Nothing Is What There Is

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The disaster […] is neither noun nor verb …[i]

 According to the classical conception of the relationship between the philosopher and language he or she is obligated to use, the doctrine of the philosopher elevates itself above its expression; language is a medium, the tool that subordinates itself to the delivery of the message. On this account, there is a clearly determined relationship between the constative and the performative, the philosophical and the rhetorical, the philosophical and the poetical. Hyperbolic language of whatever kind – the flourish of the author, the vivid image, the life-giving metaphor – would be an exaggeration of a univocal philosophical language that, whilst excessive, might still be safely paraphrased. But what if this hyperbolisation resisted translation into a calmer, more philosophical idiom? What if there was a language of thought that disrupted the classical relation between philosophy and language?

At stake in Blanchot’s negotiation of the work of Levinas is, I will argue, a witnessing of a traumatic experience at the root of language that resists translation into a calmer, philosophical idiom. A writer like Levinas might seem to call for such translation; and yet as I will argue, he depends on the untranslatability of his work in order to answer to the ‘object’ of his inquiries. His account of the relation to the Other [Autrui], as I will show, calls for a philosophical discourse that would keep memory of the opening of language. It calls for a discourse that could answer the interruption that discourse bears at its origin. But Blanchot would answer an interruption that is at least as originary and does so in a way that is very different from Levinas. Blanchot shows that the articulation of Levinas’s hyperbolic philosophical discourse depends upon a preliminary disavowal. He argues that philosophical discourse, despite itself, depends on the ongoing suppression of a resistance in language that is indicated in a certain literature. To couch this relation in terms of a trauma of language, or to write of a witnessing that occurs in philosophical language is not to inappropriately anthropomorphise the text. It concerns, ultimately, something beyond the relation between texts or between two thinkers or, indeed, between philosophy and poetry. The issue in contention between Blanchot and Levinas bears upon the way in which this trauma might be said to determine the structure of language and experience.

To witness, according to our ordinary understanding of the word, is to speak or write of what one saw with one’s own eyes or heard with one’s own ears; witnessing refers to an experience of which the speaker, the writer has a firsthand knowledge. Blanchot argues that the locus of the being-present to which witnessing points is not the ‘I’, but the third person ‘il.’ Language, as I will argue, presupposes this locus. Like Freud’s account of deferred action [nachträglichkeit], the trauma at the birth of language reveals its effects only after the fact. Levinas does not disagree; his term, le Dire, the to-say or saying in Otherwise Than Being, bears a crucial reference to the expression le dire, to testify.

For both thinkers, then, language witnesses. Where Levinas and Blanchot differ is in their determination of this witnessing.

*

Saying, for Levinas, withholds itself from the order of the said [le dit], that is, of language understood as the medium through which a message would deliver itself. Understood as the said, language always confers ideality on the given, subsuming, gathering phenomena. The noun identifies beings, proclaiming a given as this or that, thereby fixing and immobilising it, stabilising it as an experience. But there is also, according to Levinas, a verbal sense of language. In one sense, the verb might be said to bear witness to the fluency of things, to their temporality. But as it answers to being, to the interesse of the verb, it passes into the suspension or reduction Blanchot places at the heart of his work. No longer is it a question of temporality, but of the interruption of temporality. The interesse of the verb is infinitely attenuated; the tautology of being can no longer accomplish itself.

For Levinas, verbality resounds in poetry, in song as it redoubles the sonority and fluidity of things. Yet the attenuation to which it leads is never grasped until Blanchot. This is the role Levinas allots the work of his friend in Totality and Infinity: ‘We have thus the conviction of having broken with the philosophy of the Neuter: with the Heideggerian being of the existent [l’être de l’étant] whose impersonal neutrality the critical work of Blanchot has so much contributed to bring out’.[ii] Blanchot’s criticism brings out the attenuation of the verb – one which, since he misses the conditions of the genesis of Dasein, Heidegger does not grasp. The relation between being and beings, in Heidegger, is rethought as that between the ‘there is’ and beings, existence without existents and existents, the verb and the noun. This series of paired terms must be thought together. The il y a is not existence without existents, sheer chaos, however Levinas might present it. He remains a post-Heideggerian philosopher. Verbality attests to being as it unfolds, giving itself to be experienced, but this does not mean that things escape nominalisation and hence dissimulation. The thing cannot escape the schematisation that occurs in the order of the said. Yet it continues to resist; the verb exceeds the noun, mineness is suspended.

Saying, for Levinas, precedes the verbality that would reveal the sonority of things. How is this possible?

*

Witnessing, in Levinas’s Otherwise Than Being rests on a paradox. Saying is the response of the ‘I’ to the Other, an empty, wordless acknowledgement, an opening or exposition upstream of the ‘content’ of any message. It reveals itself only in ‘the sound of my voice or the movement of my gestures’.[iii] Language is not, primordially, a matter of content or information, but is born in the order of the traumatic, to a vulnerability or openness to the Other.

The encounter with the Other does not belong to the order of the recallable, recountable experience; it resists the synthesis that would incorporate it into the identity of the ‘I’. At the same time, it is visceral, wounding, evidencing not just a limit in the progression of incorporation and identification, but a structural unknown, an experience that resists memorisation.

It is in this sense that saying might be said to be immediate. Levinas writes of ‘the immediacy of the other, more immediate still than immediate identity in its quietude as a nature – the immediacy of proximity’.[iv] How should one understand this? The experience in question is not an encounter with an object like other objects. ‘The immediacy on the surface of the skin characteristic of sensibility, its vulnerability, is found as it were anaesthetised in the process of knowing. But also, no doubt, repressed or suspended’.[v] And yet, at the same time, this immediacy, the encounter with the Other, is claimed to bestow the possibility of knowledge and language.

Commenting on Levinas’s thought, Blanchot writes:

When Levinas defines language as contact, he defines it as immediacy, and this has grave consequences. For immediacy is absolute presence – which undermines and overturns everything. Immediacy is the infinite, neither close nor distant, and no longer the desired or demanded, but violent abduction – the ravishment of mystical fusion. Immediacy not only rules out all mediation; it is the infiniteness of a presence such that it can no longer be spoken of, for the relation itself, be it ethical or ontological, has burned up all at once in a night bereft of darkness. In this night there are no longer any terms, there is no longer a relation, no longer a beyond – in this night God himself has annulled himself.

Or, one must manage somehow to understand the immediate in the past tense. This renders the paradox practically unbearable. Only in accordance with such a paradox can we speak of disaster.[vi]

Levinas’ appeal to immediacy is not a new kind of empiricism that would remain in the field of facts. Nor is it the expression of a classical transcendentalism since it depends not on the a priori structure of the subjectivity of the autonomous subject, but on the visceral, concrete heteronymous experience of the Other. Language is bestowed behind the back of the autonomous subject. As such, saying attests to an enigma, to a past that has never occurred as an object of experience, to an event that escapes any retrospective synthesis. As Blanchot comments, ‘We can no more think of the immediate than we can think of an absolutely passive past’.[vii] And yet, at the same time, it is necessary to remember this past, to bear the unbearable. At the heart of Otherwise Than Being, Blanchot discerns, is a paradoxical witnessing of the ‘there is’ of language that is the condition of possibility of language and of Levinasian ethics.

Blanchot does not aim to hold open the openness of saying as an openness to the Other in its salutation, in the witnessing it occasions, but to disclose the opening of a witnessing which is bound, as I will argue, to what Levinas calls verbality. The primal scene of The Writing of the Disaster can be read, as I will suggest now, as just such a witnessing.

*

(A primal scene?) You who live later, close to a heart that beats no more, suppose this: the child – is he seven years old, or eight perhaps? – standing by the window, drawing the curtain and through the pane, looking. What he sees: the garden, the wintry trees, the wall of a house. Though he sees, no doubt in a child’s way, his play space, he grows weary and slowly looks up toward the ordinary sky, with clouds, grey light – pallid daylight without depth.

What happens then: the sky, the same sky, suddenly open, absolutely black and absolutely empty, revealing (as though the pane had broken) such an absence that all has since always and forevermore been lost therein – so lost that therein is affirmed and dissolved the vertiginous knowledge that nothing is what there is, and first of all nothing beyond. The unexpected aspect of this scene (its interminable feature) is the feeling of happiness that straightaway submerges the child, the ravaging joy to which he can bear witness only by tears, an endless flow of tears. He is thought to suffer a childish sorrow; attempts are made to console him. He says nothing. He will live henceforth in the secret. He will weep no more.[viii]

How might one read this fragment? It begins with a parenthesised allusion to the notion of the primal scene in Freud. In ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’, the so-called ‘Wolf Man’, it is claimed to refer to a scene of parental intercourse witnessed by a boy too young to frame and thereby understand that experience. Freud wonders whether the one-and-a-half-year-old witness ‘could be in a position to take in the perceptions of such a complicated process and to preserve them so accurately in his unconscious’; nevertheless, he insists that what was traumatising in the observation of parental intercourse ‘was the conviction of the reality of castration’.[ix] The traumatising scene can only be interpreted as an experience long after it occurred, that is, when the child is old enough to have interpreted what happened to him. It is ruled, to this extent, by the logic of deferred action [nachträglichkeit].[x]

Blanchot comments that the experience in question can only be endured as if one had ‘always already lived it, lived it as other and as though lived by another, consequently never ever living it but reliving it again, unable to live it’.[xi] These lines resonate with other passages in The Writing of the Disaster upon which I have commented. The ‘primal scene’ that precedes the formation of the first person, that is, of the self confident in his or her powers, who is capable of remembering and forgetting, recalls the unbearable paradox of witnessing in Levinas. Strikingly, it is presented by Freud as a scene of witnessing and trauma.

In the ‘Wolf Man’, Freud wonders whether the primal scene need refer to an actually occurring event – a real act of witnessing. At the same time, he also appears confident that he has brought the mystery of the scene in this particular case study to expression, showing, as elsewhere, how any complex the psychoanalyst uncovers can be referred back to an older one, eventually pointing back to a lack that belongs to our originary history. We each, he explains, bear our own relation to the origin, a relation that is proper or particular to us in our uniqueness, but that nevertheless bears a structural similarity with other, more general primal phantasies. He responds to the charge that patients undergoing psychoanalysis might retrospectively project phantasies on their childhood by abandoning the notion that there must be an absolute point of anchorage for the primal scene in terms of an actually occurring event.[xii] It is the structure that is, perhaps, most important since the science of such primal phantasy structures is psychoanalysis itself.

However, in the ‘Wolf Man’, Freud exhibits some hesitation about whether it is possible to provide an interpretation of the primal scene that would ground it in an empirically occurring event. To this extent, as Blanchot comments, ‘the force of this analysis lies in the way it dissolves everything into an indefinite anteriority: every complex always dissimulates another’.[xiii] What counts is not the actual occurrence of the primal scene but the way psychoanalysis would bring this trauma to language, constructing a narrative that lacks the certainty of determining what happened. Freud’s practice, like Blanchot’s or Levinas’, is a paradoxical to the extent that it is inscribed in the place opened and closed by the trauma.

*

Another clue as to the sense of the primal scene occurs in the fragments on Serge Leclair’s A Child is Being Killed that surround the fragment under discussion. Leclair discusses what he calls ‘primary narcissistic representation’ as it is incarnated in the infans.[xiv] In the later Freud, primary narcissism structures the first stage of life, preceding the formation and consolidation of the ego. As such, it is once again the ‘subject’ of an experience to which the child cannot oppose itself or overcome since it is undifferentiated or ‘objectless.’ In Leclair, the child becomes the primary narcissistic representation who must be killed not just once but over and again if there is to be the lack of an object required for desire and speech.

Leclair draws on Freud’s ‘On Narcissism’, agreeing with Freud that the affectionate parent lavishes the attention on their child that they would have liked to receive themselves. In this way, they feed the primary narcissism of the child with their own primary narcissism. The ascription of perfection to the child, the dream that he will enjoy a happier and more fulfilled life than his parents, that he will resist illness, death, suffering and restrictions on his will repeats and re-enacts the primary narcissism of the parent who, all along, wanted to be ‘the centre and core of creation’.[xv] Freud invokes the figure of ‘His Majesty the Baby’ – the image of ourselves that the parent bears as the narcissistic object of their parental love.

Drawing on Freud’s analyses, Leclair underlines the importance of the primal phantasy ‘a child is being killed’ as the attempt to overcome this self-sufficient tyrannical child who is unable to speak and desire insofar as he is without lack. Leclair makes the programmatic claim that psychoanalytic practice must aim at exposing the ongoing labour on the part of the subject to ‘kill’ this wonderful child whom, as he writes, ‘from generation to generation, bears witness to parents’ dreams and desires’.[xvi] The psychoanalyst must understand that ‘there can be no life without killing that strange, original image in which everyone’s birth is inscribed’.[xvii]

In a phrase that draws Blanchot’s attention, Leclair invokes the ‘impossible but necessary murder’ that permits life to refer to the putting to death of the returning ‘wonderful child’.[xviii] The primal phantasy to which Leclair refers recalls the passages on Levinas where Blanchot writes of the ‘unbearable’, referring to an originary affection – a receptivity to the Other that occurs before the organisation of the subject.

In his fragments on Leclair, Blanchot refers to the infans as a ‘silent passive’, a ‘dead eternity’ from which we can only separate ourselves by ‘murdering’ it.[xix] This murder, Blanchot notes, liberates our desire and our speech. In this sense, the infans is, he writes, a companion ‘but of no one’; the one who we seek to particularise as an absence [un manque], that we might live upon his banishment, desire with a desire he has not, and speak through and against the word he does not utter – nothing (neither knowledge nor un-knowledge) can designate him, even if the simplest of sentences seems, in four or five words, to divulge him (a child is being killed)’.[xx]

It appears that Blanchot concurs with Leclair: in one sense, the child is being killed; the experience of absence annihilates the child by turning upon him a capacity to negate that grants him an apparent freedom. But Blanchot concurs because he allows the child to stand in for the companion and the murder of the child to figure the movement from the first to the third person. The child becomes a name for an asymmetrical and non-reappropriable reserve harboured by the ‘I’ which suspends the possibility of its ever achieving self-presence, of a stable being-there in the first person. The return of the child is the return of ‘il’ in the place of the ‘I’ as the bearer of the experience in question. Yes, the ‘I’ will regain the power that is proper to it, but in the instant to which Blanchot refers, there is no ‘I’ there to detach itself from the experience who could recollect it or who could synthesise it into a sequence of instants.

In this sense, Blanchot reads Leclair just as he reads Freud: he points to an alteration – a primary event that is the repetition of a ‘first time’ without anchorage in what is properly individual about our histories. A child is being killed: what returns, for Blanchot, is not a tyrannical child but the ‘il’ that disperses or disarranges the power of the ‘I’ – the neuter as refusal. But the attributive function of this phrase, the reference it makes to being, to the positing of the ‘is’, is itself suspended. The ‘murder’ the ‘I’ seeks is a murder of the companion, the ‘il’ that would refuse to allow itself to become negated and to be particularised in this negation. This refusal prevents the ‘is’ of the phrase ‘a child is being killed’ fixing an event in place and time, of assigning a discreet point, a single experience to the origin. The origin is repeated in an experience that undoes the self. What is important for Blanchot in his reading is the role Leclair allows the phrase ‘a child is being killed’ to assume, repeating it until its strangeness becomes apparent, until it resonates outside a psychoanalytic context, rejoining his meditation on language.

Thus, Blanchot’s fragment on the child presents one way in which a certain constitutive lack reveals itself upstream of the mastery and subjectivity of the ‘I’. In this sense, the scene enjoys no absolute primacy, being dissolvable into a prior scene, and that prior scene to a prior one ad infinitum. Perhaps this is why Blanchot suspends his reference to Freud’s notions of the primal scene and phantasy by adding a question mark to the parenthesised remark that opens this passage. But in so doing, he draws the scene towards what his own fictional commentators in The Writing of the Disaster argue is the ultimate ‘object’ of witnessing in the récit: the ‘there is’.

This becomes clear in an excerpt from a commentary in the form of a conversation which one finds later in The Writing of the Disaster:

– ‘nothing is what there is’ rules out being said in a calm and simple negation (as though in its place the eternal translator wrote ‘There is nothing’). – No negation, but heavy terms, like whole stanzas juxtaposed while remaining without any connection, each one closed in self-sufficiency (but not upon any meaningfulness) – each one immobile and mute, and all of them thus usurping the sentence their relation forms, a sentence whose intended significance we would be hard put to explain. – Hard put is an understatement: there passes through this sentence what it can contain only by bursting. – For my part, I hear only the inevitability of the ‘there is’, in which being and nothing roll like a great wave, unfurling it and folding it back under, inscribing and effacing it, to the rhythm of a nameless rustling’.[xxi]

How should we understand these lines? I have already shown that the ‘there is’ refers for Levinas to a kind of trauma, a suffering that interrupts the structure of experience he calls enjoyment. Enjoyment is the basic, spontaneous mode of our comportment to the things around us. I do not eat in order to promote its flourishing but because I am hungry; I stroll in order to enjoy the air, not for health, but for the air; I smell a flower simply to enjoy its perfume, and therefore without any purpose that extends beyond savouring its immediate appeal. To have time, for Levinas, is to enjoy time enough to fulfil a need, that is, to dwell in the happy absorption of food and light, soil and water. It is to enjoy the panorama of beings that are, in one way or another, within my grasp. The phenomenology of enjoyment in Levinas attests to the possibility of making one’s home, of establishing a dwelling, of living with others in a civilisation.[xxii] But it also attests to what cannot be so domesticated, that is, to a dissension in the order of beings.

The ‘there is’, for Levinas, is an interruption of enjoyment, the disruption of the time of need. It is as if the world that apparently gives itself to be enjoyed suddenly affirmed its resistance to fulfilling the needs of its occupants. The subject who has time, loses time; the one who was separate from the world, working in order to tame the elements, to make a dwelling is brought up against the absence of the world. The power and possibility of the ‘I’, its ecstasis, its subjectivity, fails. The ‘there is’ reveals what gives itself as the ‘il’ in the place of the ecstatic subject in these experiences.

The ‘there is’ is not simply a state of the soul, a feeling had by a particular subject, since there is no subject of this experience. For Levinas, ‘the indeterminateness of this “something is happening” is not the indeterminateness of a subject and does not refer to a substantive’.[xxiii] The ‘il’ of the il y a should be understood in the same way as the impersonal ‘subject’ of expressions like ‘it rains’ or ‘it is warm’. Likewise, the ‘il’ cannot be situated with respect to the subject of an encounter. It is to be thought as ‘the anonymous current of being’, of a movement that ‘invades, submerges every subject, person or thing’.[xxiv] Nevertheless, we are accustomed, after Freud, to invoke just such a traumatised locus of an experience. But as I suggested with respect to the reading of Blanchot’s primal scene, the ‘there is’ plays itself out the hands of any specifically psychoanalytical determination.

How is one to think this precedence? It is not chronological, if time is thought in terms of the time a subject ‘has’ for enjoyment. Rather, it attests to an event that suspends this temporal order. One might say that like Freudian nachträglichkeit, it reveals itself in its aftereffects. On Blanchot’s account, the ostensible ‘object’ of nachträglichkeit, the primal scene, recedes into the past, into an ‘indefinite anteriority’, which returns at the heart of language; the ‘there is’ returns from a ‘past’ before any particular past instant. In this sense, the precedence of the ‘there is’ with respect to the power and mastery of the subject is structural. It inscribes itself into the very opening of the world, furled within every relation to everything the subject enjoys. To that extent, it threatens to affirm itself in the place of the ecstatic subject as a kind of pain or suffering – that is, as something that is deficient with respect to enjoyment. Indeed, at base, as Levinas writes in Existence and Existents, ‘the rustling of the “there is” … is horror’; it is ‘an undetermined menace of space itself disengaged from its function as receptacle for objects, as a means of access to beings’.[xxv] Horror names the ‘impersonal vigilance’, the '“participation” […] in which the identity of the terms is lost’.[xxvi] To the enjoyment of the subject who can master objects, who can leap beyond beings, maintaining its opening to the future, Levinas counterposes the horror of a worldless experience in which no such escape is possible. Is it this horror that is endured by the ‘il’, the vigilant companion who refuses the measure of negation – the child ‘in’ me who can never be laid to rest, but who is not alive either?

*

It is in weariness that the child of Blanchot’s récit looks up at the sky. This weariness might be understood in terms of the repetition to which Blanchot links the il y a. This is why the commentator claims to hear an unfurling and refolding in the phrase ‘nothing is what there is’: the inscription and effacement of being and nothing. There is a striking difference from Levinas, however. The first is that the child does not appear to be horrified at the disclosure in question. He is weary and then joyful.

The child’s malaise gives way to joy. His is no longer a childish sorrow, but the sorrow of human strength, of human power as it tests itself against the streaming of the ‘there is’ of the world, of language. A sorrow which is, for him, a child, a kind of joy even as it marks the limit of the powers of the adult. Only someone who has been carried to the limits of weariness can endure the il y a. Only one who is like a child, who has nothing to lose, can retain a memory of what he experienced as his strength failed. It is the child who is vigilant, the ‘il’ and not the adult, the ‘I’. But how is this vigilance witnessed in turn? How is it possible to mark this experience? The whole of The Writing of the Disaster is an answer.

One cannot read the primal scene as offering anything like a phenomenology of the experience of the ‘there is’. It is, crucially, a fictional fragment and not a work of philosophy. Why, then, write on Blanchot at all? Do his novels not remain, precisely, a literary supplement to Levinas’ philosophy?

Jill Robbins points us to a text by Bataille on Levinas and Blanchot in which he writes: ‘Levinas says of some pages of Thomas the Obscure that they are a description of the “there is”. But this is not exact. Levinas describes and Blanchot cries – as it were – the “there is”’.[xxvii] Yes, Levinas provides a phenomenology of the ‘there is’ and he goes so far as to attribute ‘analytic procedures that are characteristic of phenomenology’ to Blanchot’s literary criticism.[xxviii] Blanchot does not describe the ‘there is’ but cries it – and he does so in the récit in The Writing of the Disaster.

Levinas’s appreciation of literature is well attested. He speaks of his love of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, recalling that Blanchot introduced him to Proust and Valéry (just as he introduced Blanchot to Heidegger).[xxix] As he writes in Existents and Existence,

Certain passages of Huysmans or Zola, the calm and smiling horror of de Maupassant’s tales do not only give, as is sometimes thought, a representation ‘faithful to’ or exceeding reality, but penetrate behind the form which light reveals into that materiality which, far from corresponding to the philosophical materialism of the authors, constitutes the dark background of existence. It makes things appear to us in a night, like the monotonous presence that bears down on us in insomnia.[xxx]

He also invokes Shakespeare and, more briefly, Racine.[xxxi]

As Bataille observes, Levinas does not hold himself back from enthusiastically quoting Blanchot in his work. Already in Existence and Existents, he points to the opening chapters of Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure, where he claims ‘the presence of absence, the night, the dissolution of the subject in the night, the horror of being, the return of being to the heart of every movement, the reality of irreality are […] admirably expressed’.[xxxii] In Ethics and Infinity, he draws on a number of formulas in Blanchot’s work in order to explain the ‘there is’: the ‘”hustle-bustle” of being […] its “clamour,” its “murmur”’.[xxxiii] The ‘there is’ is claimed to be the ‘real subject’ of Blanchot’s novel and stories.[xxxiv] Elsewhere, Levinas tells us that Blanchot’s literary work ‘brings us primarily a new feeling: a new “experience”, or, more precisely, a new prickling sensation of the skin, brushed against by things. It all begins at this tangible level: these places – the hotel rooms, the kitchen, the hallways, the windows, the walls’.[xxxv] He evokes ‘the remoteness and strangeness of things heavy with their meaninglessness: a glass of water, a bed, a table, an armchair – expelled, abstract …’[xxxvi] He also mentions ‘the anonymous and incessant droning’, the ‘song filling the literary space’.[xxxvii] Blanchot’s literary work would be the very incarnation of the kind of language that Levinas calls verbality, of the attenuation of the verb, recalling the rumbling of language that re-echoes the rumbling in things, in the existents that have been expelled from the world. This is what Levinas discovers in the hotel rooms, the kitchen, the hallways, the windows and the walls of Blanchot’s récits. Levinas allows Blanchot to attest to an absence and anonymity in things, to a rustling that refuses to become a discrete sound. The poignancy of Blanchot’s fiction, for Levinas, is that it reveals the tragedy of tragedy as profoundly as Shakespeare, that is, the fact that there is no way out.

In this way, Blanchot’s literary writings appear to complement Levinas’ thought, providing vivid illustrations of the difficult notion of the ‘there is’. Moreover, Levinas’ philosophy would help us orient ourselves to Blanchot’s strange narratives just as the narratives illuminate the seemingly abstract notion of the ‘there is’. But he would fail to uncover a deeper relation between the ‘philosopher’ and the ‘poet.’

The rumbling that disturbs our rooms and corridors also threatens to tear language apart, too, including the serene sentences of the phenomenologist who writes Time and the Other and Existence and Existents. The rumbling that can be heard through the kitchens and the hallways calls, in turn, for a verbality that makes all firm and decided speech tremble. There is an experience that cannot rest in the philosophical book; it does not return to the fold of ordered words and experience or to the ordering relations that would allow a memory to be transmitted and a lesson taught. This is why Blanchot allows one of his commentators to draw attention to the difficulty of writing the phrase, ‘nothing is what there is’.[xxxviii] It cannot be expressed ‘in a calm and simple negation’; rather, ‘there passes through this sentence what it can contain only by bursting’.[xxxix] But how, then, can it be expressed?

This is not a problem that concerns a particular, isolated experience or even a kind of experience. The ‘there is’ belongs to the structure of our experience. It belongs to the way in which things emerge into appearance. But how is it possible to witness the ‘there is’? In his philosophical works, Levinas appears to be able to do just that, but this is possible because he allows the language of philosophy to be kept safe, preserved from its ostensible ‘object’. This is why he can use literature as an illustrative supplement to the philosophical exposition. But literary language cannot be grafted into a philosophical body of work in which the separation of saying from verbality is rigorously maintained without wagering the discursive procedures of philosophy itself. Levinas maintains that the rustling of the ‘there is’ is ventriloquised by the Blanchotian récit, but, as I have shown, the ‘there is’ also implies a theory of language that renders Levinas’ rigorous separation of saying and the ‘there is’, philosophy and literature, untenable.

*

In ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, Blanchot’s account of language in Blanchot parallels Levinas’ account of ecstasis and enjoyment. He uses the phrase Lazare, veni foras to figure the summoning of the referent out of its real existence by language. Language depends on this negation for it loses what it would name in the very movement of nomination. Yes, language grants the referent an ideal life, the life of the mind, but it has already lost what originally called for language. As such, ‘the torment of language is what it lacks because of the necessity that it be the lack of precisely this. It cannot even name it’.[xl]

Literary language is distinctive because it is intended to reclaim this beginning in its real existence:

it wants the cat as it exists, the pebble taking the side of things, not man but the pebble, and in this pebble what man rejects by saying it, what is the foundation of speech and what speech excludes in speaking, the abyss, Lazarus in the tomb and not Lazarus brought back into the daylight, the one who already smells bad, who is Evil, Lazarus lost and not Lazarus saved and brought back to life.[xli]

Literary language would maintain its relation to the real thing, to the Lazarus who refuses to rise from the tomb. It does not save Lazarus, like ordinary language, by granting him an ideal existence. Rather, it attests to the Lazarus who remains in darkness, to the rotten corpse, to an irredeemable excess. As such, literature dreams of ‘the presence of things before the world exists, their perseverance’.[xlii] Blanchot invokes ‘existence without being, existence which remains below existence like an inexorable affirmation, without beginning or end – death as the impossibility of dying’.[xliii] Literary language attempts to become thing-like, to suspend the movement of meaning in order, through an extraordinary mimesis, to incarnate the real existence of things before negation. In this sense, it points to an existence that precedes the ideal existence of language, reaffirming itself as the reserve with which language cannot have done. It is, paradoxically, the dead Lazarus who gives life to living language. As such, it is the pre-worldly existence without being that literature would remember. The impossible death to which Blanchot refers is the affirmation that returns at the heart of every negation: it is the existence in general that refuses to confine itself in a discrete existent. Blanchot refers, like Levinas, to the ‘there is’.

It is not by chance that the structure of enjoyment in Levinas and the power of the speaking ‘I’ in Blanchot run parallel. Language, for the latter, belongs essentially to the same ecstasis or openness to the world that permit existents to be discovered. It articulates the same existents as they offer themselves to the ecstatic subject. But language in Blanchot also belongs to what dissimulates itself in the disclosure of the world. It has a ‘hither side’ since it allows the ‘I’ to bring to expression the way in which existents come into presence as an interrelated whole, as a meaningful contexture. This means that any act of literature, including the fictional fragment on the child, already bears witness to the ‘there is’. It is as literature that it bears witness to the torment of language even as it is as literature that it is condemned to make sense. Then the fragment on the child must not be read as a representation of a real or imagined child who undergoes a real or imagined experience, but as the performance of what happens as language. Like all of Blanchot’s fiction and indeed all literature, it attests to the witnessing of language itself insofar as it is a piece of literature. It stages an experience of witnessing and enacts a witnessing because of its very status as literature.

The status of language in Blanchot is paradoxical: it both grants the possibility of subjectivity whilst rendering the power and the mastery of the subject provisional. Language allows itself to be appropriated, to appear transparent, to operate as a medium, whilst implying the expropriation of the language user. It gives and denies itself, and in so doing, opens the world as something that grants itself to the powers of the ecstatic ‘I’. What differs in Blanchot and Levinas is the status of this gift. Paraphrasing Levinas, Blanchot writes the Other, ‘separates me from myself (from the ‘me’ that is mastery and power, from the free, speaking subject) and reveals the other in place of me [l’autre au lieu de moi]’, the Other requires that ‘I answer for absence, for passivity’.[xliv] It is in this pre-voluntary donation of this response that I originate, but only insofar as there is no foundation, nothing that would permit a root to secure itself. It is in this sense that this answering for, this giving or response, is traumatic. And this trauma, like the trauma of witnessing in Levinas, is paradoxical. In allowing the fragment on the child to figure this trauma, Blanchot indicates that the ‘there is’, the rhythm of being and nothingness, is at play in the relation to Autrui, in witnessing itself. What is witnessed? This claim has to be explored with enormous care.

*

From Levinas’ perspective, Blanchot would not have thought the ultimate dimension of witnessing. Beneath or before the death that it is impossible to die in Blanchot, there is saying, the response to the Other. But as the commentators in The Writing of the Disaster point out, the phrase ‘nothing is what there is’ is a sentence that explodes; it bursts open. The primal scene is a dramatisation of that explosion, providing its figure in the weeping child. In one sense its referent, that is, the oscillation of being and nothingness, is nominalised and thereby dissimulated. But in another, it points towards an opening of language that accompanies Levinasian saying. The Writing of the Disaster is an exploded book, a book about the explosion that phrases like ‘nothing is what there is’ indicate: it is a book given over to the rhythm of being and nothingness as they unfold and refold in the event called the ‘there is’. But it also shows how Otherwise Than Being has already exploded from within, that Levinas’s text rests on a disavowal of its own textuality.

It is as though Blanchot’s text enclosed itself in the text of Levinas, spinning itself from Levinas’ writings and hatching as the enemy from within. In one sense, Blanchot’s thought is parasitic, inhabiting the terms and structures of the host text. The text that hatches from Otherwise Than Being is not obedient: it is not the Lazarus who comes compliantly towards us when he is summoned by the words ‘Lazarus venture forth’. The ‘other’ Lazarus refuses resurrection, remaining in the tomb of Otherwise Than Being. But in The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot calls forth the other Lazarus in his refusal to be resurrected, showing how Levinasian witnessing depends upon a prior witnessing, how another writing is inscribed across the pages of Otherwise Than Being. Blanchot points not to the respiration of language but to its asphyxiation, not to Levinasian saying but to a smothering, not to the wisdom of love of Otherwise Than Being, but to the madness of a foreword that unravels every word in advance.

Levinas argues that every written work, however dry or impersonal, would bear the marks of this saying, an address to the Other that turns it from itself. He would renew the texts of his predecessors and contemporaries in his essays by attending to the trace in the letter of the text of the saying that opens that text beyond what he calls the said, understood as the mode of discourse that would permit the disclosure of being. He would unsay the dead letter of the said, writing against writing and reading against reading in order to incarnate a wisdom that escapes the letter.

One cannot argue simply that the language of Otherwise Than Being is a disavowal of the nominalisation or verbalisation upon which it depends. It is, thereby, a disavowal of the resistance of literature to a philosophical mobilisation. This is why it is insufficient to quote literature in a classically philosophical text in order to make a classically philosophical point. The graft of literary words refuses to heal – and, in so doing, it shows that philosophical language, too, is originarily wounded and that it cannot attain the health it would seek.

But it is not a matter of supplanting philosophy with poetic evocation, but rather that the text of the philosopher who retains a classical relation to language bears witness in the spirit of that text if not its letter. It carries a burden heavier than it can bear. But this does not mean the philosophical text is condemned to disavow its own verbality. If it is the case that the ‘there is’ rumbles in our language and in our experience, then it is insufficient to acknowledge that a certain literature attests to this rumbling is borne in the literary work to the extent that it remains resolutely non-discursive. The philosopher uses the same language as the literary writer; but this does not mean philosophy must become literature no more than it means literature must become philosophy. Philosophical language is marked by trauma; what separates literature from philosophy is that it allows this trauma to reverberate, to play. Blanchot’s literary criticism witnesses this witnessing in turn; it is vigilance over a vigilance which occurs as literature.

Blanchot’s theoretical writing is exemplary insofar as it acknowledges its dividedness. What unifies The Writing of the Disaster is an attentiveness to the witnessing that, as he shows in various contexts, wounds and marks language. It is a book that places its own discursive procedures at stake. It is not only a book on witnessing; it witnesses – and it does so by figuring an explosion of language in its exploded fragments. But no textual practice will allow a book to become the thing it designates. It still means; which means that it remains and must remain bound by discursivity. It is never just performative; it is also constative. This is why it must name the possible and indicate the impossible, binding itself to a hyperbolisation of language that cannot be translated away.