Author: Lars Iyer

It is true that there was an evolution in my political practice: this evolution unfolded itself (in part) through historical events, the rise of Hitler, the war in Spain (the récit L''Idylle' marked the importance that this had for me), 1940, the resistance. But it unfolded itself more profoundly through the necessities of literary experience. The long ordeal that was Thomas l'Obscur changed me metaphysically and politically, in a radical manner, and to the degree that Faux Pas is a theoretical response to Thomas l'Obscur I can absolutely reject the influence of Maurras and you can see that he is, literally and philosophically, at the antipodes of my inclinations.

Blanchot, undated letter to Évelyne Londyn, cited here

Green believed that well-groomed, well-behaved English was an obstacle to expression. But his style wasn’t a merely negative exercise, a winnowing or clearing out: he delivered a gorgeous, full-bodied alternative. (via)

May '68 and the Prague Spring were political failures which profited us much more than any victory, by virtue of the ideological vacuum they created. Not knowing where we were going, as happened to us in the street those days, but knowing only that we were going, that we were on the move, so to speak, without fear of the consequences and the contradictions – that's what we learnt. […]

Do you believe in God?

To know that, if there's a divinity, it can only be within us, seeing that there's only emptiness around us, is no help in solving the problem. not believing in God is just one more credo. I doubt whether it' possible not to believe at all. That would be like removing all meaning, all eternity from the great passions of our lives. everything would become an end in itself, with no consequences. Though we can't  rule out the future of humanity being just that, either. […]

The title [of The Lover] isn't original.

I decided on it after I'd finished the book, as a reaction against all the books with that same title. it isn't a story about love, but about everything in passion that remains suspended and incapable of being named. The entire meaning of the book lies there, in that ellipsis. […]

Memory, digressions and flashbacks have always been an integral part of the narrative structure of your works.

It's often thought that life is punctuated chronologically by events. In reality, we don't know their significance. It's memory that restores their lost meaning to us. and yet all that remains visible and expressible is often the superfluous, the mere appearances, the surface of our experience. The rest stays inside, obscure, so intense that we can't even speak of it. The more intense things are, the more difficult it becomes for them to surface in their entirety. Working with memory in the classical sense doesn't interest me – it's not about stores of memory that we can dip into for facts, as we like. Moreover, the very act of forgetting is necessary – absolutely. If eighty per cent of what happened to us wasn't repressed, then living would be unbearable. True memory is forgetting, emptiness – the memory that enables us not to succumb to the oppression of recollection and of the blinding pain which, fortunately, we have forgotten.

Citing Flaubert, and with him a large part of the contemporary literary tradition, Jacqueline Risset has spoken of your work as an uninterrupted series of 'books about nothing'. Novels built precisely on nothingness.

To write isn't to tell a story, but to evoke what there is around it; you create around the story, one moment after another. Everything there is, but everything which might also not be or which might be interchangeable – like the events of life. The story and its unreality, or its absence. […]

The events of our lives are never unique, nor do they succeed one another unambiguously, as we would wish. Multiple and irreducible, they echo infinitely in consciousness; they come and go from our past to the future, spreading like an echo, like circles rippling out in water, constantly exchanging places. […]

Could you define the actual process of your writing?

It's an incorrigible inspiration that comes to me more or less once a week, then disappears for months. a very ancient injunction – the need to sit oneself down to rite without as yet knowing what. the writing itself attests to this ignorance, to this search for the shadowy place where the entirety of experience is gathered.

For a long time I thought writing was a job of work. I'm now convinced that it's an inner event, a 'non-work' that you accomplish, above all, by emptying yourself out, and allowing what's already self-evident to percolate through. I wouldn't speak so much about economy, form or composition of prose as about balances of opposing forces that have to be identified, classified, contained by language like a musical score. If you don't take that into account, then you do indeed write 'free' books, but writing has nothing to do with that kind of freedom.

So that would be the ultimate reason you write?

What's painful is having to perforate our inner darkness until its primal potency spreads over the whole page, converting what is by nature 'internal into something 'external'. That's why I say that only the mad write absolutely. their memory is a 'holed' memory, addressed totally to the outside world. […]

I write to be coarsened, to be torn to pieces, and then to lose my importance, to unburden myself – for the text to take my place so that I exist less. There are only two ways I manage to free myself of me: by the idea of suicide and the idea of writing.

As for his use of language, Bataille's greatness lies in his way of 'not writing' while still writing.

The Lover, The Malady of Death and Emily L. are difficult books, where the text advances by ellipses, silences and innuendo. An almost amatory collusion between text and reader is needed that's able to go beyond mere understanding of the sentences in themselves. 

Q. Your characters lie beyond all typologies or objective descriptions. They're beings disconnected from any reality, contingency or definition. Engimatic , hovering between madness and normality, screaming and silence,  they emerge suddenly on the scene without any of that inevitability and necessity that normally underpin the classic mechanisms of fiction. A form of ceremonial, something ritualistic pervades their actions and the unremitting flow of their speech. But there is no defined psychological framework for the individual character.

A. The hero of the traditional, Balzacian novel posses an identity that's all his own, a smooth unassailable identity pre-established by the narrator. But human beings are just bundles of disconnected drives and literature should render them as such. 

I lay hold of [my characters] at this unfinished stage of their construction and deconstruction, because what interests me is the study of the cracks, of the unfillable blanks that emerge between word and action, of the residues to be found between what's said and what remains unsaid.

With the result that the reader will never be able to identify with them, contrary to what is usually done, by yielding to a surface psychologism. But the words my characters speak – like the words all characters speak, perhaps – conceals their essence more than it reveals it. All they try to say and think is merely the attempt to muffle their own true voices.

Q. what are the differences between your activity as a writer and as a film-maker?

By its 'external' nature – being a collective work, a way of being in life, with other people – film doesn't have that urgency, that obsession that there is in writing. It might be said that the film distances the author from her work, whereas writing, woven out of silences and absences, throws her irremediably inside it. No one is as alone as a writer. 

I've often made films to escape that frightening, interminable, unhappy work. And yet I've always wanted more than anything else to write. 

Why, in your opinion, do people begin drinking?

Alcohol transfigures the ghosts of loneliness. It replaces the 'other' who isn't there. it stops up the holes that have opened up in us at some point, long ago.

 Marguerite Duras, interviewed 

(Back in March, I discussed Josipovici's work with him at the Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts. No recording exists (but there are a few pictures), but I thought I'd put up my introduction to the event.)

Gabriel Josipovici is a major contemporary English novelist, playwright and critic, whose work spans several genres. There are now eighteen novels, four collections of short fiction, eight critical books, a memoir of his mother, the poet and translator Sacha Rabinovitch, and numerous plays for stage and radio. He is a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, and has two books forthcoming this year: a study of Hamlet from Yale, and a collection of essays from Carcanet.

Gabriel was born in 1940 in Nice, France of Egyptian-Jewish parents , surviving the war in the Auvergne region, before returning to Cairo with his mother. He moved with her to England in 1956, where he read English at Oxford before becoming a professor at Sussex University, where he retired in 1998. His work has been widely celebrated, but he has never been a literary insider, and, indeed, has often found himself at odds with English literary culture.

This may have something to do with the unique perspective he brings to both his fiction and his critical writings. Gabriel has said that he’s never felt ‘inward’ with England and with English life. This is not something he laments – indeed, these circumstances, he says, are less a disadvantage than a privilege. Part of this privilege is that it’s meant that he has cultivated a sense of the fragmentariness and insecurity of human experience – a sense that our lives are more incomplete and disordered than they might seem, and that we are never quite at home in the world.

This is apparent in Gabriel’s account of the novel. Take the two great achievements of the novel genre: psychology, that is, the depiction of interior life, and social expansiveness, that is, the surveying of a complex social universe. Novels typically show depth in their rendering of human interiority, and breadth in their presentation of a social panoply. The danger comes when the achievement of this depth and breadth is dependent on a simple-minded model of representation, since this kind of realism depends on a kind of bad faith. This becomes particularly apparent, Gabriel suggests, in the use of an impersonal narrator, describing a scene from a position outside the space and time of the narrative. Since this kind of superhuman position is unavailable to us in life, it should unavailable in fictional narration, too.

The use of first-person narrative might seem a solution to this problem, but too often one finds exactly the same kind of remove, for example, in the use of description, which implicitly depends on the narrator stopping to describe an environment. Bad faith again, since we rarely pause in this way. The question for Gabriel, then, is how we write without the remove in question. How do we show fidelity to our experience of passing through the world in all its openness and its fleetingness, and in the necessary fragmentation of our awareness? How do we attend to  a kind of uncertainty and unknowing that is implicit to our experience?

Gabriel's solution is to place emphasis on the direct presentation of dialogue in his fiction. Gabriel is, indeed, a peerless writer of dialogue, using it to drive his stories forward rather than psychological analysis. His novels are usually chamber-pieces, with a limited number of characters, and often focus on artists and musicians, who explore the same kind of questions Gabriel responds to in his fiction.

Gabriel is not, as is often portrayed, a difficult author. He is not committed to grim-faced experimentalism or to the most forbidding varieties of high modernism. His fiction is never solemn, but light; never monumental, but modest. It is sparse, dialogue-driven, and often witty. It is moving, yet utterly unsentimental. He can deal with the grimmest of topics without ponderousness. And it is, above all, playful, in a way that, as Gabriel argues in his critical work, several centuries of Western art has made us forget. He is insistent that his art should be seen not a window on the world – a representation of the way things are – but as a toy, as a hobby-horse on which we can jump and ride and then discard as a mere stick (the allusion here is to Sterne's Tristram, a touchstone work for Gabriel). Gabriel's work seeks our co-operation. It asks us to admit that we know less than we think we do, and that the world is more open than we think. It asks us to remain with doubt and uncertainty, and does not hide its artifice.

Why, then, has his work not been met in this spirit? Perhaps because the freedom it gives to its reader is too great – because it does not resemble the slick and technically accomplished literary fiction that guards itself from openness, from experience. In one sense, Gabriel’s fate is that of second-phase modernists such as Gert Hofmann and Thomas Bernhard – authors ignored by mainstream English criticism, which prefers its literary fiction ponderously focused on ‘big’ themes or moments in history. But Gabriel’s situation is very different from these Europeans, since he is based in this country and, in his criticism and reviews, has addressed himself to our literary establishment.

Those of us have always felt that our literary culture is paranoically enclosed, shut tight against Europe, against Modernism in its various phases, against anything but the Usual Stuff, have been unsurprised at the hostile and philistine reception of Gabriel’s What Ever Happened to Modernism?, as well as by the widespread neglect of his recent novels. Thank goodness, then, for the alternative media, the world of blogging, which has seen a broadening of readers acquainted with Gabriel’s work. And thank goodness for our event tonight, which I hope will introduce or re-introduce you to one of our few examples of literary integrity.

 And I’m not writing for dorks who need descriptions of everything, right? ‘There’s some grass growing there, over there is an orange tree that carries oranges, and the oranges are initially green, and then they turn yellow, and eventually they receive an orange colour’. Well, I always have the feeling, whenever I’m writing, that I am in a certain place, and everyone knows anyway where that is, and I spare myself the necessity of all that. That way, I give the people leeway – right? But the people who describe all that – right? – ‘They enter through the door, then she meets Doctor Uebermichl, and he’s got a briefcase, and it’s a Pierre Cardin briefcase, and inside the briefcase there are seven files from the company Soandso. And then he’s even wearing a hat with a black band, and towards the rear it is tied together in a bow’. All that is uninteresting, but that is what most of the writing industry is made of. Because people cannot think in big acts and large steps, but can only take extremely tiny small-bourgeois, conclusive mini-steps. That’s horrible! Well, describing nature is nonsense anyway, because everyone knows it, right? That’s stupid, right? Everybody who’s been in the countryside or in a garden knows what’s going on there. Consequently you don’t need to describe that. The only interesting thing is what’s happening in the countryside or in the garden, right? ‘Omit’, they say, right? But nowadays it’s modern again that you … you know, every little thing is being included, right? Sixty pages have already gone by before someone has even left through the front door or the garden gate. And that’s even uneconomic, right? And constantly people are going crazy because the poet has no imagination and no idea how the story should go on.

Thomas Bernhard, interviewed

One cannot emphasise enough just how crucial was the mass domestication of the car, ensuring the transition from what might be called 'traditional solidarities' to the unprecedented unleashing of modern individualism. What does it matter if the car kills, pollutes, and often makes people into total jerks, its proliferation destroying every urban space worthy of the name, when what is at stake is to ensure the domestication of gigantic human masses, the forging of thousands of psychologies of average men on wheels, 'highway mentalities', aping day and night the fluidities and competition of the Great market, etching it into the landscape ….?

Gilles Chatelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs

RG: My answer here is quite simple. I tend to write in a condensed form: in fragments, in aphorisms, in blocks. For this kind of work you have to be prepared, you have to have certain ideas of what you expect to say (the “necessity” element). But then, suddenly, you get inspired, and you are able to “realize” your work “immediately,” you are able to place the right words in the right time, like in music. That’s the second phase, the writing itself. The third phase is when you already have enough material, and you can “play” with it to gradually shape the final structure into which it all fits.

FG: So you’re delineating three steps in your process: preparation, writing/work, and play. Play coming last might surprise some people. Which step is the most difficult for you? How do you deal with that difficulty?

RG: The most difficult is writing itself—what is before it is not too far from what is after it. In that sense there is an “ecstatic element” in what I write. And because we can’t experience the ecstatic perpetually, we need to be prepared for it—so later it would help us to recognize what had happened “inside” of it. Meanings are usually inherent to what is written, but not always. When they are not, you have to find the “secondary inherencies” by structuring the whole material anew. That’s play. But that’s work at the same time.

Interview with Róbert Gál

INTERVIEWER

This sounds very pessimistic and hopeless and seems at variance with your mystical and religious tendencies.

IONESCO

Well, there is a higher order, but man can separate himself from it because he is free—which is what we have done. We have lost the sense of this higher order, and things will get worse and worse, culminating perhaps in a nuclear holocaust—the destruction predicted in the Apocalyptic texts. Only our apocalypse will be absurd and ridiculous because it will not be related to any transcendence. Modern man is a puppet, a jumping jack. You know, the Cathars [a Christian sect of the later Middle Ages] believed that the world was not created by God but by a demon who had stolen a few technological secrets from Him and made this world—which is why it doesn’t work. I don’t share this heresy. I’m too afraid! But I put it in a play called This Extraordinary Brothel, in which the protagonist doesn’t talk at all. There is a revolution, everybody kills everybody else, and he doesn’t understand. But at the very end, he speaks for the first time. He points his finger towards the sky and shakes it at God, saying, “You rogue! You little rogue!” and he bursts out laughing. He understands that the world is an enormous farce, a canular played by God against man, and that he has to play God’s game and laugh about it. That is why I prefer the phrase “theater of derision,” which Emmanuel Jacquart used for the title of his book on Beckett, Adamov, and myself, to “theater of the absurd.”

Ionesco, interviewed

To walk about London on a Sunday with nowhere to go – that will take the heart out of you.

Whatever you do, don't be gloomy, because that gets on people's nerves.

And don't write about anything you know, for then you get excited and say too much, and that gets under their skins too.

At lunch she drank a half-bottle of Burgundy and felt very hopeful.

I've had rather a rum life, but I was thinking the other day, would I go through it all again? I think not.

I like the man who wrote From Russia With Love… Ian Fleming. He's one who can take you away from everything if you're bored and sad.

No more pawings, no more pryings – leave me alone. …

I hate the whole bloody business. It’s cruel, it’s idiotic, it’s unspeakably horrible.

I didn't ask to be born; I didn't make the world as it is; I didn't make myself as I am; I am not one of the guilty ones.

One day the fierce wolf that walks by my side will spring on you and rip your abominable guts out.

I was always happy in the morning, not always in the afternoon and never after sunset.

I'll bet my tears are ninety per cent gin.

I don't feel well. I don't feel up to it. My clothes are too shabby.

You know what you must do in your writing. You must tell the truth about them. You must tell the truth against their lies.

'Smile please,' the man said. 'Not quite so serious.'

When my first love affair came to an end I wrote this poem: I didn't know/ I didn't know/ I didn't know. Then I settled down to be miserable.

I am always being told that until my work ceases being "sordid and depressing" I haven't much chance of selling.

Haven't touched a drop for a month. Won't it be fine when I do.

Yesterday at the cinema in the one and threes, watching the usual thing. Biff. Bang. Why, you dirty double-crossing. Bang. Biff.

Don't listen to what I say. Don't listen to me, I'll depress you.

I want a long, calm book about people with large incomes – a book like a flat green meadow and the sheep feeding in it.

I wish I were old and the whole damned thing were finished; then I shouldn't get this depressed feeling for nothing at all.

Justice. I've heard that word. I tried it out. I wrote it down. I wrote it down several times and always it looked like a damn cold lie.

Let's have more drinks, honey.

Detestable world.

'Oh, shut up about being tired,' she would say. 'You were born tired. I'm tired too. We're all tired.'

Save me from destruction, ruin and desolation. Save me from the long slow death by ants.

I'd never get into the sacred circle. I was always outside, shivering.

One is born either to go with or to go against.

'Obscene drawings on the tablecloth are not allowed here,' the waiter said as he approached.

Do you believe in God? I do not know. In human love? Yes. Still? Yes. In humanity? No.

There's very little invention in my books. What came first was the wish to get rid of this awful sadness that weighed me down.

His name was Disastrous because his godmother thought it such a pretty word.

'Quite like old times,' the room says. 'Yes? No?'

I'm over eighty. Look at me. And what have I done? Nothing! Nothing! Mediocrity. Mediocre, that's what my work is.

The mean things they got away with – sailed away with – smirking.

The estate house had been empty for so long that a centipede fell out of a book when I opened it.

Oh, God, I'm only twenty and I'll have to go on living and living and living.

So many people think I don't exist that sometimes I ask myself if I do.

I am alive I think. Not at all sure sometimes, and waving not drowning.

I feel it's very tactless of me to be alive. No savoir faire. (Damn little savoir vivre either)

Save me from destruction, ruin and desolation. Save me from the long slow death by ants.

I do believe that life's all laid out for one. One's choices don't matter much.

You'd pine to death if you hadn't someone to look down on and insult.

Oh God the stupidity, the ugliness, the darkness, the loneliness and the cruelty of this beastly little place.

Drama is catching, I find.

You look very perky, I hardly recognised you.

It's so cold in this damn place that I can't think of anything except how cold I am and cold in general and that cold is hell.

'Obscene drawings on the tablecloth are not allowed here,' the waiter said as he approached.

I am trying to stop hope growing again like the beanstalk.

I am tired. I learnt everything too late. Everything was always one jump ahead of me.

The trouble is I have plenty to say. Not only that but I am bound to say it.

Tears? There's not a tear in her.

The unutterably sweet peace of giving in.

It is cold and dark outside, and everything has gone out of me except misery.

I sat and I looked about and I thought: Why do I hate people? They're not hateful.

From Jean Rhys, various writings, various characters, via.

… under wage-labor, nihilism has entered production. It is no longer a question of modernization producing rootlessness, contingency, uncertainty, anomie as side effects of a rational core. Rather, productive activity uses those very effects as resources. “Nihilism, once hidden in the shadow of technical-productive power, becomes a fundamental ingredient of that power, a quality highly prized by the marketplace of labor.” (GM86) The result is the affective prevalence of opportunism and cynicism. The post-Fordist worker moves from one thing to another; negotiating rules of the game, responding to rules not facts. Money makes these things equivalent; the general intellect is always something else. It is a qualitative potential that forms the basis of all production.

McKenzie Wark on Paolo Virno

Direct self-observation is not necessarily sufficient for us to know ourselves: we need history, for the past flows on within us in a hundred waves; indeed, we ourselves are nothing but that which at every moment we experience of this continual flowing. Even here, when we want to step down into the flow of what appears to be our ownmost and most personal being, the dictum of Heraclitus is valid: one does not step twice into the same river.

Nietzsche, Human All Too Human

What you are seeking is a better age, a more beautiful world. It was this world that you embraced in your friends; with them you were this world…. It was not human beings that you wanted, believe me, you wanted a world. The loss of all golden centuries, as you felt them compressed into a single glorious moment, the spirit of all spirits of better ages, the power of all heroes’ powers: those were to be replaced for you by a single human being!

Diotima, in Hoelderlin's Hyperion

Strange! I am dominated at every moment by the thought that my history is not only a personal one, that I am doing something for many people when I live like this and work on and write about myself this way. It is always as if I were a multiplicity, which I address in intimate, serious, and comforting terms.

Nietzsche, unpublished note, 1880.

Discipline was Sun Ra's preachment – his major preachment. You know, Michael Ray told me, when they – you know, they practiced every day and they all lived in the same house, so they could get up – and I've seen them do it, when I did that interview in 1966 – and I was talking to Ra, he was sitting at the keyboard, it's about noon, and guys start appearing in this little three-room  apartment. I looked over there and here's a guy climbing out from under the grand piano, where he's been sleeping, and I look over there by the window and here's a guy coming off his mat on the window ledge, he's been sleeping there, and another guy's sleeping here, on the couch. They get up, you know, and walk in, have a bowl of cereal, and put on whatever they were putting on – a shirt, or whatever – and then they could come in and, as each came in, Sun Ra would tell them what they working on that day, and they would start working. And they did this every day.

Wayne Kramer, interviewed in Sun Ra: Interviews and Essays

My dear friend, I feel as though it has been ages since you wrote. Yet perhaps I deceive myself: the days are so long, I no longer know what I am supposed to do with them. All my 'interests' have gone missing. In the deepest part of me an immovable, black melancholy holds sway. Otherwise, weariness. Mostly in bed. Also it's the most rational thing to do for myself. I've lost a great deal of weight; people are amazed. Now I've found a good trattoria and will fatten myself up once more. However, the worst thing is this: I can no longer seize on any reason why I should live for another six months. I am deprived, and I suffer too much. Further, I've begun to grasp the imperfections, the mistakes, and the genuine calamities of my entire intellectual past, which are inconceivably vast. It is too late to make up for them; I won't be doing anything good anymore. why do anything at all! - 

Nietzsche, letter to Overbeck, March 22nd 1883

My existence is a terrible burden: I would have cast it off long ago if I hadn't been conducting the most instructive tests and experiments in the intellectual and ethical domains precisely during this period of illness and almost total deprivation – this joyfulness, thirsting after knowledge, brings me to heights where I triumph over all martyrdoms and all hopelessness. On the whole, I'm happier than ever before in my life. And yet! Constant pain, a feeling of being half-paralyzed, a condition closely related to seasickness, during which I find it difficult to speak – this feeling lasts several hours a day. For my diversion i have raging seizures (the most recent one forced me to vomit for three days and three nights; I thirsted after death). Can't read! Only seldom can I write! Can't deal with my follows! Can't listen to music!

Nietzsche, letter to Otto Eiser, January 1980

I am at the end of my thirty-fifth year; the 'middle of life' they have called it now for a millennium and a half. Dante had his vision during this period; he speaks of it in the opening lines of his poem. And now in the very midst of life I am so 'surrounded by death' that it could seize me at any hour. Given the nature of my illness, I am forced to think of a sudden death, due to convulsions (although I would a hundred times prefer a slow, lucid death, during which one could still speak to friends, even if it should be a more painful one). Thus I now feel like the most ancient of men, also in the sense that I have fulfilled my life's work. a good drop of oil has been pressed from me, I know, and they will not forget that about me … 

Nietzsche, letter to Koeslitz, September 11th 1879

I find it preposterous and, even more than that, myopic in you to have let several months pass without getting in touch with me.

On the other hand I am best off alone.

More and more I am coming to think of the firm as an anonymous, adversarial force.  Do something to enfeeble this impression.

Most of the time just thinking about Suhrkamp is enough to make me lose my temper.

Perhaps we should get together sometime.

Or perhaps not.

Indifference helps me across all the mountains of rubbish.

One cannot be enough of an adversary.

The water level of dimwittedness is rising.

[…] Respond to this sentence when you happen to be going through a phase when you have a sense of humor.

[…] I would be saying a lot if I were further to remark that it would be pointless to make a single further remark.

We are all standing on an ice sheet of misunderstanding.  And so we would do best not to make any sudden moves, lest we tumble into the water.

It would be fine by me if you replied immediately.

Take it all as you will

Thomas Bernhard to Siegfried Unseld, his editor at Suhrkamp, in a letter from 1972 (translated by Douglas Robertson)

Deleuze: 'Life will no longer be made to appear before the categories of thought; thought will be thrown into the categories of life'. this amounts to a conversion or revolution in thought. the relevant insight is that the question of the meaning of life is a false problem, for it seeks to displace a living, breathing, thinking person in favour of a completed thought expressing a meaning or purpose. This would be to mistake the greater for the less, so that one attempts to regulate the greater by the lesser. it is the gesture of taking a perspective produced by life, nature and history as though it stood entirely outside. Rejecting such claims to know transcendent reality, the immanentist revolution consists in encountering life within thought, within the forces that count so much as how you think. For immanence means ethos: It is a way of thinking and dwelling …

Phaedrus, in Philip Goodchild's On Philosophy as a Spiritual Exercise

Five, six seconds and no more – then you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony. Man in his mortal frame cannot endure it; he must either physically transform himself or die. it is a lucid and ineffable feeling. You seem to be in contact with the whole of nature and you say: 'Yes, this is true!' God, when He created the world, said at the end of each day: 'Yes, it is true, it is good'. It is not emotion, it is joy. You forgive nothing because there's nothing to forgive. Nor do you really love anything – oh, this feeling  is higher than love! The most terrible thing is the horrific certainty with which it expresses itself and the joy with which it fills one. If it lasted longer the soul could not endure it, it would have to disappear. – In these five seconds I live the whole of human existence, I would give my life for it, the price would not be too high. I order to bear this any longer one would have to transform oneself physically.

Kirilov, in Dostoevsky's The Devils

In 1994, my mother had just died. I went to visit my father on Rue Michel-Ange. I found him on the telephone with Maurice Blanchot.

To my knowledge, this had almost never occurred.

In expressing their mourning, they said tu to one another. The words broke up over their first names: Maurice, Emmanuel. There was between the two of them an inexpressible connection that for thirty years had only been expressed through letters and the dedications of their books.

“Raissa is dead,” Blanchot was saying. The sentence hung there. It was not necessary to expand. “Raissa is dead.” What I heard there was like an echo from the forties. The voice of “broken and martyred France,” but the eternal France that my father had always loved.

Standing there next to my father, I then remembered June 1961. Maurice Blanchot was involved in the political battle of the time. June 1961 was the last encounter between Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas. I was present, a child hardly twelve years of age.

There had been a great event in my father’s life the previous evening. I was there, too.

It was the thesis defense of Emmanuel Levinas in the old Sorbonne. The Liard amphitheater was full. The French university was getting Totality and Infinity.

On the jury were Jean Wahl, Vladimir Jankelevitch, Paul Ricoeur, Gabriel Marcel, and Georges Blin. In the audience standing very discretely was Maurice, always the friend, the unique and brotherly interlocutor. It was the following morning that Maurice Blanchot came to visit Emmanuel Levinas at his home on 59 rue d’Auteuil. He had, it seems to me, been there several times since the war. This thesis defense of the previous evening marked the end of my father’s institutional isolation. Undoubtedly emotion dominated, too strong. Words were pointless.

What could they say to one another?

I was present for a strange and sublime “pas de deux” in that living room on Auteuil, where Totality and Infinity had been written in sorrow.

There was in this room a silent emotion interrupted by attempts at speaking.

The impossible words were fragmented like broken sobs.

There remained only the“tu”and their given names, Maurice, Emmanuel. They paradoxically helped to veil the extreme intensity of the connection, just as they would much later in 1994.

My father stood almost perfectly still in front of the fireplace while Maurice performed a series of scholarly and continuous circumvolutions in that living room.

To the child that I was at the time, Blanchot appeared immeasurably elongated and thin. He was very handsome. He walked with his chest slightly inclined like Giacometti’s L’Homme qui marche.

I felt the bond between the two men. It had been forged at the heart of the twentieth century’s great tragedies and nearly miraculous consolations: the Russian revolution, Nazism and its defeat, and the creation of the State of Israel.

But I could foresee at the moment of this last encounter that the forms of the connection uniting these two men were again going to be radicalized.

Why did this occur precisely on this morning of June 1961, the day after the defense of Totality and Infinity? I would not know exactly how to go about analyzing this.

The speech that carries within itself the inevitable memory of the profane and the dailiness of language became improper to use without betraying, for Maurice and Emmanuel, the infinite complexity of the values of life, of thought. It was a question of leaving intact everything that forged the connection between Blanchot and Levinas since Strasbourg in the 1920s.

That morning in June of 1961 they left one another to pursue this indissoluble connection in a proximity that was still greater for being further away, disengaged from all trivial orality.

They never again saw each other face to face. And that left room for a correspondence that so often was sublime and essential.

Michael Levinas, The Final Meeting between Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot [Technically, it wasn't their final meeting – Derrida recalls visiting Levinas with Blanchot in 1968]

The meetings of the college  [i.e., the Socratic College] took place after dinner every Tuesday (or Wednesday) in the rue de Lille, where Bataille was living. Their theme: Nietzsche. As well as Bataille, there were the five persons mentioned and, not seated like the others, studiously round the table, but sunk deep in an armchair, a seventh and for me mysterious individual whose voice was not heard in the banal exchange of greetings as people gradually arrived. I knew nothing about him. I did not ask him any questions. I did not seem him at Paulhan's, and encountered him only here, scarcely visible in the depths of the armchair. I had no difficulty persuading myself that he must never go out, so pale was his complexion, so white even his wrists. We were all quite thin, our waistlines under the control of a war-time diet. But even compared to us, Maurice Blanchot looked thin.

Bataille began with a brilliant presentation. After a while, you sensed that even the reader himself was perplexed. At first, this added a sort of anxious gravity to our attention. As it persisted, we began to exchange puzzled looks. your neighbours brow began to display a sort of shadow, a blur of doubt. Illumination was a long time coming. Bataille could feel it. Did he lose heart? His delivery became slower. He suddenly stopped.

In principle, the presentation was supposed to be followed by a discussion. But nobody knew how to begin. We stayed silent. Then, from deep in the armchair where he had virtually been forgotten about, Blanchot quiet uttered a few sentences of dazzling brilliance. They restored us to the joy of understanding. We breathed again. So marvellous was the moment that, in order not to spoilt it, we left it hanging by getting up and leaving.

Jean Lescure, cited by Michael Holland