writing by the finished and completed work. Literature opens. Fail if you write it – fail by failing writing – (‘The Judgement’ is a success, but what kind of success? Perhaps only an idol of success, for it is not the absence of the book at which literature aims in Kafka’s writing) and fail if you do not.

*

Still, literature seems to offer Kafka a chance to escape from dying, from endless suffering. It is, he claims, in another disingenuous remark, through literature that he is able to die content:

On the way home told Max that I shall lie very contentedly on my deathbed, provided the pain isn’t too great. I forgot – and later purposely omitted – to add that the best things I have written have their basis in this capacity of mine to meet death with contentment. All these fine and very convincing passages always deal with the fact that someone is dying, that it is hard for him to do so, that it seems unjust to him, or at least harsh, and the reader is moved by this, or at least he should be. But for me, who believes that I shall be able to lie contentedly on my deathbed, such scenes are secretly a game; indeed, in the death enacted I rejoice in my own death, hence calculatingly exploit the attention that the reader concentrates on death, have a much clearer understanding of it than he, of whom I suppose will loudly lament on his deathbed, and for these reasons my lament is as perfect as can be, nor does it suddenly break off, as is likely to be the case with a realm lament, but dies beautifully and purely away.[xv]

Writing, as I have shown, depends upon the exertion of a kind of mastery over one’s own death. No longer is it the limit of what you can or cannot possess – the extremity to which you cannot bring yourself into relation as a sovereign equal – and this is the point: such mastery is tempting because of the very extremity of death. The strength required to realise a book demands the author must summon every power and become control itself, the literary toreador. Then it is against death that the author must test his will. But this is not right. Kafka is not Hemingway or Leiris; writing is not tauromachy.

What, then, is the contentedness Kafka seeks? What would it mean for him to enjoy his death? One suspects a kind of ruse: Kafka, after all, dreams of leaving writing in order to emigrate to Palestine; he puts down his work to take up carpentry. Yet he fills his notebooks, page after page, not with sketches and plans of future stories like Henry James or Dostoevsky, but with tales which begin and then break off, never to be completed. There are dozens of such incomplete stories.

It may appear from this fragment in the diaries that Kafka is playing with death, that it is his toy. It is as though his alleged contentment in death recalls Hegelian wisdom: the conversion of negativity into positivity; the transformation of death into a condition of possibility of truth and the world. Death gives form to the formless and definition to the indefinite. But Kafka is not concerned with truth or the world. Reading the pages of his diaries it becomes clear that his insistent appeal for a content death is a mirror of his dissatisfaction with life; who has written more eloquently of the difficulty of their relations with the world? This dissatisfaction does not afford him mastery over death, but it makes death into a refuge. A refuge from what? From the office, from the demands of his fiancée and his difficulties with his family. But also – surely – from writing, from the uncertainty of writing. For the man who created Gracchus, contentedness in death means a still pen. Kafka dies content when he joins his characters in death. He writes; he dies – but then, when the character is dead, he is given back to his dissatisfaction. And then? He begins writing again.

‘If I do not save myself in some work, I am lost. Do I know this distinctly enough? I do not hide from men because I want to live peacefully, but because I want to perish peacefully’.[xvi] Poor Kafka begins anew. Why? Because contented death should be his wage as an artist; it is the aim of his writing and its justification. It is what he wants. But does he want it? Blanchot: ‘”The capacity to die content” implies that relations with the normal world are now and henceforth severed. Kafka is in a sense already dead. This is given him, as exile was given him; and this gift is linked to that of writing’.[xvii] From the passages in his Diary on ‘the merciful surplus of strength’ it seems the gift of writing gives Kafka strength to endure in this deathly condition. Writing is born from his suffering – this surprises him – and straightaway outstrips it. Literature begins when Kafka begins to ring changes upon suffering. It begins as he seeks, in the manner of the infant of Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, to die content in his characters[xviii] But this only because he cannot die content; because he suffers from what the merciful surplus would grant him. Then the most honest tale, for Kafka, would be the one in which death, for his protagonist, is impossible and the tale itself cannot be brought to term.

The best things I have written have their basis in this capacity of mine to meet death with contentment: one might wonder whether Kafka plays with his characters as a cat does a mouse. Whether, indeed every page of his literary oeuvre were nothing but a massive torture device, analogous to the one in ‘In the Penal Colony’, which Kafka would like to test on himself.

Kafka’s characters, one might say, inhabit the space of dying. It is the movement of dying which claims them as they seek in vain for recognition from the castle or to exonerate themselves in the trial. Like Kafka, they seek a way to come to death, to find contentedness. But what do they find? Death 'like a dog' in The Trial; death without terminus in The Castle. Either way, Kafka survives the death of the characters that die; as for those who do not, he breaks off the tale which narrates their adventures and begins another. Burn my books, he tells Brod, but what he means is: burn what cannot bring itself to the end. Burn what survives me in the stories I wrote to find my way to death. Burn everything in me that cannot die with my mortal body. But Kafka gives Brod this command which means he knows nothing will be burned. Why does he give it? Because something in him survives of the desire for literary immortality, although he seeks only to live in his death, to wander on like Gracchus. He seeks to live not his death but his dying.

Elsewhere in the Diary Kafka writes: ‘Write to be able to die, die to be able to write’. Write to be able to die – write in order to discover the contentment of departing a miserable life, a kind of safe suicide. Die to be able to write – deploy death in order to make sense, to realise a book. What does he mean? That Kafka is in lieu of what he seeks and of the power of seeking. The work fights back; Kafka becomes the work’s mouse; his cry is Josephine’s: pathetic and piping.[xix]

Death is the possibility of the work, but death depends upon a prior dying; how can we understand this peculiar intertwining? In a footnote in The Space of Literature, Blanchot points to the work of his friend Levinas. It occurs after this short passage:

When a contemporary philosophy names death as man’s extreme possibility, the possibility absolutely proper to him, he shows that the origin of possibility is linked in man to the fact that he can die, that for him death is yet one possibility more, that the event by which man departs from the possible and belongs to the impossible is nevertheless within his mastery, that it is the extreme moment of his possibility (and this the philosopher expresses precisely by saying of death that it is ‘the possibility of impossibility’).[xx]

Blanchot is referring, of course, to Heidegger, as part of a more general meditation on the relationship between death and the artwork. The themes here are already familiar: death is the condition of possibility of sense, but at the same time escapes the economy which would allow sense to be produced. Write to be able to die, die to be able to write: the power to annihilate the real existence of things (and the ‘I’) is the ground of action (die to be able to write), yet writing arrests dying, suspending the annihilation of things (write to be able to die).

This remains abstract. Blanchot indicates another way of understanding the relationship between writing and dying in a footnote: ‘Emmanuel Levinas is the first to have brought out what was at stake in this expression (Time and the Other)’. Here, Blanchot refers us to the remarkable series of arguments which leads Levinas to reverse Heidegger’s expression ‘the possibility of impossibility’ to ‘the impossibility of possibility’ in this early book.[xxi]

What does Levinas mean? At the heart of Heidegger’s phenomenology of mortality is the claim that it is always a specific Dasein who dies; death, he writes ‘lays claim to [Dasein] as an individual Dasein’ since no-one, as Heidegger writes, can die in its place.[xxii] It is by facing up to the fact that I will die (that is, to the possibility of the impossibility that I will continue to exist) that I might take on my existence in its uniqueness.

Dasein can be said to be authentically itself, according to Heidegger, when it lays claim to its own existence by liberating itself from what he writes are ‘those possibilities which may accidentally thrust themselves upon one’ by bringing itself into the proper relation to its morality.[xxiii] Dasein can only seize those contingent possibilities as its own, or indeed, chose other ones, once it has faced up to the fact that it will die. This is why Heidegger claims that Dasein can achieve a certain freedom by and through its relationship to what he calls the ‘uttermost possibility’ of death.[xxiv] The possibility of death makes Dasein’s possibilities possibilities for Dasein, which it can thereby assume and take over for itself.

In Time and the Other, Levinas argues that Heidegger illegitimately assumes that death is an ‘event of freedom’; Dasein cannot take over its thrown existence by relating itself to its death.[xxv] ‘Death is ungraspable […] it marks the end of the subject’s virility and heroism’; it offers no purchase for the subject: it remains ‘absolutely unknowable’ and ‘foreign to all light’.[xxvi]

Levinas thus reverses Heidegger’s famous formulation: ‘death in Heidegger is not […] “the impossibility of possibility”, but “the possibility of impossibility”’.[xxvii] What Heidegger ignores about the approach of death, according to Levinas, is that ‘at a certain moment we are no longer “able to be able” [nous ne “pouvons plus pouvoir”]’ – that is, we experience not simply our inability to do this or that, to assume this or that responsibility, or to choose this or that possibility, but the disappearance of our very ability to assume, take responsibility or choose.[xxviii] This experience not only interrupts the tasks and the projects with which we are occupied but entails ‘the impossibility of having a project’ – that is, the impossibility of enacting any kind of task whatsoever.[xxix] It may seem that Levinas is confusedly focusing on the ‘experience’ of dying, that is, the approach or the arrival of death, trying to make this point count against Heidegger when the author of Being and Time is not trying to present a phenomenology of the experience of dying, but is concerned with the stakes of the knowledge on the part of finite Dasein that death is a certainty. Heidegger is producing a phenomenology of mortality, but Levinas a phenomenology of dying – a subtle but profound difference.

Such a phenomenology of dying is part of Levinas’s larger concern with suffering; the phrase, ‘the impossibility of possibility’ is understood as part of a relationship between suffering, dying and existence which is very different to that of Heidegger. According to Levinas, ‘suffering in all its degrees entails the impossibility of detaching oneself from the instant of existence’.[xxx] In this context, this phrase refers to the inability of the suffering subject to reaffirm its freedom – which is, for Levinas, the impossibility of escaping the instant in which it is mired. The suffering subject cannot leave the instant behind: it is attached to it because it cannot summon up the strength to make the future possible for itself. The phrase, ‘the impossibility of possibility’ refers in this context to the inability of the subject to muster its powers. It cannot render its possibilities possible for itself in the manner of resolute and authentic Dasein.

It may seem Heidegger does not need to be anything but agnostic about what suffering or dying might be like whilst his account of resolute being-towards-death is simply an account of how Dasein comes to terms with the fact that it is mortal. All he would require to carry through his existential analysis of Dasein is an account of what it means to be brought into relation with the possibility of the impossibility of one’s continuing to exist. The phenomenologies of dying and suffering that Levinas produces would be ‘regional’ in the sense that they do not trouble the Heideggerian account of the relationship between the human being and death nor indeed the fundamental structure of the existential analytic of Dasein.

However, it is necessary to attend to the context of Levinas’s discussion into which the discussion of suffering and dying is set. Unlike Heidegger, he moves not from the analytic to Dasein to broach the question of the meaning of being, but from being in general to a particular being. Levinas sketches what resembles a cosmology: the ‘there is’ is a chaos of undifferentiated being from which the ego is said to emerge. It is in ‘horror’ that the ego shrinks from the depersonalisation of what he calls the sheer ‘there is’ of being.

The great drama of existence, according to Levinas, is that of struggle to maintain oneself in existence, to maintain that self-becoming which would permit a ‘victory over the ‘there is’’.[xxxi] The ego must first of all take possession of its being (this is what Levinas calls the ‘first ontological experience’) and sustain this possession. ‘Hypostasis’ is Levinas’s name for the event in which the ego seizes itself for itself, thereby securing a basis from which it can act as a principle or archē.[xxxii] Hypostasis permits the opening of an interiority in this taking up of a relationship with itself – ‘it is not just that one is, one is oneself’ [on n'est pas, on s'est].[xxxiii] This relation to oneself as a relation to being is what Levinas calls the fundamental ‘freedom of the beginning’.[xxxiv] To exercise and concretise this freedom is not an impersonal fate but the task of a kind of responsibility, but this is not merely a formal relationship to oneself. It is the effort to be, the constant struggle or work to keep a place from which to exist.

To exist, for Levinas, requires a kind of effort. The human being is not at one with itself but is torn; it takes work and effort to remain oneself; Être is always S’être. The human being as a substantive can always collapse into being understood as a verb. Heidegger’s account of the ecstasis of Dasein passes over the hypostasis through which it was able to achieve its being-there; the ‘Da’ of Dasein is produced and maintained in the effort of Dasein to be. And when this effort lapses? When the ‘Da’ disperses and Dasein’s ability-to-be, its Sein-können, disperses with it?

Suffering, physical suffering, names, for Levinas, the ‘experience’ in which the knot which binds the self to the self is loosened such that the ego is no longer able to preserve itself in its egoity. There is a lapse in the work of identity which insinuates an indefinite suspension at the heart of the ‘I’. In passing over the experience in question as well as the notion of identification to which Levinas appeals, the existential analysis passes over the conditions of Dasein’s existence. The transition from the possibility of impossibility to the impossibility of possibility is emblematic of a shift not merely from a phenomenology of mortality to a phenomenology of dying, but one away from Heideggerian phenomenology altogether.

What has this got to do with literature? Kafka to Janouch: ‘Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering’. What matters here is to understand suffering in terms of what Levinas and Blanchot call dying and how, in turn, this entails the reversal of the possibility of impossibility into impossibility of possibility. Die to be able to write – mobilise determinate negation in order to create something, establish an authenticating being-towards-death; write to be able to die – suspend that determinate negation in order to experience a real and not an ideal death, arrest the relation to death which would permit authenticity: only in terms of this double imperative might one understand Kafka’s predicament and the predicament of literature.

*

In The Space of Literature, Blanchot argues there is something incommensurable about the resolution to take my own life and about that action itself. Death, for Blanchot, is something upon which I cannot seize. The error of the suicide is to think death is an event which occurs in the normal course of time; it is the impatient attempt to die at a particular moment, determining the uncertain futurity of death’s approach. But this futurity is the mystery of what Blanchot calls dying. It does not belong to the order of time as it is measured by what is possible for the human being. The ‘other’ futurity, the time of dying, is what Blanchot will also call ‘the absence of time’: the suspension of time when the dying self cannot leave behind the instant of dying.

Like Levinas, Blanchot claims, the impossibility of possibility can be found, ‘In the most common suffering, and first of all in physical suffering’.[xxxv] ‘Suffering is suffering when one can no longer suffer it, and when, because of this non-power, one cannot cease suffering it’.[xxxvi] There is no subject of suffering – no one, that is, who could draw on a power to make suffering cease – but only ‘the infinite “present” of a death impossible to die’.[xxxvii] A ‘present’ which is not the finite stretch upon which Dasein is projected, but an interruption in which there is no one there and no ‘there’ in which to ‘be there’. There is only a kind of streaming, a flow without subject, a Cratylean stream into which one cannot step into even once.[xxxviii]

Blanchot repeats, in his own terms, the structure Levinas calls hypostasis, that is, both the act of assembling of the self which allows it to begin and the ‘being there’ which the self must maintain in order to have a place from which it can exist. Self-relation, which is also a relation to being, is accomplished through the mobilisation of death, according to Blanchot; the economy of sense depends on the negation of the real existence of things; our only approach to the world is through language. What he calls dying arrests this self-relation and the articulation of sense; the horror of death lies in the way it resists the powers of the self, in the impossibility of possibility it entails.

For Blanchot, dying arrests the relation to being. It is neither nothingness, as it could be dialectically recuperated, but nor is it being, insofar as the existence without existents named by the ‘there is’ suspends the economy of possibility. Blanchot uses the word le neutre, neuter, neutral, making use of its etymologically root as it suggests neither one thing nor the other, to suggest a wavering that settles neither into being nor nothingness. This is his way of naming what Levinas calls in Time and the Other ‘the impossibility of possibility’. Thus it is he writes of ‘a suffering that is almost indifferent, not suffered, but neutral (a phantom of suffering) insofar as the one who is exposed to it, precisely through this suffering, is deprived of the “I” that would make him suffer it’.[xxxix] Likewise, it is to this experience he refers when he writes of this experience as being no longer ‘that of a transcendent Being; it is “immediate” presence or presence as Outside’.[xl] ‘Impossibility, neither negation nor affirmation’, Blanchot writes ‘indicates what in being has always already preceded being and yields no ontology’.[xli]

Kafka suffers – but is Kafka there to experience his suffering? ‘Possibility is not what is merely possible and should be regarded as less than real’, Blanchot writes – it is not understood as what is logically permissible.[xlii] ‘Possibility establishes and founds reality: one is what one is only if one has the power to be it. Here we see immediately than man not only has possibilities, but is his possibility’.[xliii] If Kafka suffering were complete, then it would be impossible for him to write. But his suffering was never complete; he was able to write; literature opens because of the great leap ‘the merciful surplus of strength’ permits. Now Kafka suffers from literature: he cannot bring writing to a close. He writes and seeks to give himself death, that is, the cessation of literature, in the death of his characters. But even this is deprived of him in those tales which answer to his condition. Kafka creates K., Gracchus and in so doing a literature of impossibility, of infinite suffering.

Art, for Blanchot, is linked to this impossibility, this suffering. The possibility of realising an artistic work depends upon an experience in which the artist relinquishes his or her powers and the ability to be. This is because art depends on its relation to the absence of sense, that is, to the ‘night’ beyond the day of meaning. The ‘other’ night no longer grants the rest in which the author might regain strength, but is experienced in a kind of insomnia in which the one who wakes is detached from all creative powers. Who wakes? The suffering or dying self is an analogue to the one born in insomnia. Once again it is the experience of the impossibility of initiative, of the indefinite suspension of an instant, of a movement of dying which cannot find its term. This is the self fascinated with what Blanchot calls the work, l’oeuvre. The work, now, cannot be linked with the creative will but with the dissolution of the will. The work, like dying and suffering, is workless; the attempt to answer to the work is to attest to what cannot come to light in the great day of meaning. Then the task of realising the work is impossible. Impossibility, here, is no longer understood as a logical mode, but as a kind of experience. It names an experience of the limit of human initiative in which the self becomes the site of contestation. True, the work is impossible, but it continues to happen.

This experience is not tragic if this means the great contestation of the limit of the possible through the magnificent will of the hero. Such contestation, if it occurs, happens only in the ‘other’ night and involves not so much the shattering of the self as its dispersal, such that there is no one there to be destroyed. When I say ‘I’, according to Blanchot, ‘death is already loose in the world’. And when I loose the capacity to say ‘I’? When, in the dispersal in question there is no one there, no Dasein, that is, to brace itself against the ‘other’ night?

The work brings us, the readers, into relation which what Blanchot calls worklessness, that is, to the undifferentiated chaos of the il y a. Contrary to all other human products, which are still to be understood in terms of the realisation of a possibility, the work is not testament to the creative ingenuity of the human being but to a kind of decreation, as though art brought the bad deity of Gnosticism into existence – as if it were a matter of dissolving everything fixed and determinate into a primordial chaos. But the artwork is not the black hole which would swallow up the world. The book (as opposed to what Blanchot calls the work, which might also be named worklessness or the absence of the work) exists like other items in the world; it remains a determinate object with clearly defined contours. To write a book is a real achievement; a real birth, as Kafka said of ‘The Judgement’; but the book is not the work.

Kafka writes at his desk; when he cannot write literature, he composes entries in his diary or writes letters. He releases several small volumes of his stories into the world and keeps other stories back. Kafka writes a great deal and destroys a great deal, but such destruction is not what Blanchot calls the work. Rather, the work, which is to say, worklessness, the absence of the book, can only be indicated by Kafka’s tales.

When, in The Step Not Beyond, Blanchot places the words writing and dying together, it is only to mark, in writing, the attenuation of the will. To write, to die: yes, it is possible to write as it is possible to die, only with literature, this possibility depends, in turn, upon an experience of impossibility – upon a lapse in the work of identification. What are called writing and dying are a way of marking the economy of the literary text (or, better, the relation between economy and aneconomy which happens as the work); likewise, the word work is used as a way of marking the relation to non-meaning upon which the literary work depends.[xliv]

Existence, for Heidegger, remains projective and ecstatic; it already assumes being is not a burden. Or rather, even as it admits it, even as Heidegger invokes the ‘burdensome character of Dasein’[xlv] which pushes Dasein ‘to take things lightly and make them light’[xlvi], he still permits the freedom of ecstasis. Dying is an event which cannot complete itself; it cannot, indeed, be localised as an event. It is an interruption or discontinuity, a suspension or reduction without subject. Who is the ‘subject’ of dying? No one. Personne. There is no ‘I’ to be there; no one who possesses initiative. It is here the relation to being reveals itself as the impossible. But to claim ‘being is impossible’, as Blanchot sees after The Space of Literature, still grants too much; it is necessary to underscore the way the account of Levinasian-Blanchotian ‘dying’ and ‘suffering’ breaks with ontology altogether.

Neither death, as Blanchotian dying, nor writing, as it names the relation to the work, can be grasped as a completed event, as the cadaver or the book. Dying and writing defer completion without simply inserting themselves into the temporal order. They Without content, without shape, without form or punctuality, they might be said to happen in the infinitive, if this names a verb which marks a process that cannot be terminated and which does not require a subject. It is a question, rather, of an impersonal ‘il’ without tense. Worklessness is always to come; it never arrives. The absence of the book is never something that happens now. Writing itself, insofar as it is linked to what Blanchot calls the book, has never happened.

To write, to die: how does suffering bear writing? In his famous reflections in The Space of Literature, Blanchot argues I cannot plan to kill myself – the instant stretches forever; I cannot die in the present. Death, on this account, is ungraspable. Preparing to commit suicide, I assume that death is an event in the world. Kafka makes the same mistake when he claims to die content in the death of his characters: he seeks to be intimate with death. The artist plans something which cannot be planned and tests his resolute will against what paralyses that will. The suicide ‘takes one death for another’, the artist ‘takes a book for the work’.[xlvii] Both seek to render the impossible possible, to gain power in the realm of the powerless. Both, furthermore, experience ‘a radical reversal’.[xlviii] The writer writes in order to be able to die, but the power to write, to determine a work depends upon his relation to death. This is the paradox: ‘if Kafka goes toward the power of dying through the work which he writes, the work itself is by implication an experience of death which he apparently has to have been through already in order to reach the work and, through the work, death’.[xlix] The artist no longer receives his identity through writing. To write is to become ‘il’ to the extent that the writer is related to an event which cannot be brought about or identified. The writer is the one who, by writing, produces nothing. This is what is unbearable for Kafka and is why he dreams of coming to death in the death of his characters.

Write to be able to die – but dying is an experience of the impossible. Know that to write is not to receive your identity through writing, but rather to experience the infinite referral of identity. Know the books you have written cannot save you from writing, and all those you will write cannot bring any closer to you the absence of the book they reach toward. Die to be able to write – but know, too, that the capacity to die will fail you and you will have to relinquish your propriety over what you took to be your work. The hypostasis which permits you to work, to gather yourself up, to clear some space and time to begin is suspended.

The merciful surplus of strength delivers Kafka over to literature; he revels in his powers. In Blanchot’s words, death is possible; Kafka finishes literary works. But then Kafka is drawn, too, to an impossible death, a dying – his work is magnetised by the demand that Kafka sacrifice his power to determine in order to lay hold of what he is: a writer, a literary writer. Die to be able to write; write to be able to die: ‘Kafka's heroes carry out their actions in death's space, and that it is to the indefinite time of “dying” that they belong’; it is this context Blanchot will also invoke Kierkegaard’s ‘sickness unto death’.[l]

In The Sickness Unto Death, written by the ‘higher’ pseudonym Anti-Climacus as in others by Kierkegaard, the task is to delineate what it means to become a self; it is necessary to actualise what you are as yet only in potential.[li] To become a self is a matter of relating the two sides of the human being, of reconciling the finite and the temporal with the infinite and the eternal; the physical and the necessary with the psychical and freedom. This is possible only through despair [fortvivlelse].[lii]

In the first kind of despair, there is only a negative relationship between these two poles – we might recognise the form of existence with characterises the aesthetical sphere. A choice is necessary in order to step into the ethical sphere; one must choose oneself, drawing upon a freedom hitherto unsuspected. In this way, the two sides of the human being are dynamically joined: a self is born in their union. Whence Judge William’s admonishment to the aesthete in Either/Or: choose yourself. But then Kierkegaard shows us that the Judge, who presents himself as one who has made a choice (who has chosen to choose himself) does not grasp the origin of this capacity. The self does not give birth to itself; it is not born through an act of will. If it produces itself, it is only by actualising a latent self-relation. But the relation itself was created; it owes itself to a transcendent source. To step into the religious sphere is possible only insofar as the self relates to God. God was there before [ante] everything. The self achieves itself in this relation and is thus free to be itself.

To remain in despair, according to Anti-Climacus, is to forgo this possibility. Despair happens when the self does not relate to itself properly as a self. Only the religious sphere is without misrelation. Misrelation, then, is irresoluteness: the inability to decide, to leap ahead. But what if one cannot become a self through an act of resolve? What if resoluteness itself fails, or meets with no help from above? What if the self itself dissolves in an experience of the infinite? Then the relation that would allow one to leap out of despair is subject to an indefinite detour and it is as if God had a demonic double. This, perhaps, is the 'doubling' that only the doubter (the despairer) experiences: the bifurcation which makes the leap of faith the death leap. For the Christian, one might die to one's old life and be reborn; dying is a passageway. But for the non-Christian there is through this leap only a deepening of the misrelation, only a deeper despair, in which the terms are set apart forever. Only the Christian, according to Anti-Climacus, can understand the significance of the sickness unto death and can be led from despair to be born anew. Some types of aesthetic despair involve an attempt to overcome despair, to die to it, without this ever being possible. It remains a sickness unto death – a dying without terminus.

Kafka cannot make the leap. This, indeed, is another way to understand Kafka’s despair: he cannot make the step through which he would receive by writing what he had lost in life. When he leaps into literature, the suffering with which he began is as though bracketed. Now a new suffering begins: the sickness without end, the sickness which aims at death but never reaches it. Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering: but what does he receive by way of this writing? What is his consolation? Now we come to the great motif of repetition as it is explored by Kierkegaard in Repetition and Fear and Trembling.

Repetition comprises general reflections by one Constantine Constantius and the letters written to Constantius by a young man. We learn from those letters that the young man fell in love, but that no relationship was established between him and his beloved. Who is it he adores? The young man appears to adore adoration; the ‘object’ of his love is loved only because she enables him to love. He loves her as the occasion of his love; this is what he understands when he loses her. As such, she was nothing; if he had written of her, writing out of his adoration, it was only to determine her as the focus of his capacity for loving. She was ideal, not real; as the object of his love, as his beloved, she existed only as an archetype belonging to an eternal past.

As such, the young man is linked to her by recollection [Erindring].[liii] That is to say, he has not reached her; recollecting, he plunges into himself; he is lost. His relation to the beloved is a pseudo-relation, or at least it is one which falls, with him, into his past and to the ceaseless recollection of an archetype which inhabits the past. But then the young man wonders whether this experience is a kind of ordeal – perhaps, he wonders, it is analogous to the trials of Job. Didn’t Job receive everything anew after his test? He kept faith – if he had 7,000 sheep before his trial, he had 14,000 after; if he had 500 yoke of oxen beforehand he had 1000 after. Remembering the time when Job was rebuked in the form of a thunderstorm, the young man writes, ‘I am waiting for a thunderstorm – and for repetition’.[liv] What does he want? To receive himself anew.

What has he lost? His own past, his own future. Better: he has lost possibility, the chance of transformation. And what does he seek? Repetition [gjentagelsen]: to take his life again – to receive it anew.[lv] He wants possibility – he wants the momentum which will carry him into the future. This is how he would break from recollection. And break he does (or at least this is what we learn from his correspondent, Constantius, who later claims that the young man was a fiction, his own creation. Do not believe him. For they are both diners and discussants, as real as one another, at the symposium in the first part of Stages on Life’s Way.)

Kierkegaard will go on to claim the original state precedes the original sin. The relationship to God is received anew through the incarnation and atonement of Jesus Christ. This would be the Christian repetition – the restoration – to which the repetition for which the young man strives can only approximate.

Kierkegaard may have thought he could win back his former fiancée at the time he wrote Repetition, but he learnt, as he finished it, that she was engaged. He ripped up the last pages of Repetition and rewrote them, making the young man discover his beloved is engaged and rejoice in that fact. Is it this which makes Repetition so peculiar? In one draft, Kierkegaard had meant the young man to commit suicide. This would have been more satisfying although the book would be less of an enigma. No longer brought to term through a suicide, it is transformed into a text, like Kafka’s, written in death’s space. Loving becomes a synonym for dying, for writing.

The young man writes: ‘I am myself again. Here I have repetition; I understand everything, and life seems more beautiful to me than ever. It did indeed come like a thunderstorm’.[lvi] Then he didn’t achieve repetition by establishing a real relationship with his beloved, who was already lost to him. What he was seeking and what he found was himself – the one for whom possibility was possible. But this does not convince. Perhaps it was that the young man wanted his beloved before he wanted himself; what he sought, first of all, a relation that was not a self-relation. He looked for a newness or novelty that would come from without – the shattering experience of the Other – and the book should have ended, perhaps, with this experience or his suicide. Who is the Other? His beloved? God? Constantius comments that if the young man were religious, he would never have become a poet. But what kind of judge is Constantius, whose name suggests the inability of movement, of momentum, of transformation?

The young man, by contrast, is nameless. He has no name, it is suggested, because he can find no purchase either on the present nor the future. He is not-yet, pure potential. But when he regains the power to repeat – when repetition allows him to enter, once again, the economy of possibility – one might think he would regain his name, too. Kierkegaard’s text doesn't tell us; the young man disappears from the stage. One might wonder, however, whether there is a repetition which reaches beyond both recollection and the pristine innocence which is recovered in the relationship to God – a non-Christian repetition, then, that would restore not a name, but a namelessness, not possibility, but impossibility. There is a thunderstorm without cease from which no deliverance comes.

Such would be the repetition of the suspension of the instant (the time of the absence of time) to which literary writing is linked. It is not just that Kafka is now as though alienated by the words he uses – as if he could simply keep silent like the Abraham of Fear and Trembling. There is no escape. Yet as Blanchot argues, writing is also linked to the repetition of the experience of the origin as it deprives the self of initiative, the capacity to begin and the ability to be able – of a different thunderstorm, then, the thundering silence of a murmuring without term. It is by this silence that the author loses her name and the signature she appends to the finished work is made to tremble. Giving itself over and again is an experience which deprives her from even the power to remember. Language is not hers; within language, repeating itself, is the experience which deprives her of her name.

What is the meaning of the thunderstorm? Repetition brings only disappointment, failure with respect to what can be said. Who speaks when repetition speaks? No one. Personne. Repetition erodes the position, the being-there of the writer. The finite cannot reintegrate the infinite, the temporal cannot reconcile itself with the eternal, the psychical does not dominate the physical – the writer endures an endless misrelation, a necessary dying, which cannot be reconciled with the freedom of to write. There is only despair and the return of despair – the sickness unto death of the one who would accomplish writing as a task like other tasks in the world.[lvii]

Kafka the failure, the one who places everything to sacrifice without wanting anything in return, is the young man of Repetition who writes to receive himself anew without receiving anything. He is, too, the aesthete of Either/Or who foregoes the chance to choose himself and the atheist lost in despair described in The Sickness Unto Death: Kafka has faith only in a writing he cannot achieve; he writes, but the ‘merciful surplus of strength’ can never carry him to the hither side of writing. ‘What would the testing of Abraham be, if having no son, he were nevertheless required to sacrifice his son? He couldn’t be taken seriously; he could only be laughed at’.[lviii] ‘That laughter’, writes Blanchot, ‘is the form of Kafka’s pain’; only this is a pain which has transmuted itself and become literature.[lix] ‘Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering’.[lx] But this is his vigilance: Kafka’s text watches over his pain; Blanchot, vigilant in turn, repeats the vigilance of Kafka’s writings in his own commentaries.

One might suspect that in writing of Kafka’s pain Blanchot is doing exactly the same as these commentators by rendering The Castle an allegory of Kafka’s life. But this is not the case. Blanchot is writing of what literature demands – of a pain which is specific to literary creativity. If Blanchot tells us of Kafka’s vicissitudes this is with the aim of allowing them to indicate the vicissitudes of literature (Kafka also suffers from literature); he moves not from literature to biography, but from biography to literature, narrating Kafka’s life as Silentio does Abraham’s. This time, however, Blanchot does not celebrate a knight of faith, but a knight of bad faith who can never understand what it is he has wagered nor what he has wagered it for. Kafka is marked by the despair of an endless misrelation – his is a Gracchus-like wandering which leads him to unfold text after text, some complete and some incomplete, but all strangely full, saturated with a voice that bears upon the condition of narrative.

Misrelation, sickness unto death, fruitless repetition: this is Kafka’s experience. But how is this suffering marked in the text itself? What traces does it leave such that Blanchot can retrace them to the experience where it is not a matter so much of the death of the author, but that of dying upon which his capacity to write must also refer: to the strange intertwining of dying and death? It is a question of what Blanchot will call symbolic reading, which he contrasts to that of allegory.

*

Everyday talk, Blanchot writes, has as its ideal the dream of pure communication; words, here, are ‘no more than ghosts, absences of words’; they are signs, indifferent tokens, whose own sonority and rhythm matters little.[lxi] In literature, language is no longer able to present itself simply as the sign of absent or imagined things. To read literature allegorically, according to Blanchot’s understanding of the word, is to suppose the story itself were a sign of something else – that the real story is elsewhere and this one, the one we are reading, is of no consequence in itself. In this sense, allegorical reading approximates to the relation to language present in ordinary communication. If I ask you to pass the salt it is for the most part what is signified by this expression rather than the way I say it that is important.

What Blanchot calls symbolic reading reaches beyond itself, but not by presenting itself in its entirety as a sign; indeed, it is just such signification it seeks to avoid. Imagination becomes symbolic, Blanchot writes, when

the image it seeks, the figure not of such-and-such a thought but of the tension of the entire being to which we carry each thought, is as if immersed in the totality of the imaginary world: it implies an absolute absence, a counterworld that would be like the realisation, in its entirety, of the fact of being outside reality.[lxii]

So it is that as it were behind the details of the story, something else is indicated:

On one hand, it is made of events, details, gestures: it shows faces, the smiles on faces, a hand that takes a spoon and carries it to the mouth, crumbs of plaster that fall from the wall when someone climbs it. These are insignificant details, and the reader does not have to seek or receive meaning from them. They are nothing but particularities, worthless moments, dust of words. But on the other hand, the symbol announces something, something that surpasses all these details taken one by one and all these details taken together, something that surpasses itself, that refuses what it claims to announce and discredits it and reduces it to nothing. It is its own emptiness, the infinite distance that it cannot interpret or touch, a lacunar immensity that excludes the boundaries from which the symbol endeavours to make this infinite distance appear.[lxiii]

The details of the story are not there to contribute to the verisimilitude of the story, fleshing out a world which is never substantial enough. Symbolic literature is not content with narrating a story which takes place in the world and remains in the world. There is an absence, a lack beyond the fullness of narrative incident. What characterises the symbolic story, Blanchot writes, is that ‘it makes out of the lack of its story the subject of its story, it tries to realise in it this lack that always infinitely surpasses it’.[lxiv]

The symbolic tale aims not to retrace a narrative, but to indicate its negation. This is not simply the erasure of a story, but the story of an erasure, as though at one and the same time, the story were possible and impossible. The symbol might be said to join the story to the absence of a story; the events, gestures and details are not signs which point to a signified, but indications of something which does not offer itself to signification. The lack that is thus foregrounded is what makes Hegel’s account of symbolic art peculiarly apposite.

Hegel says of symbolic art that its principal fault is Unangemessenheit: the exteriority of the image and its spiritual content do not succeed in coinciding fully, the symbol remains inadequate. Undoubtedly, but this fault is the essence of the symbol, and its role is to send us endlessly back to the lack that is one of the ways by which it would like to make us experience lack in general, emptiness in its entirety. The symbol is always an experience of nothingness, the search for a negative absolute, but it is search that does not succeed, an experience that fails, without this failure being able to acquire a positive value.[lxv]

What, then, does the symbolic story seek? The negative absolute? Art, as Hegel explains in his lectures on aesthetics, is the sensuous appearance of the Idea.[lxvi] What does this mean? The painter lifts her subjects out of prosaic, everyday life, elevating the instant into a kind of eternity. ‘Natural’ time and space are overcome. The vitality and dynamism of the painting answers the wholeness of our experience in its unity and coherence, celebrating the richness of life in its free movement. The shining forth of the underlying unity and harmony passed over in everyday life is presented in sensuous form. Presented thus, the subject of art is disinterested; it allows a contemplative detachment of the Absolute. As such, the Absolute is never, for Hegel, an empty beyond, a Jenseits beyond experience; it unfolds from experience. The philosophy of Absolute Spirit articulates this explication, attending to art, alongside religion and philosophy, as a mode of meaning.

But for Hegel, the epoch in which art can be said to reveal the Absolute has passed. The typology of art begins with symbolic art, which Hegel associates with that the ancient Orient, in particular the Egyptians, who represented their beliefs through animal symbols. The Symbolic work of art presents us with what remains indefinite and opaque. By contrast, the classical work of art, exemplified in the statues of Greek gods, joins the human and divine in sensuous unity. With the Greeks, the sensuous is transformed as the self articulates and objectifies itself as Spirit. The self does not lose itself in sensuousness, but rediscovers itself in its objectification as a statue of a human being, which is why Greek statuary is so important to Hegel. The sensuous can now shine forth as Spirit and leave behind its crude, unformed materiality. A statue is not bare marble and a poem is not sheer sonorousness. The marble and sonorousness are idealised; the concrete is thereby lifted from itself as it discloses its content by way of the sensuous. The Ideal names nothing other than this: it is the way the Idea presents itself sensuously, in the transformation of matter as it is shaped by artistic activity.

With the Greeks, the Idea is immanent in the Ideal; art clearly constitutes an autonomous sphere of meaning. Romantic art, which follows the rise of Christianity, attends to an inwardisation which Classical art does not; the infinite is not the amorphous materiality of Symbolic art; nor indeed is it embodied in the perfect form of Greek statuary. The infinite has been inwardised; Spirit discloses itself just such an inwardisation. With Romanticism, the balance struck with classical Greek art has been lost; the artwork can no longer be regarded as an end in itself. While art brought the gods into the presence of the Greeks, Christian spirituality outstrips it in its emphasis on the inwardness of the soul. As such, art falls behind religion as a form of Absolute Spirit. The inward turn of Christian spirituality is superseded once again as philosophy comes to itself as the final form of Absolute Spirit. Philosophy, according to Hegel, succeeds religion; Romantic art succeeds Classical art, which, in turn, supersedes Symbolic art.

Why then does Blanchot think the negative absolute in terms of the symbol? It may seem he retreats to an older, pre-Hegelian sense of the absolute as an empty beyond. But if the negative absolute indicates such a Jensheit, only it is one which is, as it were, ‘within’ experience. Blanchot no longer celebrates the Idea as it shines through aesthetic sensuousness, but emphasises the weight, density and materiality of matter as it refuses dialectical development. The sensuous is no longer idealised, but falls back to an unformed materiality from which Hegelian art was able to lift itself.

If Blanchot writes of the image, he does not follow Hegel’s modified conception of the way in which the image, or sensuous shape of the artwork is brought together with the Idea in the Ideal. For Hegel, image and original (the Idea) come together; the artistic whole is such that it cannot be broken into its constituents without losing the shining of the Ideal. Yet for Blanchot, the image, the materiality of the work, outplays the Idea, refusing reconciliation and peaceful repose in the Ideal.

What does that mean? Is Blanchot claiming for art the capacity to direct access to the immediate? If so, he risks retreating to a position Hegel exposed as hopelessly naïve? When Blanchot writes of the immediate it is to evoke the excessiveness of materiality, of sensuousness, over form, which is to say, the self-articulation of the Idea. This excessiveness resists the good infinite of the work of art as it gathers up the apparently arbitrary and contingent, binding them in such a form that the truth of the whole becomes visible in the concreteness of the artwork. The bad infinite of sensuousness unbound from the Idea cannot be understood as part of the positive sense of the whole. It repeats itself by affirming the neutral double of the world, the dimension of materiality which resists the light of meaning and truth.

Thus it is that the symbolic tale evidences the demand of the symbol – the demand, that is, of a universal negation not, as Blanchot emphasises, ‘as an abstract universal but as a concrete emptiness, a realised universal emptiness’.[lxvii] Symbolic literature does not seek so much to realise a world as to derealise it, to press upon the reader the experience of the failure of signification. The work is not a finished masterpiece that would celebrate the movement of life, but a black hole, a point of infinite density which draws the reader across its event horizon.

How should one understand this? ‘Any possible world’, writes Maurice Natanson in his account of the relationship between phenomenology and literature, has a ‘horizonal character’; that is to say, it is delimited. ‘For something to be “in” the world means that we can grasp it through the primal horizon of its being’; what we experience is more or less familiar, more or less strange to each of us, but it remains intraworldly.[lxviii] Blanchot, by contrast, argues that with a certain literary fiction, this horizon cannot be drawn; there is another distribution of the familiar and the strange. Natanson insists ‘A thing or event, then, is horizonal at the outset. For something to be or to transpire is for it to have regional or zonal character’; Blanchot suggests that the things or events that come forward to us in fiction have a fragmentary character.[lxix]

For Roman Ingarden, whose classic phenomenological studies of literature Natanson recalls, the reader attempts to concretise what she reads. The declarative sentence in the novel is only, he claims, a pseudo-statement. To read is to fill out what is read by comparing it to our experience of the world. Thus it is we become frustrated watching an adaptation of our favourite book – when, for example, Anthony Perkins plays Joseph K., and Orson Welles takes the role of the advocate. This is not to give the determination of the literary work of art over to the will of the reader, but to claim that the work lives by lending itself to such concretisation even as it withdraws from it, permitting, from its mesh of text, a million different ways of seeing K. the landsurveyor his assistants or even the castle itself.

On Ingarden’s account, a reader builds up an image of a fictional world by concretising particular clauses found in a story. For Blanchot, however, such concretisation only holds sway in ordinary speech. Ordinary speech, he argues, is close to what he calls allegory where the physical and sonorous qualities of speech falls away in favour of the meaning speech is meant to convey. In literary writing, by contrast, the relation to the text is such that those same qualities are foregrounded. It is the symbol which is the model of the reader’s relation to the text. For Blanchot, reading literature does not depend upon an animating intention; this is simply to treat literature on the model of everyday speech. What happens as the literary work resists the opening of meaning even in the midst of what makes meaning possible. This is the case even when intentionality is transmuted by Heidegger into ready-to-handedness or the understanding-of-being and set into the context of being-in-the-world.

How, then, is the text animated at all? How does it come to mean? It is not that it resists the economy of meaning altogether but that it withdraws from meaning even as it offers itself to it, which is to say, it both grants the possibility of interpretation and withdraws from that possibility.[lxx] This may seem analogous to Ingarden’s argument, but in fact it inverts it. What, for Blanchot, is encountered with the literary work is not simply the donation of sense which would animates the fictional world of the book, but the senselessness which prevents this animation. The book is not alive but undead; if it appears to live, it does so only as a simulacrum of life. Indicated in the letter of its text is the same absence of the world one experiences in suffering, affliction or weariness.

Art is the shattering of the horizon of the world. Understood from Hegel’s perspective, the passage of Absolute Spirit is reversed. The sensuous is no longer illuminated by the light of the Idea. No inward turn separates Romantic art from Greek art; likewise, Greek art only delimits what happens in the event of the work Blanchot describes. All art is Egyptian; the infinite cannot be inwardised, but escapes the economy of interiority. From the perspective of phenomenology, the neutral double of the fictional world turns intentionality back upon itself. Meaninglessness presses forward in the very meaning of the literary work.

Here, the stakes of the repetition to which literature is linked cannot be confined to aesthetics alone. Blanchot is true to Surrealism insofar as literary writing is, for him, a mode of research in which it is thinking in the broadest sense that is at issue. To claim, as I will now show, that reading literature can be thought by analogy to the phenomenological reduction is also to claim that a practice analogous to phenomenology is born in Blanchot’s account of literature.

*

In the first volume of the Ideas, Husserl expounds his notion of the phenomenological reduction, understood as a suspension of judgment with regard to the existence of that which is taken to exist. The reduction, Husserl writes, leads to a reversal in ‘the sense commonly expressed in speaking of being […] the being which is first for us is second in itself; that is, it is what it is, only in “relation” to the first’.[lxxi]

In his dissertation, which bears the strong influence of Heidegger, Levinas argues against what he takes to be Husserl’s excessive theoreticism.

Yet it seems that man suddenly accomplishes the phenomenological reduction by a purely theoretical act of reflection on life. Husserl offers no explanation for this change of attitude and does not even consider it a problem. Husserl does not raise the metaphysical problem of the situation of the Homo philosophus.[lxxii]

Or, once again,

By virtue of the primacy of theory, Husserl does not wonder how this ‘neutralisation’ of our life, which nevertheless is still an act of our life, has its foundation in life…. The freedom and the impulse which lead us to reduction and philosophical intuition present by themselves nothing new with respect to the freedom and stimulation of theory. The latter is taken as primary, so that Husserl gives himself the freedom of theory just as he gives himself theory. Consequently, despite the revolutionary character of the phenomenological reduction, the revolution which it accomplishes is, in Husserl’s philosophy, possible only to the extent that the natural attitude is theoretical.[lxxiii]

This theoreticism is what Heidegger would resist when he reconsiders the ‘sum’ of Dasein’s existence as part of his inquiry into the meaning of being, according to Levinas. Husserl, according to Heidegger, has failed to grasp the significance of the ego sum; it remains to plunge Dasein back into the world. The existential analytic would attempt to retrieve the being of the self, of Dasein, from its metaphysical appropriation. For Levinas, there is still a question of how one attains that position from which it is possible to philosophise, thus breaking from the ‘natural attitude’ which has a similar structural role to the analyses of Das Man in Being and Time.

What is left of the reduction in Heidegger is no longer understood as a reflection on the experiences delivered up by the exploration of intentionality. Affects ‘assail Dasein in its unreflecting devotion of the “world”’.[lxxiv] Indeed, affectedness allows things to show up as phenomena – ‘existentially, Befindlichkeit implies a disclosive submission to the world out of which we can encounter something that matters to us. Indeed from the ontological point of view we must leave the primary discovery of the world to bare mood’.[lxxv] Moods come and go, taking determinate objects. What is singular about anxiety (and later boredom) for Heidegger is that it has no particular object and is directed towards Dasein’s being-in-the-world as such. Moreover, the fundamental mood of anxiety opens within everydayness such Dasein can come to itself as it breaks with the net of involvements with things and persons in which it is caught.

This is what remains of the Husserlian reduction: the world is revealed in the fundamental mood of anxiety as it deprives beings of their familiar places and functions in Dasein’s world. No longer are beings ready-to-hand, placed at our disposal. Dasein breaks from its involvement with intramundane things; they lose all significance. For anxious Dasein, the world ‘has the character of completely lacking significance’.[lxxvi] Yet even as it does so, things in the world come forward without the animation of Dasein’s tasks and projects as though they were no longer ‘existed’ by the ek-static projection of Dasein. But anxiety also as it were reduces Dasein to itself, wrenching it from the idle chatter and aimless curiosity which prevents it from ever grasping itself as an individual. As disclosing, anxiety reveals to Dasein the possibility that it might exist authentically; now it has the chance to become what it already is at an existential level: a self.

It may seem Dasein thereby arrives in the experience Blanchot places at the heart of his account of suffering: it becomes no one in particular as it loses grip on what is conventionally assumed to be its identity. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger focuses on the expression, ‘es ist einem langweilig’ in order to comment upon the Grundstimmung of boredom, which in plays the same role as anxiety in his writings and lectures of previous years.[lxxvii] As William Large comments, ‘Es’ and ‘Einem’ are both neutral, es being a ‘dummy subject’ which, in this expression, refers to the world as such, but not to any particular person or thing in this world, rather a world where everything has dissolved in the same of fog of indifference’.[lxxviii] Likewise, einem no longer refers to a specific person; for Heidegger, profound boredom happens ‘not to me as me’, Heidegger says, ‘not to you as you, not to us as us, but to someone’.[lxxix] Yet the fundamental mood of boredom still permits one to choose oneself. This is because of the fundamental reflexivity which, for Heidegger, is built into Dasein at an existential level: its selfhood. This reflexivity depends in turn on the structure which, Levinas claims, is the organising principle of Heideggerian thought. It is in terms of the suspension of this reflexivity that Blanchot’s account of suffering and literature might be understood.

*

In Time and the Other, Levinas writes, discussing the difference between being and beings: ‘in Heidegger there is a distinction, not a separation. Existing is always grasped in the existent, and for the existent that is a human being. The Heideggerian term Jemeinigkeit precisely expresses the fact that existing is always possessed by someone’.[lxxx]

What does this mean? Heidegger explains how the things themselves are bound up with the way in which they are encountered and used in the everyday, familiar environment [Umwelt] that forms the context of Dasein’s existence. Understanding is therefore automatic and tacit, involving a grasp of a given situation that allows Dasein to know what to do there. Things are first experienced within a pre-conceptual contexture, making sense in terms of the possibilities they offer for manipulation or deployment.

Thus, Dasein has from the first an interest with that with which it engages. Dasein understands things in view of certain possibilities that Dasein can fulfil. It is the preconceptual understanding-of-being which bestows Sein-können, the ‘to-be-able-to-be’ of Dasein. ‘As understanding’, Heidegger writes, ‘Dasein projects its being upon possibilities’.[lxxxi] Dasein understands things as part of those projects with which it is engaged and, more generally, as part of a broader self-understanding. The understanding-of-being is part of a ‘being towards oneself’ that, Heidegger argues, ‘constitutes the being of Dasein’.[lxxxii] As such, Dasein always and already transcends the given and projects itself towards the future. Dasein’s activities must always be grasped in terms of its overall concern for itself. Dasein is a worldly being, whose self-understanding is part of its understanding of being.

There is, as Levinas acknowledges, a difference between being and beings (or what he terms existence and existents) for Heidegger. This does not mean that existence should be understood in terms of the supreme being of the medieval theologians nor as the most empty and most universal concept that we reach by abstracting what is common to anything that exists. Nor should the difference between existence and existents be mapped onto the relationship between being and becoming, where the former is understood as what endures in the midst of the flux of the latter. Being is, as Heidegger writes in Being and Time, ‘transcendens pure and simple’, and the question of its meaning must be broached through an account of the temporal transcendence of Dasein.[lxxxiii] Being must be thought from the pre-voluntary act of surpassing which happens as the understanding of being that Dasein originally is. It must show, as the fundamental-ontological question par excellence how the understanding of being is possible. And it can only do this by laying bare and reflecting on the very mineness of Dasein, the fact that ‘the being of this being is in each case mine [je meines]’.[lxxxiv]

It is in terms of this fundamental ontology that we should understand Levinas’s claim that existing is, for Heidegger always ‘possessed’ by someone. Such ‘possession’ (Levinas’s word for what Heidegger calls Jemeinigkeit, translated by Macquarrie and Robinson as ‘mineness’) does not refer to something that belongs to one in the sense of having something as one’s own or in one’s control; I do not own being as I would a piece of property. There is, as Levinas writes, a distinction between being and Dasein and not a separation: they must be thought together. Without this distinction, Heidegger could not begin his attempt to broach the question of the meaning of being that so transforms phenomenology. ‘Dasein is an entity which, in its very being, comports itself understandingly towards that being’.[lxxxv] Dasein does not constitute being through acts of reflection; it as it were inherits being, being delivered over, abandoned or ‘thrown’ into existence. Dasein cannot, as it were, get back behind its thrownness but has to be. As Levinas puts it in his oral defence of Totality and Infinity, ‘this ‘obligation’ to be, this manner of being, is an exposition to being that is so direct that it thereby becomes mine!’[lxxxvi] It is only because Dasein is mine that there is an ‘I’.

Yet there is still a reflexivity, even if it is not that of the transcendental ego reflecting on its experience. This is indicated, Jeffrey Kosky notes, in the verb Heidegger uses to designate this primordial being-affected: sich ängstigen.[lxxxvii] Quoting Heidegger, who writes that anxiety is ‘a threat which reaches Dasein itself and which comes from Dasein itself’, Kosky comments, ‘he seems to acknowledge the existential-ontological significance of this grammatical-reflexive. In a sense, then, Dasein gives its anxiety to itself […] Dasein’s passivity is rooted in an existential and reflexive auto-affection’.[lxxxviii] Moreover, the whole account of authenticity repeats this auto-affection insofar as one gives oneself authenticity. It can do this because Dasein is ‘always mine’ even as mineness is subject to a lability.

It is this fundamental reflexivity which is undone in Levinas and Blanchot. For his part, Levinas understands existence in terms of a division: the human being is not at one with itself but is torn; it takes work and effort to remain oneself; Être is always S’être; the human being as a substantive can always collapse into being which is understood as a verb. The emphasis on project and intentionality passes over what Levinas might be understood to present as one version of the reduction: nausea (On Escape) or physical pain (Existence and Existence, Time and the Other) which Blanchot follows in his own work.[lxxxix] What does it reveal? The way in which the bond between being and beings indicated in expressions like je me suis and on s’est is suspended. The verb is attenuated, worn out; the infinite explicates itself in the finite.

It may appear Blanchot retains two versions of the reduction which are indicated in the quotation from Janouch: Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering. With regard to the first, Blanchot follows Levinas; it plays the same structural role as anxiety in Being and Time and ‘What is Metaphysics?’ with respect to the existential analytic of Dasein: that is, it reveals bare Dasein. For Blanchot and Levinas, however, it reveals an impersonal opening which no longer has the possibility of attaining authentic selfhood. In the second, Blanchot indicates a suffering born of the step into literature itself as it issues in an indeterminable speech. Le pas au-delà. The second reduction is structurally linked to the first one insofar as it is also concerned with an experience which cannot be brought to term. Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering: Kafka would then pass through a first reduction – suffering, and pass into another – literature.

Yet the separation of the first and second reduction remains too simple as long as it rests on the model of a field of emotion (suffering, loneliness, weariness) that would exist before language and which the writer, employing language as she would an instrument, would attempt to bring to expression. Writing is not such a tool. The words suffering, loneliness and weariness operate as concepts; they are inherited, along with other words, as part of our culture. Certainly, they may seem to fit with what we experience, felicitously capturing experiences hidden in the recesses of our soul. But what if those same experiences depended on those words? What if those experiences crystallised around the words themselves, accreting and coming together so they appear as nothing other than suffering, loneliness and weariness? Then it is not a question of losing something through writing, if this loss is framed in terms of the written betrayal of an experience which is completely extra-linguistic. Rather, this loss must be thought in terms of a struggle between the singularity of an experience and the words that seem to offer themselves to describe it. These words are particulars which stand beneath universals; they are conceptual.

The struggle, then, is not between language and its other, but between the singular and the particular. In this sense, it may seem there are not two reductions but only one, which is given in terms of this struggle as it is endured by the writer. The writer is the one who suffers from this struggle, who undergoes it and cannot help but undergo it. But the writer struggles as a writer, that is to say, as one who has to write. Asked in a questionnaire, ‘Why do you write? Blanchot replied: ‘I will borrow from Dr Martin Luther when at Worms, he declared his unshakability: Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. May God help me. Which I translate modestly: In the space of writing – writing, not writing – here I sit bent over, I cannot do otherwise and I await no help from the beneficent powers’.[xc] I could not do otherwise, which is to say, literature works through the writer. But even this formulation is misleading. For the writer would not be a writer without words. It is with language the writer suffers. Literature is this struggle, and not its result. It is that place of torsion from which a work is born.[xci] As such it not only occurs for a writer about whose life we can learn from biographies or literary-critics, but also for the readers who encounter the text. What Blanchot allows to be called the reduction is marked in the text as readers encounter it, the text being nothing outside such encounters. It reaches the reader in literary fiction, as I will show, in what Blanchot calls the narrative voice.

*

‘Often in a bad narrative’, Blanchot writes, ‘we have the impression that someone is speaking in the background and prompting the characters, or even the events with what they are to say: an indiscreet and awkward intrusion’: the author’s voice obtrudes, it is overbearing.[xcii] But it is in way a way analogous to this intrusion that the ‘neutralisation’ of the narrative voice reveals itself. There is, Blanchot writes, a voice which resounds outside the circle of narrative and it is as though this circle, this zone or bounded horizon, has been decentred; ‘as though the outside were precisely this centre that could only be the absence of any centre’.[xciii]

What does this mean? Blanchot reprises his reflections on the phrase ‘this merciful surplus’, taking a sentence from The Castle for his analysis. Imagine a writer, he says, writing a sentence like ‘The forces of life suffice only up to a certain point’.[xciv] Here, as before, there is a bad faith in evidence that is similar to that of the writer who writes of her loneliness or her suffering, since the writer still had energy enough to turn the exhaustion in question into an idea. What happens when it is placed in a narrative? It no longer has anything to do with the author’s life or anything outside the narration itself. Who speaks? What speaks? Neither Kafka nor one of his characters; it is, rather, it is the narrative voice which speaks, an ‘il’ without source. Who is this ‘il’? Is Kafka allegorising his life in his work? Are we to read the pages of The Castle as a veiled autobiography? Is Kafka assuming the mantle of a kind of philosopher or moralist as Brod would have it, instructing us about the necessity of loving others? To answer in the affirmative to either question would be to miss what happens in the unfolding of the narrative. The ‘il’ belongs only to the narrative. In Kafka’s The Castle, the narrative voice no longer seeks the disinterested detachment of the narrator of, say, George Eliot’s Middlemarch. There is no breathing space; we do not as readers stand apart from the text as its spectators, but are enfolded in its steady narration, the streaming of words. ‘We hear in the narrative form, and always as though it were extra, something indeterminate speaking’; something speaks without determinable contour.[xcv]

With the rise of the novel, there is a chance for the novelist to become the creator of the novel-cosmos, the disembodied, omniscient deity who is everywhere in the novel, enjoying every perspective, but who is able, nonetheless, to bind these perspectives into a single vision. The monistic vision of this kind of novel, its narrative feast, is unified in its multifariousness by the authoritative, God-like narrator. Here, the narrative voice is not simple; on the one hand, as Blanchot writes, there is ‘something to tell, the objective real such as it is immediately present to an interested gaze’; on the other, there is ‘a constellation of individual lives, of subjectivities­ – a multiple and personalised “il”, an “ego” manifest under the cloak of a “il” that is apparent’.[xcvi] The narrative voice divides itself between these perspectives.

Compare Flaubert. Kafka admires the aesthetic distance in Madame Bovary. For Kafka, it is an absolute book existing unto itself; it is disinterested; the author maintains a distance from all events and asks, in so doing, the same of his reader. Blanchot comments, ‘the ideal is still the form of representation of classical theatre: the narrator is there only to raise the curtain’; the novel is autonomous; ‘it must be left free, the props removed, the moorings cut, in order to maintain its status as an imaginary object’.[xcvii] Then for all its supposed impersonality, Madame Bovary divides itself between an ‘objective’ narrator and the characters themselves. With Kafka, by contrast,

everything is different. One of these differences is essential to the subject that concerns us. The distance is the creative disinterestedness that Flaubert struggled so hard to maintain; it is that of the writer’s and the reader’s distance from the work and authorised contemplative pleasure, now enters into the work’s very sphere in the form of an irreducible strangeness.[xcviii]

What does this mean? Blanchot: ‘in the neutral space of the narrative, the bearers of speech, the subjects of the action – those who once stood in the place of characters – fall into a relation of self-nonidentification. Something happens to them that they can only recapture by relinquishing their power to say “I”’.[xcix] Consider K. of The Castle: the landsurveyor is, above all, a man unsure of his employment, his position – he is only a man who wanders among a community to which he does not belong. What does he want? Security? But he has abandoned the country of his birth and has even forgotten this abandonment; once, he says, he was married, he had children, but now? K. is the man who has forgotten everything except his position as a landsurveyor and the rights which would accrue to him as a holder of such a position. Whilst he was once married, he has become one of Kafka's bachelors, an eternal Junggeselle, a 'young-fellow' who has not found his station.

It is a matter, for K., of working out the intentions of the denizens of the castle. What do they want with him? Can they clarify what his duties are as the new Land Surveyor? Can they reassure him that he even has this position? Was he right to think he had even been summoned to the village by the castle authorities? He seeks to confirm his station; he is a Vermesser, a surveyor, one who measures and delimits the world, and, as a commentator points out, one who presumes, sich vermessen, who causes a fuss because he will not accept his place.

When he arrives in the village, K. is confident, bold; but he is soon defeated by the distance of the castle itself (he tries to reach it on foot, but collapses, exhausted) and the inscrutability of the castle officials. K. is not the pilgrim on a steady way to his goal, but the weathervane, blown this way and then that, gaining confidence and then losing it again, hopeful and then resigned.

All along, K.’s pomposity is mocked by his assistants; their antics mimic the persistence of their master as it approaches hubris; but he, K., does not understand. His confidence withers only when K. is overwhelmed by weariness. We know, although the book was unfinished, that K. himself was meant to die. In the final lines, listening to Gerstäcker’s dying mother, it is as though K. will die of his own weariness, as if that weariness itself were infinitely attenuated, that K. himself were stretched so thinly that there is nothing of him left. It seems, in these final pages, that his defiance towards the castle and its officials has disappeared. His weariness is such that the castle can appear as what it is: co-extensive with the village, a ramshackle collection of huts, yet, for all that, the repository of an authority which remains fascinating.

Joseph K. of The Trial is more defiant than The Castle’s K. At first, he believes his own trial is singular, separable from all others because he is innocent. His trial, he supposes, may even become a test-case and he goes about the court under the impression the other accused take him to be one of the judges or magistrates. Yet he too spins from assurance to unconfidence and he, like K., will fall victim to a weariness which brings him towards a kind of resignation: to his sense that the trial was his fate and he had to recognise its necessity.

Joseph K.'s death is not tragic; he dies ‘like a dog’; he ‘perishes’ rather than ‘dies’, as Heidegger would say, contrasting such annihilation from the death of resolute and authentic Dasein. He perishes; he does not die the great death in which he runs up against his own finitude. His is not an experience so much of the limit but of the limitlessness of that limit; his death does not bring himself up against what would reveal the magnificence of human striving. Still he perishes, but even as he does so, it is as though he has to die for Kafka to end a book which would otherwise stretch for a million pages. He perishes, but The Trial, like The Castle, is unfinished and it is as though within its pages there were another story: the infinite account of K.’s own weariness, his perishing, a detour which cannot find its term in death.

Yet until his last, fatal weariness, K. moves; he is restless, and in this regard is very different from Joseph K., who felt sure of his good position as a high-ranking bank official and does not know until too late he has been thrown out of the world. Over and again he throws away whatever advantage he gained for himself. The housekeeper’s promise, the benevolence of the mayor, the offer of a job: he is suspicious of all good fortune; nothing satisfies him.

If K. chooses the impossible, it is because he was excluded from everything possible as the result of an initial decision. If he cannot make his way in the world, or employ, as he would like, the normal means of life in society, it is because he has been banished from the world, from his world, condemned to the absence of world, doomed to exile in which there is no real dwelling place.[c]

The choice and the decision had been made for K. before he crossed over the wooden bridge into the village of the castle. Who decided? Fate? is that the word? But The Castle is not a tragedy; it is not fate that will break the tragic hero or heroine against the ultimate limit. Nor is it heroic death that would confront its readers with the magnificent fragility of the human being.

K. is not a magnificent tragic hero. He is febrile, restless, he seeks, but nothing satisfies him. Would the novel have ended with him finding acceptance as a member of the village? It may appear the novel does not develop at all, simply repeating, in various forms, the impasse which was evident from its first page. Integration into the village community was impossible for K. from the start. Should K., then, defy the village, leaving it behind (at one point, he suggests to Frieda they should elope together)? Even this is impossible; K., who says, early in the novel, 'I want always to be free', is never free of his desire to receive recognition from the castle authorities. 'I want no grace and favours from the castle but my rights' he says, a little further into the book. What does he want? K. may appear to embody a new modernity: he seems to confront the castle, as Elizabeth Boa remarks, 'as an equal and critical partner'; he is, after all, the land surveyor, whose business it is to 'measure and redefine prevailing relationships'.[ci] Yet K., for Blanchot, is not the modern bourgeois; he is the one who brings himself into relation with the outside, who cannot rest; the one who could not do otherwise.

The Castle, it is often observed, is narrated exclusively from K.’s point of view.[cii] We are always sure, as readers, of what K. is thinking. And what does he think? It is always a matter of coping with the course of events; his attention is always focused on his predicament. K. thinks of nothing but the situation in which he finds himself. Except that this situation is itself without exit, absurd. Kafka’s books are labyrinths in which his characters wander until they fall down exhausted.

The drama of the novel is given in the collision between K., the man of the outside, and the implacable authorities of the castle. As a result, it can only be a matter of frustration, of the alternation between moments of grace and moments of setback. Absurdity: nothing is possible; there can be no progress, no resolution; The Castle might run on forever. It would seem Kafka intended for his hero K. to die. But Kafka is true to his suffering of literature and thus can never let K. reach death. This is why, one presumes, K. suffered a great weariness at the moment the secrets of the castle were to be vouchsafed to him. He would live on in a phantom version of Kafka's novel: a book with an infinite number of pages; a book which, somewhere, Kafka is still writing.

*

The vicissitudes of K. are only one aspect of what, for Blanchot, makes The Castle a symbolic story. ‘The symbol is always an experience of nothingness, the search for a negative absolute’, Blanchot writes.[ciii] But what does this mean? The positive absolute might be understood in term of the absolutum which Nicholas of Cusa used to name God or das Absolute of post-Kantian philosophy as it indicates what is unconditioned, self-contained and perfect. Hegel breaks from the conception of the Absolute in both cases claiming the absolute has been separated from the phenomenal world. It is necessary, for Hegel, to think the Absolute and the phenomenal world alongside the knowledge human beings have of the relationship between them. The Absolute, for Hegel, is the conceptual system which is contained by the phenomenal world as it develops and gives itself to human knowledge. This is the sense of the absolute against which Blanchot sets himself. The negative absolute of which he writes reveals itself in the details of the story. Klamm’s pince-nez, the icy light on the snow, the faces of the peasants and other details are only indications of something which cannot be directly presented. Here, the 'object' of such indications is not separate from those details in the manner of, say, Schelling's Absolute which Hegel criticises, but nor are those details merely a moment of the presentation of the Absolute to human knowledge as for Hegel. The details now resonate with an ungraspable materiality; it is as though they bring with them a vast reserve of materiality, in the manner of the heavy plinths Giacometti sometimes attached to his sculptures. The novel, in its details, indicates the impossible; it is symbolic.

Certain novels attempt to seize this shadow for itself; this, perhaps, is how The Castle gives itself to be understood. On a symbolic reading, it is a system of indices comprising specific encounters and details. The novel, one might say, is on a perpetual quest to discover its own condition of possibility. It is a story which tells its own story, which seeks to reach behind itself and seize upon its genesis – to manifest, through its details, the outside from which it sprung. The sickness unto death is not simply K.’s condition, a name for his suffering; it is the condition of the story itself.

This is what the reader experiences as she attempts to concretise the world of the novel. No longer does she find herself in the position of contemplation; she cannot identify with its events from a distance. The interest of reading vanishes. Narration might be said to reveal itself in its purity as it is detached from any particular perspective, even that of a God-like narrator. The reader is exposed to what Blanchot calls the narrative voice. What does this mean?

In the end, it is neither the characters nor the details of the story that are the source of the voice in question. The narrative voice can no longer be confined to any particular point of view; it is not one perspective among others; what it recounts is not being recounted by anyone in particular. This does not need to compromise the linearity or the continuity of the story. The voice may, for a time, possess that of a particular character, but it is never a personal voice; to call it ‘spectral, ghostlike’ is to indicate the way in which it sets itself back from the speaker whose voice it appears to grant.[civ] In Blanchot’s words, narrative accomplishes a neutralisation; commenting on the sentence from The Castle, Blanchot writes, ‘the narrative would be like a circle neutralising life, which does not mean without any relation to it, but that its relation to life would be a neutral one’.[cv] This neutralisation is a kind of withdrawal or suspension which can no longer understand in terms of meaning or lack of meaning. Rather, it opens ‘[a] reserve that exceeds every meaning already signified, without being considered either a richness or a pure and simple privation. Like a speech that does not illuminate and does not obscure’.[cvi] It is by allowing this aneconomic reserve (this negative absolute, this symbol) to resound that literature carries over the reduction Kafka experiences to the reader.

‘There is in literature an emptiness of literature that constitutes it’, Blanchot writes.[cvii] It is this same emptiness with which the reader is brought into relation by the narrative voice. What does this mean? Blanchot reminds us of Kafka’s awareness of the rabbinical traditions of commenting on the Bible; an ongoing, incompletable task. Exegesis does not precede the Book in this tradition; everything begins with the commentary that will fill many other books. It is a desire to return to a kind of originary speech which summons Kafka towards the absence of the book – an approach he makes by way of writing, only by writing. Yet K. of The Castle is not Kafka; nor is the castle itself the Biblical word. The Castle is structurally concerned with the question of writing: ‘the essential element in the narrative – that is, the essential aspect of K.’s peregrination – consists not in K.’s going from place to place, but from exegesis to exegesis and from commentator to commentator, listening to each of them with impassioned attention, then breaking in and arguing with certain turns of the Talmudic dialectic’.[cviii] The movement of The Castle is one of various exegeses, the opening of which bears upon, finally, ‘the impossibility of writing (and of interpreting) The Castle’.[cix] This is why the book cannot end. Kafka intended to have K. die. But it would be this death K. could not reach. On the last night The Castle records, K. responds to the chance of his salvation by falling asleep, as if, Blanchot suggests, this infinite weariness were the analogue of an endless speech.

Whence the temptation of the commentator to resist the literary reduction by attempting to account for a movement that is apparently magnetised by nothing determinate. Brod ‘completes’ Kafka’s The Castle in his theatrical adaptation; he writes several critical studies of the work of his friend and writes novels where Kafka appears barely disguised as ‘Garta’. Brod attempts to fill in the void which opens in Kafka’s writings the better, he thinks, to preserve their greatness. The same occurs in those readings (Brod’s amongst them) which suppose the castle of Kafka’s novel is an image of another world. True, there are always motifs of salvation in Kafka’s work, but to assume the castle – which, as the landsurveyor K. sees, is only a collection of village huts – is a symbol for a heavenly beyond is to commit the same impatience as K. Do not think K. will find what he seeks; the castle is a collection of huts and Klamm himself an ordinary man given to ordinary passions; neither the castle nor its officials are hidden. To understand them as the goal itself is to be content with intermediary figure; there is no goal, no resolution.

There is a temptation on the part of the reader to judge Brod to be Kafka’s ape, a ludicrous, capering figure. Such a reader, by insisting that the various interpretations of The Castle are ridiculous, remains secure in his good conscience: ‘I am not an ape’, he says to himself and believes he knows what this book is about: ‘it presents us with the nothingness, the absurdity of existence’. But what if another apishness, another buffoonery were also present in this interpretation? If the mesh of text we call The Castle is bound up with a gaping void, if this virtual dimension is something like the secret heart of the work which can only be covered over each time it is read and lends itself to its own dissimulation, then the book itself speaks of nothing other than itself.

One does not serve the book by making a theme of its putative nihilism, whether tentative or definitive. The book is a symbol of nothing but itself. Does this mean that commentary on The Castle – even the one I am writing now to accompany Blanchot – is impossible? But there is a kind of commentary which keeps fidelity with the void, maintaining the space or interval of literature, literature’s remove, before all other interpretations as though it stood at the door of the work knowing that it will admit no one, not even the ‘man of the country’, which is to say each of us, all of us, as we begin to read. That closed door was made for each of us, readers and writers, but remains closed to each of us in a different way. It is upon its hard surface we scratch our own interpretations of what we dream is inside.

The reader need not be the ape of the artwork, grotesquely supplementing something that is already sufficient unto itself. For some, its self-sufficiency is intolerable; the commentator is envious of what keeps the artwork closed from the world. But what of the artwork itself? To claim the artwork incarnates itself in matter, that it happens in the details of the story and the vicissitudes of its characters is to risk suggesting the work merely clothes itself in language as though it were a pure idea that had found incarnation. The temptation is to conceive the artwork like the dresser crab that seizes the ephemera from the ocean floor clothing itself in details and incidents which, in the end, are merely ornamental. But The Castle is nothing other than the characters and the details of the description even as the voice which surges through every sentence and joins the artwork to an indeterminable reserve, to what Blanchot calls the work, refuses form and presence.

The risk is the commentator, the literary critic, seeks to bind the artwork to the world, folding back the peculiar self-resembling of the artwork to show that it would speak of something other than itself. Read closely, however, and it is clear not only that such commentary happens in the work itself but, too, that that commentary is always provisional. The possibility of commentary is the possibility of an artwork. The artwork is not simply what gives itself to be repeated, it exists as its repetition. It is not only the aircrash which kills everyone on board, but the black box recorder which survives the crash. It is not only the nova, the star exploding, but the nova’s husk.[cx]

The finished artwork is already joined to the world – it means, it must mean in order to present itself to a reader. In this sense, it is only a commentary upon itself, upon the surprise of its own existence. It is its own ape, its own buffoon because it shows the work of art is nothing but a bareness, an affirmation without content, which seeks to clothe itself in order to give itself what is ultimately only the illusion of substance. The artwork happens when it is encountered, when it gives itself to be read singularly by each reader. It is as though it waited like a door which cannot be opened; what differs from reading to reading is only the physical aspect of the shut door. The artwork itself is its own commentary, its own difference and repetition, reaching its audience through the contentless repetition that it is.

The work disjoins the world from itself. To read is not to step through the mirror into a world that is like our own, but to bring oneself into relation with the absence of the world. What happens as the work is the unravelling of the world, a difference that happens in and as repetition as things give themselves to be experienced. To invert a Heideggerian formulation, it occurs as the unworlding of the world by repeating and as it were commenting upon itself each time it is encountered. This formulation is misleading, because it threatens to substantialise the ‘there is’ of the ‘there is the work’, but what formulation would suit this curious occurrence, which happens without ever hardening itself into what could properly be called an event? Better to say the work is a dissemination without determinable origin, a happening which repeats itself without determinable content. The narrative voice is this repetition, this reduction, as it happens as the work.