An essay focused on Hölderlin and originally published as ‘The Turning’ (1955) is the last to be included in the appendix to The Space of Literature. The essay is in part a response to Beda Allemann’s reading of the turning or reversal undertaken by Hölderlin between earlier commentaries on Empedocles and Hyperion – in which Hölderlin expresses the desire for reconciliation with the divine which is formulated as the desire to unite with the fiery element, to pass into another world, the desire for immediacy, for death – and later writing where the task of the poet is one of mediation between mortals and the gods. Here Blanchot references ‘As When on a Holiday’ as a well-known example thanks to Heidegger’s commentary, which itself became known in France thanks to his 1946 review ‘The “Sacred” Speech of Hölderlin’. This turning is deemed necessary for the poet to save himself from the dangerous experience of fire which threatens to consume him; Blanchot notes that it has also been interpreted by critics as a glorification of the earthly fatherland and as a patriotic return to the duties of this world. Blanchot challenges the interpretation of the turning offered by Allemann – and Heidegger, although he is not named – by focusing on a reversal which is never ‘one easy metamorphosis’ (SL 276).

Allemann understands the idea of reversal in Hölderlin as a response to the experience of fire which threatened to consume the poet at the time he was writing Hyperion and Empedocles. Blanchot writes that Hölderlin denounces this experience as not only dangerous but, more significantly, false, ‘insofar at least as it claims to be immediate communication with the immediate’. Blanchot cites Hölderlin’s commentary on a fragment by Pindar on the law, where Hölderlin writes that both the gods and man must distinguish between worlds to maintain celestial pureness (the gods) and the opposition of contraries that alone allows knowledge (man) (SL 273). The immediate is impossible for both men and gods alike, and the poet is not intermediary between these two worlds but the one tasked with safeguarding this absence; Blanchot reminds us that when Hölderlin writes of ‘the categorical reversal’, he is commenting on his translation of the tragedy of Oedipus, who was condemned to live apart from both gods and men and to maintain the empty place opened up by this double infidelity (SL 272). In the absence of the gods our relationship to them is not purely negative, and this is what makes it terrible; it has been replaced by a relation with what is higher than the gods – the ‘Sacred’, the law, or what Hölderlin names ‘the Most High’ – and it is this relation without relation that threatens to tear and disorientate us (SL 275).

The reversal is an indication of the impossibility of the mediation of the immediate at the edge of this abyss; it is man’s heart that must become ‘the intimacy where the echo of the empty deep becomes. language, but not through one easy metamorphosis’ (SL 275–6). Blanchot cites the hymn Germania as an example of the richer conception of inspiration which results from the reversal understood not as singular and redemptive but as repeated and reversed: with Allemann, he notes that the focus of earlier hymns (when the poet felt the necessity of not giving himself over to the experience of the fire) becomes appeased power in Germania; Allemann argues that this is because Hölderlin has accomplished the reversal and opened that pure region of mediation between sky and earth; but Blanchot sees the poet as turned aside from both heavens and earth as the one tasked with maintaining this rupture. The closing lines of the essay cite Hölderlin at a time when ‘madness had completely obscured [his] mind’:

And when we read these words gleaming with madness: ‘Would I like to be a comet? Yes. For they have the speed of birds, they flourish in fire and are as children in purity’, we sense how the desire to be united with the fire, with the day, may have been realised for the poet in the purity guaranteed by his exceptional integrity. And we are not surprised by this metamorphosis which, with the silent speed of a bird’s flight, bears him henceforth through the sky, flower of light, star that burns but unfurls innocently into a flower. (SL 276)

Hölderlin suggests that the turn to the divine, the immediate, the Open, is achievable; perhaps his madness is evidence of this indifference. Blanchot’s rewriting of this quotation in the lines that follow, however, does not bear witness to the incineration of this comet but to its light, which at once destroys and unveils. Figurative language becomes more literal in this rewriting as the comet transforms into blossoming flower, signalling not reconciliation between the human and the gods but multiple metamorphoses which result from this endless confrontation with the void.

Holly Langstaff, Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot