Author: Lars Iyer

Continuing to blog the new novel, Wittgenstein Jr.

Review from Library Journal, February 15, 2012

http://reviewscenter.mediasourceinc.net/detail%2FLibrary%20Journal%2F2012-Feb15%2F12-698111271839845951.xml

This sequel to Iyer's Spurious brings back W. and Lars, perhaps the most unlikely and absurd literary duo since Samuel Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon. This is a loosely constructed philosophical comedy with an episodic feel. (Spurious began as a series of blog posts, and this novel feels similar.) While there is a minimal plot (W. and Lars take a trip to America; they start an intellectual/performance art movement they call Dogma; W. worries about losing his professorship in departmental cutbacks), there's little in the way of change or character development. But that's really not the point. Rather, this book is about the crazily dysfunctional friendship of the main characters (one of whom may be a projection of the other's imagination), filled with cuttingly witty insults, and W.'s acid take on nearly everything.

VERDICT Like Godot, this novel is a philosophical rumination, at once serious and playful, on the nature of existence and meaning. While it's comic, there is at bottom a profoundly tragic sense of the chaos and emptiness of modern life. Despair has rarely been so entertaining.

Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, North Andover, MA

Publisher's Weekly reviews Dogma.

Dogma reviewed at Booktrust.

Short essay, Top 10 Literary Frenemies, in the Guardian.

'The United Kingdom has a Thomas Bernhard, and his name is Lars Iyer'.

Dogma reviewed at Hey Small Press.

My piece Top 10 literary frenemies in The Guardian

Russell: I told him he not simply to state what he thinks true, but to give arguments for it, but he said arguments spoil its beauty, and that he would feel as if was dirtying a flower with muddy hands. He does appear to me – the artist in intellect is so very rare. I told him I hadn’t the heart to say anything against that, and that he had better acquire a slave to state the arguments. I am seriously afraid that no one will see the point of anything he writes, because he won’t recommend it by arguments addressed to a different point of view.

Russell on Wittgenstein, in a letter

Tiny Camels on Dogma.

<The fifth and last chapter from Blanchot's Vigilance.>

‘Because he was a Jew, my father died in Auschwitz: How can it not be said? And how can it be said? How can one speak of that before which all possibility of speech ceases?’[i] Berek Kofman was buried alive in Auschwitz because he stopped working in order to celebrate the Sabbath. He refused not by opposing his power to the power of his captors. He knew what would happened if he stopped to pray. Work, for Berek Kofman, would neither liberate him nor provide his rehabilitation; he refused to perform his tasks on the run. But to refuse work was also to refuse the entire order of power of which such work was an emblem. He was not one of those who would hold himself back in the midst of his labours in order, later, to bear witness. It was left to his daughter to bear witness in his place, or rather to write of the witnessing of others, and of those who, she argues, teach us to witness and to learn from witnessing.

When Kofman first writes of her father’s death, it is not in the manner of a straightforwardly autobiographical recounting. Her account of his deportation and his death opens her homage to Blanchot and forms part of a broader attempt to reflect upon the event that, she writes, ‘must henceforth constitute the ground of our memory’ – of the memory of Jews and non-Jews.[ii] She also draws upon Antelme’s The Human Race, in which he recounts his own experiences as a deportee, retracing Blanchot’s own commentary on this volume.

It is as part of this complex text dedicated to the memory of her father, to Antelme and to Blanchot, that she inserts two pages from Serge Klarsfeld’s textual memorial which records the names, deportation dates and dates and places of birth of French deportees killed in the camps where her father’s name is listed, commenting, with quotations from The Writing of the Disaster:

It is recorded, there, in the Serge Klarsfeld Memorial: with its endless columns of names, its lack of pathos, its sobriety, the ‘neutrality’ of its information, this sublime memorial takes your breath away. Its ‘neutral’ voice summons you obliquely; in its extreme restraint, it is the very voice of affliction, of this event in which all possibility vanished, and which inflicted on the whole of humanity ‘the decisive blow which left nothing intact.’ This voice leaves you without a voice, makes you doubt your common sense and all sense, makes you suffocate in silence: ‘silence like a cry without words; mute, although crying endlessly’.[iii]

Her father’s name is a name among others. But the memorial is not a list of classification of the kind that the SS kept so assiduously. The memorial names names, but does so in order to let the names resound in a different manner than in the concentration camp roll-call, or the catalogues of the living and the dead kept by their captors. But is there such thing as a proper naming – an act untainted by shame? There cannot be an absolute idiom; the immediate does not allow itself to grasped immediately; when I name something, I invoke a whole network of powers in order to withdraw the presence of the thing of which I speak or write. In ridding myself of the singular, I reveal the meaning, the idea that subsists in all things; but this means that the particular disappears, the unique instant escapes and the word fails to capture what seemed to offer itself to its grasp. But does the memorial not provide the beginnings of an idiom, recalling the specificity, the singularity of each victim? Does the memorial counter the identification and classification of names and numbers that occurred in the camps through a renaming: by calling out the names again, this time in order to remember what happened? It is true that the memorial presents a list of information, but its sobriety, its restraint lets the names resound anew, halting the inexorable roll-call.

It is in order to let her father’s name resound along with all the other names on the pages of the memorial she reproduces that Kofman writes Smothered Words. In Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, published a few years later, Kofman recalls that all she has left of him is the fountain pen she took from her mother’s purse: a pen that she used until it failed her, until, patched up with Scotch tape, it took its place before her on her desk. It ‘makes me write, write. Maybe all my books have been the detours required to bring me to write about “that”’.[iv]

To write about that: Kofman would indicate the instant that is incommensurable with writing and calls for it, demanding that writing become an endless detour, a series of futile attempts to reach the trauma, to broach it in its uniqueness and its singularity. Her aim is to write a writing like that of the textual memorial. The imperative to ‘write, write’ is a response to the demand to situate herself with respect to this loss even if this demand can never be resolved. But she does not satisfy herself with a private act of witnessing, retreating into mourning, nor even to commemorate terrible events. She writes to disturb us, her readers, to awaken a memory (scarcely a memory but an excess of memory, a hypermnesis) that, she claims, demands a new kind of ethics and politics, a new practice of writing.

It is in this respect, for Kofman, that Blanchot‘s theoretical practice is exemplary:

It behoves me, as a Jewish woman intellectual who has survived the holocaust, to pay homage to Blanchot for the fragments on Auschwitz scattered throughout his texts: writing of the ashes, writing of the disaster which avoids the trap of complicity with speculative knowledge, with that in it which is tied to power, and thereby complicit with the torturers of Auschwitz.[v]

Blanchot, author of The Writing of the Disaster, would have taught us how to witness.

*

Kofman pays particular tribute to the figure of the Jew in Blanchot: ‘the infinite of which the Jew, for Blanchot (even if he is not only that), is the emblematic figure, he who has been able to preserve throughout his history the vocation of foreignness, of exile, of the outside’.[vi] This foreignness, exile or exteriority is as terrifying as it is measureless, refusing to let the proposed ‘solution’ to the Jewish question do away with that question.

It is no longer, with the Jew, a matter of myths, of the pagan existing which would enroot us in the soil of a particular place ‘The words exodus, exile – as well as those heard by Abraham ‘Leave your country, your kinsmen, your father’s house’ – bear a meaning that is not negative’. ‘To leave the dwelling place, yes; to come and go in such a way as to affirm the world as passage, not because one should flee this world or live as fugitives in eternal misfortune’.[vii] Blanchot affirms exodus as an affirmative relation to exile, to the unknown of a wandering which does not seek rest, as passage through the outside which escapes the interiority of the state.

The Jewish God would not name ‘the God of power, promise and salvation, of whose retreat Auschwitz is the mark’.[viii] This God names the call from the outside, the call that elects a people to leave their abode. It is this God who called Abraham into exile, who allowed the slaves to become a people in the deserts of Egypt, a people without land, but one elected to observe the Law and to preserve an ethos.[ix] The words heard by Abraham, ‘leave your country, your kinsmen, your father’s house’, take on meaning for Blanchot as a summons to a positive errancy, to a new, nomadic relation to the earth.[x]

*

Considering Pasternak’s question, ‘What does being Jewish signify? Why does it exist?’ Blanchot writes:

I believe that among all the responses there is one in three parts that we cannot avoid choosing, and it is this: it exists so the idea of exodus and the idea of exile can exist as a legitimating movement; it exists, through exile and through the initiative that is exodus, so that the experience of strangeness may affirm itself close at hand as an irreducible relation; it exists so that, by authority of this experience, we might learn to speak.[xi]

What does it mean to step outside? Is it simply to cross a border, moving from one territory into another? Blanchot: ‘the Hebrew Abraham invites us not only to pass from one shore to the other, but also to carry ourselves to wherever there is a passage to be made, maintaining this between two shores that is the truth of passage’.[xii] To pass, passage: to ‘affirm the world as passage’, as exodus and exile sets the Jew apart from the Christian for whom the here below is scorned and from the Greek who allows this world to be measured by the transcendence of light (‘truth as light, light as measure’).[xiii] It is by passing beyond the horizon of light that the Jew relates ‘to what is beyond his reach’: to that of which God is one name.[xiv]

Abraham takes his family from Sumeria. They pass into the desert that is between spaces, between sedentary states. Nomadism, migration brings those who pass in relation with what Blanchot calls ‘the Unknown that one can know only by way of distance’. When Jacob wrestles with the one he will later call an angel, he is said to become the ‘partner’ of ‘the inaccessible outside’.[xv] Jacob is renamed Israel, the one who struggles with God. The word Israel will also name his progeny.

Israel remains outside. The Jew is the one who maintains a relation to what is unknown, to the foreign even as this prevents the foundation of a state, which is to say, an interiority like any other. This is why Blanchot can affirm what Neher writes: ‘How can one be in Exile and in the Kingdom, at the same time vagabond and established? It is precisely this contradiction that makes the Jewish man a Jew’.[xvi] The desert, for the Jew, is not a dwelling place but the world become passage. But a passage to where? Not to the promised land understood as a final destination. Passage remains passage. One might object that passage was always, for the Jew, on the way to the promised land. A deal was made with God. Yet Blanchot’s account of Judaism will see speech itself as the promised land.

Speech, in this sense, is the promised land where exile fulfils itself in sojourn since it is not a matter of being at home there but of being always Outside, engaged in a movement wherein the Foreign offers itself, yet without disavowing itself’. To acknowledge the relation to the Outside in the relation to the Other prevents me from taking the Other to be another like myself.[xvii]

Speech opens the Jew to the promised land in which one might live without that land becoming one’s own. There is no dwelling for the Jew.

To speak, in a word, is to seek the source of meaning in the prefix that the words exile, exodus, existence, exteriority and estrangement are committed to unfolding in various modes of experience; a prefix that for us designates distance and separation as the origin of all ‘positive value’.[xviii]

The last phrase, positive value, is to be contrasted with the values which are impugned in nihilism. At the outset of the essay, Blanchot has already claimed the question of what is specific to Judaism has received answers which determine the Jew negatively; he gives the example of Simone Weil, who argues Judaism lacks the clarity of Greek thought. Blanchot wonders whether this fear to affirm the words which begin with the prefix ‘ex-’ is that of ‘playing into the hands of nihilism and its most vulgar substitute, anti-Semitism’.[xix] It is true that anti-Semitic rhetoric will condemn what is taken to be the deracination of the Jews – a rootlessness Blanchot celebrates as it separates the Jew from the interiority of any particular state. This relation is what breaks any myths of the place (the same myths, of course, upon which the Nazis would draw), returning each time as a call outside, as the experience of an insecurity which disrupts the relation to being in a place, to dwelling.

The call outside breaks not only the relation to the place, but that way of thinking which would allow experience to be measured according to the security of this place. To contrast Ulysses to Abraham, as Levinas does, is to separate one who remains himself throughout his vicissitudes, who seeks only to reach his birthplace and his wife and his son from the one who simply goes outside, who passes into the desert, that ‘between the shores’ which escapes interiority.

The response to the call assembles a people who are joined in a limit-experience, in the border that broadens and becomes a desert. Above all, for Blanchot, it maintains ‘that Jewish thought does not know, or refuses, mediation and speech as mediating’.[xx] And again: ‘Judaism is the sole thought which does not mediate’.[xxi] How should one understand this?

Granted, Hegel is the mortal enemy of Christianity, but this is the case exactly to the extent that he is a Christian: far from being satisfied with a single Mediation (Christ), he makes everything into mediation. Judaism is the sole thought that does not mediate. And that is why Hegel, and Marx, are anti-Judaic, not to say anti-Semitic.[xxii]

Judaism maintains a point of indifference between the ordinary notions of interiority and exteriority, the inside and the outside and the ‘other’ exteriority and the ‘other’ outside. It watches over this indifference in the practice of reading which makes the Jews a people of the Book.

What is refused with speech is the possibility of what will be called the master and slave dialectic as it permits the mediation of the struggle between two self-consciousnesses such that a form of society is possible and eventually the triumph of a universal state that would bestow recognition upon all. Blanchot will grant ‘the dialectical fulfilment is at work, and this is necessary’ even as, alongside the dialectic, there is the relation to the outside which Judaism maintains.[xxiii] ‘My relation with the Other is irreducible to any measure, just as it excludes any mediation and any reference to another relation that would include it’.[xxiv] And it is so because it is also a relation to the outside, to the ‘other’ exteriority.

*

What does it mean when Blanchot calls Judaism ‘eternal philosophy’?

I say ‘eternal philosophy’ in the sense that there is in Levinas no spectacular break with the language called ‘Greek’, wherein the principle of universality is preserved. But what is pronounced, or rather announced, with Levinas is a surplus: something beyond the universal, a singularity which can be called Jewish and which waits to keep on being thought. Prophetic in this respect. Judaism, as that which exceeds all that has ever been thought because it has ever been thought already, and which nevertheless bears the responsibility for thought yet to come: this is what gives us the other philosophy of Levinas, a burden and a hope, the burden of hope.[xxv]

Judaism is not a counter-philosophy commensurate with what began in Europe with the Greeks. It marks a break in the language of ousia and edios, theoria and thaumazein. It breaks in the act of prophesy. But what is prophesised? What, in Blanchot’s stripped down Judaism, does prophecy mean? ‘Prophetic speech announces an impossible future’, writes Blanchot in an earlier essay, ‘it is not the future that is given, it is the present that is taken away, and with it any possibility of a firm, stable, lasting presence’.[xxvi] An impossible future? After the destruction of the Temple, the desert opens. Speech which has become prophetic ‘needs the desert to cry out and that endlessly awakens in us the terror, understanding, and memory of the desert’.[xxvii] But what does this mean? ‘The desert is still not time, or space, but a space without place and a time without production’.[xxviii] A place does not offer itself for dwelling, as that place in which the work to transform the desert can begin.

speech prophesises when it refers to a time of interruption, that other time that is always present in all time and in which people, stripped of their power and separated from the possible (the widow and the orphan), exist with each other in the bare relationship in which they had been in the desert and which is the desert itself – bare relationship, but not unmediated, for it is always given in a prior speech.[xxix]

The widow, the orphan: far from betraying a naive sentimentalism on the part of Levinas or Blanchot, these are names for the one to whom I am related when the measure of power, of the self, fails: when, that is, I no longer seek to hold the Other at a distance various cultural categories permit. The walls have fallen – yet this does not mean distance is overcome once and for all, that everything would collapse into an undifferentiated mass. The Other holds me at a distance, it is true, but at its distance, which is to say, as it escapes my power, or, better, the power which would permit me to maintain my grip upon the world. I am drawn from myself, explicated, such that taking my place and revealing it to have been usurped – there is only the ‘il’ without determination. It is not that I wait; the ‘il’ waits for me. It is not that I speak as prophet, but that the ‘il’ speaks and allows to resound as speech the prophecy which is born in the relation to the Other.

Stripped of their power: the infinite is explicated within the finite in the relation in question. Prophecy reveals the finitude of the human being to have been already disturbed by the relation to the Other. It is no longer my relation to my death which counts, but the relation to the vulnerability of the Other. Speak or kill – to speak is to acknowledge the Other as the Other; to kill is to forget the speech which has already occurred as a wordless acknowledgement upstream of what can be said.[xxx] Who speaks? The prophet who is the outside within me – the ‘il’ who speaks in my absence, the vigilance without power or possibility. Speak or kill – speech happens without me; the ‘il’ responds in my place, revealing that place to already constitute an usurpation.

Eternal philosophy, eternal vigilance holds open a propheticism which may disappear in so-called Greek thought. Jewish thought names the interruption of the continuous discourse of the said. The burden of hope lies in the relation to the Other: a relation which cannot be endured as an enclosed and intact ‘I’. Unbearable, then, is that experience which watches over a future and awaits us in the suspension of the present instant. Unbearable, but borne by a people as they pass between the shores.

*

It is in a tribute to the work of Levinas that Blanchot writes:

I will not speak of the other or about the other, but I will speak – if I speak – to the Other (that is, to the stranger, the poor, him who has no speech, even the master, bereft of mastery), not to inform him or to transmit knowledge to him – a task for ordinary language – but rather to invoke him (this other so other that his mode of address is not ‘you’ but ‘he’), to render him witness by a manner of speaking that doesn’t efface the infinite distance, but is speech by this distance, a speech born of the infinite.[xxxi]

To speak of or about the other is to risk speaking in the place of the Other and thereby assuming this place, filling in the infinite dissymmetry of the relation between the ‘I’ and the Other.

According to Blanchot, it is Levinas who shows us that Jews bear witness to a relation of difference with the human face, recalling us, he writes, ‘to the exigency of strangeness; not separated by an incomprehensible retribution, but designating as pure separation and as pure relation what, from man to man, exceeds human power – which is nonetheless capable of anything’.[xxxii] For Levinas, the relation or separation that opens between human beings escapes the entire dimension of power and hence the cultural determination of human relations as master and slave, employer and employee. The unilateral relation to which Levinas attends is not modelled after any reciprocity; to claim that it escapes power is also to point beyond any particular construal of the relation between individuals. It is, rather, an exposition, opening immediately in a greeting or salutation in which the ‘I’ is claimed to be elected by the Other.

We have met these formulations before. What is surprising in the present context is that election is presented as a trauma; after all, is it not in these terms that Levinas writes of the enslavement of the Jews in Egypt? Yet it is appropriate, he claims, to describe the relation that bestows the good because it is structurally analogous to the ‘thorn in the flesh’ of the opening to the Other. It is, for Levinas, analogous to the irruption of the good.

It is significant that this trauma is also presented as a witnessing. The ‘I’ before the Other is claimed to say a word of welcome, analogous to Abraham’s hinei, the here I am through which he put himself in service to God. The call that tore Abraham from his sedentary existence is structurally analogous to the opening to the Other that is acknowledged in saying. Both imply the disruption of settled way of existence, of the happiness of a life lived without a more fundamental responsibility. Both singularise the one who responds, summoning him or her to assume responsibility. Both, in turn, are also analogous to the persecution that occurred in the Egyptian enslavement. But both also bear witness to a traumatism more originary than that exemplified in the enslavement of Israel. Saying, for Levinas, is, as we have seen, a contentless declaration of a readiness, a doing before understanding that happens in response to the traumatising opening to the Other. The Other, like the God who calls Abraham, is not a master with an imperious will. The traumatic opening that bestows the good is not enmeshed in relations of power, nor is it an event I can choose whether or not to acknowledge. It inscribes itself in me. Henceforward, according to Levinas, I am responsible to the Other before all else (although there is also the structure of the third, by which this responsibility is claimed to give rise to justice, to politics).[xxxiii]

It is to the primacy of this traumatism, this saying, to which Levinas’s thought, in its entirety, attempts to attend. But if he is to retain the opening to the Other that obtains as saying, if he is to remember that language is inaugurated in the address to the Other, then this demands an attempt to write in a way that allows this election to resound. It is to traumatism, to saying, that Levinas answers in his extraordinary endeavour to carry through a reduction of philosophical writing, refusing to make saying into an object of discourse. Otherwise Than Being is a work of philosophy written against the said in order to answer to a relation that withholds itself from the measure of power.

The traumatism can this be thought in terms of the vigilance of the ‘il’, of the experience of the ‘there is’ of language. In previous chapters, I have made the claim that Blanchot’s account of the Other bears a relation to the ‘there is’ of language. The question remains open as to how one should think this with respect to the relation to the Other.

One way to organise it is to follow to the end the exploration of the reduction as Levinas sets it out in Otherwise Than Being. I have already begin this analysis in chapter three; what remains is to show firstly how witnessing, for Levinas, is ultimately a witnessing of God, and, secondly, that the same structure is presented in Blanchot’s texts, with the ‘there is’ of language taking God’s place.

*

Levinas’s God is not reached through a transcendence to another world; nor too, does God reveal himself to us in theophany. God is only ‘there’ in my response to the Other; I acknowledge him as I speak, as I address the Other. If God commands me, this is ‘the command is stated by the mouth of him it commands’[xxxiv]; it is what I speak in response to the Other. To witness the Other is also to witness God; but this means only that I speak and thereby allow the infinity of the Other to become infinite, marking in my speech the very infinition of the Other. Then God cannot be objectified or represented; God is always withdrawn from any particular site; there is, by contrast, only the trace of his passing, a trace, moreover, of no one who was ever ‘there’ in a time synchronous with my own. As Levinas puts it, the trace ‘comes from a past that has never been represented, has never been present’[xxxv]; I cannot follow God’s tracks to his lair. The trace can only be thought as a diachrony, as an experience which interrupts the temporal order.

How to witness God? Levinas cannot avoid synchronising the diachrony of saying; he writes for us, which means he is condemned to use a potentially objectivising, representational language. How can this be avoided? Levinas cannot avoid betrayal if he is to write of the Other, but he can maintain his discourse as a kind of indication. ‘[P]hilosophy is called upon to reduce that betrayal’: but how is such a reduction possible?[xxxvi]

Already Totality and Infinity is called a ‘language of fragments’[xxxvii], in Otherwise than Being, Levinas make use of what he calls contestation – the holding in tension of saying and the said. But now he appeals to prophetic discourse as it is linked to witnessing, to glorification. Propheticism is compromised, it is true, but it resists this compromise, pressing against it, allowing ‘the name of God’ to resonate in every language.[xxxviii] All language witnesses God through a kind of auto-reduction. Vigilance is always a witnessing of the glory of God.

Levinas coins the word illeity in order to indicate the way in which God is transcendent. This word is formed from il or ille, indicating the passing of the infinite, that is, the way in which the infinite reveals itself without yielding to the powers that belong to the subjectivity of the subject.[xxxix] Levinas associates illeity with the ‘he’, with ‘the nonphenomenality of the other who affects me beyond representation, unbeknownst to me and like a thief’.[xl] The notion of illeity resonates with another notion formulated jointly by Blanchot and Levinas in their first writings: the ‘there is’. One way to understand the relation between illeity and the ‘there is’ in their texts, separating the role of these notions in the thought of Levinas and Blanchot, is in terms of the relation to the infinite they respectively imply.

In ‘God and Philosophy’ provides an indication as to how one might think the interrelation of illeity and the ‘there is’ with respect to the Other:

God is not simply the ‘first other’, the other par excellence, or the ‘absolutely other’, but other than the other, other otherwise, other with an alterity prior to the alterity of the other, prior to the ethical bond with the other and different from every neighbour, transcendent to the point of absence, to the point of a possible confusion with the stirring of the ‘there is’.[xli]

Both the ‘there is’ and illeity might be characterised as explications of the finite. Yet if the latter is, as I will show, an acknowledgement of the glory of God, the former is revealed in an experience as lowly as physical pain. In pain, ‘there is an absence of all refuge. It is the fact of being directly exposed to being. It is made up of the impossibility of fleeing or retreating’.[xlii] The one in pain cannot leave the painful instant behind; she is unable to summon the strength sufficient to open a future for herself. The ‘there is’ is not the Heideggerian ‘es gibt’; it is not the being of beings understood as ‘transcendens pure and simple’, that is, the temporal transcendence that opens the future. The horror of the ‘there is’, for Levinas, lies in the fact that it gives nothing to be experienced – that it does not permit a ‘subject’ of experience to take up a stance with respect to the irremissibility of being. By contrast, the good infinition of God is claimed to be otherwise than being, that is, beyond the bad infinition of existence.

The full account of the reduction in Otherwise than Being is meant to avoid not only the disappearance of saying into the said, but also the intoxicated speech of the poet, who would sing of the Other as he would the things of the world. The ‘there is’ is linked, for Levinas, to just such a pagan drunkenness. Why, then, does he grant that God, the ‘il’ who passes in illeity, might be confused with another ‘il’, that is, the ‘il’ of the ‘there is’?

Abraham’s ‘here I am’ re-echoes in the contentless declaration Levinas figures as the ‘here I am’ of the ‘I’ before the Other. Both are ways of opening to God. Both are ways of witnessing. As he writes, ‘It is by way of this witnessing that glory is glorified. It is the way in which the Infinite surpasses the finite, and the way in which the Infinite comes to pass’.[xliii] For Levinas, it is this witnessing that calls the subject into existence just as Adam was called from the thickets of Paradise where he sought refuge. The voice of God ‘moving through the garden from the way whence comes the day’ is a figure for a response to a summons that cannot be evaded, an originary surprise that calls, in turn, for the sincerity of saying.[xliv] It is in the hineni, the me voici or here I am that I acknowledge the summons that exposes me as if to a blazing sun that burns away every interiority. But this infinite, originary relation, the light of a blazing sun, harbours a shadow. Levinas writes transcendence ‘needs ambiguity as “a frontier at once ineffaceable and finer than the outline of an ideal line”’.[xlv]

Why does it need ambiguity? Because God is known only through the trace. God passes in the trace. God is there insofar as he is acknowledged in Saying. The Other, for Levinas resembles herself; but God, as it were, resembles Himself in the self-resembling of the Other. This means there is an ambiguity with respect to God’s presence. This is why the relation to the Other, for Levinas, can seem to glorify something other than God. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas will link poetry to the feminine body. The Other given in voluptuosity, in the erotic night, brings the ‘there is’ very close to the ‘I’. Perhaps eroticism might be said to profane the Other by mimicking the way in which the infinite is said, by Levinas, to pass in the finite. It is unsurprising when Levinas links poetry to eroticism, to the feminine body. This already anticipates the way in which Blanchot will think God as a name for the ‘there is’ of language.

*

‘Assuredly, it would be rash to claim to represent Judaism by allowing God’s name to vanish into thin air’, Blanchot writes.[xlvi] But then what place is marked by the name of God? ‘With regard to Greek humanism, Jewish humanism astonishes by a concern with human relations so constant and so preponderant that, even when God is nominally present, it is still a question of man; of what there is between man and man when nothing brings them together or separates them but themselves’.[xlvii] A non-mediating relation to the Other, to Autrui, the one who is without horizon, who breaks the horizon of light, which is to say, for Blanchot, of the conditions of intelligibility which have determined theoretical discourse since the Greeks: this is what ‘Jewish humanism’ would preserve. But what does this mean?

A summary outline: Greek humanism would name, at bottom, the confidence that the human being is the measure of all things, that everything will yield itself to the light of theoretical speculation. Wonderment that the world exists is also, for the Greeks, wonderment at the capacities of human thought. Blanchot always presents phenomenology as the outcome of such ‘Greek’ thinking: the emphasis on the shining forth of the world as it is revealed to the philosophical speculator according to the model of perception and the claim that truth and meaning would lie in such disclosure and can be witnessed in the phenomenological treatise answers to a faith in the light of reason. However, the danger is that phenomenology interposes a third term that would explain the relationship between the ‘I’ and the world such that the relation to the Other is annulled. Phenomenology threatens to neutralise the play of the neuter.

Is ‘God’, like the Other, a name in the neuter? Does it name what Blanchot allows himself to call immediacy or presence? Blanchot does not witness in the Other what Levinas calls illeity, the trace of God’s passing, nor even, in a simple sense, the ‘there is’. It is the ‘there is’ of language which is witnessed. Another exteriority opens in place of the exteriority affirmed by Levinas. There is another way to understand prophetism and the significance of the holy texts of the Jews and the traditions which determine their reception. What does Blanchot witness? The unknown as it is explicated in the relation to the Other; the infinite as it is gives itself without term.

Blanchot affirms Jewish monotheism, but in his own way. It names not transcendence but to its reversal. Blanchot does not break with Levinas’s argument concerning the central importance of the relation to the Other, the precedence of saying over the said, but allows this relation to be implicated by the ‘there is’.

It is for this reason that Blanchot can claim that the Nazi persecutions did not prevent the revelation of the infinitude of Jewish monotheism. Anti-Semitism bears furled within it a positive revelation of the God whose call, recorded in the scriptures, bound a people to one another. Blanchot’s ‘God’ did not die at Auschwitz, but was revealed anew. Here would be the revelation of the Law and the ethos: the call outside, the revelation of the Other is, for Blanchot, the revelation at the heart of Jewish monotheism. The voyage out, the movement of migration, called for the solitude of Israel from its outset, an election that prevented enrootedness, sedentarism and the institution of a kingdom or a state like other states.

Has Blanchot gone too far in claiming the meaning of Jewish monotheism in this way? Levinas permits this claim in allowing the ‘there is’ is confusable with illeity. From one perspective, Blanchot’s oeuvre can be read as issuing from a confused misunderstanding of the revelation to which Levinas points. From another, Levinas’s own texts can be read as an attempt to sacralise the ‘there is’, seeking to contain its unrestricted force in the institution of prohibitions marked out by key terms in his lexicon.

Might one then propose a Blanchotian account of trauma and witnessing in place of a Levinasian one, regarding the notions of witnessing, of saying in Levinas’s work as delimitations of a broader, transgressive notion of the ‘there is’? It cannot be a question of arbitrating between Levinas and Blanchot, since it is the very possibility of arbitration that is at issue. If there is no transcendence without ambiguity to which one might appeal, then it is impossible to arbitrate between them. But if this is the case, this implies that there is no reason to follow Levinas in his apparent certainty that the relation to the glorious infinitude of illeity is differentiable from the ‘there is’. To know that there might be confusion with respect to the ‘there is’ and illeity, transcendence and the reverse of transcendence, is already to stray.

What does this mean with respect to Blanchot’s reflections on Judaism? He foregrounds the same ambiguity between the illeity and the ‘there is’ as Levinas, but accepts the consequences of this ambiguity. This does not mean it is possible to locate Blanchot’s account of witnessing and trauma on one side of this ambiguity with Levinas’s account on the other, since this would be to resolve this ambiguity in advance.

But how is this ambiguity marked in Judaism itself? For Blanchot, it is must be thought in terms of the relation to the Book the Jews would embody.

*

In the opening dedication to Otherwise Than Being, Levinas writes that anti-Semitism is the hatred of the other man in every confession, every nation. Yet by linking it to the name, Semite, he claims a special status for the Jews as witnesses for all humankind. In one sense, for Levinas, the Jews are a people like any other, ‘a people in love with happiness, like all peoples, and with the pleasures of life’; and yet by a ‘strange election’ they are bound to a revelation.[xlviii] But they are also are a people to whom, in Levinas’s image, the Bible is bound as strings are bound to the body of a violin, whose history gives the revelation a human history as the revelation of the Infinite. This means that God is not, for Levinas, absent from Auschwitz; to assert this, he writes, ‘would amount to finishing the criminal enterprise of National Socialism, which is aimed at the annihilation of Israel and the forgetting of the ethical message of the Bible, which Judaism bears, and whose multimillennial history is concretely prolonged by Israel’s existence as a people’.[xlix] Levinas calls for a return to these same texts: to the origins that continue to give sustenance. The scriptures and commentaries, flowers in the ‘garden of Writing’, open to those patriarchs and prophets, Kings and builders, farmers and builders who would live from the divine source.[l] ‘The adventure of Spirit also unfolds among men’ and it is still unfolding; the modern Jew must learn how the ‘traumatism’ of the enslavement in Egypt ‘constitutes my very humanity, that which draws me closer to the problems of the wretched of the earth, to all persecuted people’.[li] Likewise, the traumatism of the camps does not obliterate the revelation, but testifies to it in another sense. The revelation that elicits Abraham’s ‘here I am’, the burning bush before which Moses lowers his eyes, meet the books of the witnesses of the extermination. The garden remains open to the Jew.

As a commentator on scriptural texts, Levinas urges the relevance of Jewish literature for Jews of our time (as he writes, for modern Jews, ‘whose concern with the intellectual destiny of the West and its triumphs and crises is not simply borrowed […] the problem of the revelation remains pressing, and demands the elaboration of new modes of thought’).[lii] As a philosopher, he uses a vocabulary of election and prayer, religion and the sacred. Talmudic commentary and philosophy converge in the notion of saying, of witnessing. He would invite the Jew into the garden of writing to read and, in turn, to write; he would also teach us that reading and writing are likewise a response to saying; Levinas invents a practice of writing that answers to revelation and shows how Judaism bears witness for all of humankind. But for Blanchot, witnessing is associated with another kind of receptivity, another practice of reading and writing. To read with Blanchot is to understand that the religious language of the scriptural commentator also bears witness to a certain poetry that, finally, outplays the notions and vocabulary of monotheism. Blanchot’s critical practice, and, in particular, his notions of witnessing and trauma, attests to an ambiguity inherent in religious experience, that is, to the problem of understanding illeity as anything other than a restricted delimitation of the ‘there is’.

This gives an indication of the way in which one might approach Levinas’s Talmudic commentaries. Levinas knows how far scriptural texts are from contemporary experience; this is why he writes commentaries, drawing the Jews into the garden, showing us that the texts are alive, that they bind together a people, granting them a future in the future of exegesis. The revelation, he writes,

has a particular way of producing meaning, which lies in its calling upon the unique within me. It is as if a multiplicity of persons – and it is this multiplicity, surely, that gives the notion of ‘person’ its sense – were the condition for the plenitude of ‘absolute truth’, as if each person, by virtue of his own uniqueness, were able to guarantee the revelation of one unique aspect of the truth.[liii]

But to permit this equivocation, to turn the determination of meaning over to the reader, is to render the status of his own commentary ambiguous. The very language of the commentaries, like the scriptures themselves, is affected by the ambiguity between illeity and the ‘there is’. Linguistic meaning depends upon transcendence, upon the dissimulation of the power of language to negate its referents. But language is also composed of other rhetorical and poetical elements that are very evident in scriptural texts. For Levinas, the revelation is given in exegesis, in the encounter of the reader with the text. But the same exegesis involves interpretation, that is, the attempt to retrieve a meaning by extracting the semantic from the syntactic, the real from the image, death from dying. Revelation is transmitted not despite the syntax of language, but by means of it. Language, that is to say, becomes symbolic, referring to nothing outside of itself. It is in terms of the immanence of language that the revelation might be thought; the glory of God that would pass in saying is confusable with what is immanent to language itself.

According to the well known argument of Blanchot’s ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, language can never purge itself of sense once and for all. It must mean, lending itself to reading; it must carry through the minimal transcendence that implies it can never become a thing unto itself. Language can neither free itself from things nor become a thing; it is drawn simultaneously in two opposing directions. As such, the effects of the ambiguity of transcendence cannot be confined to God alone; the reader of the scriptures or the commentaries might discover something revelatory in the grain of the language that was supposed merely to convey revelation. Is this what Nietzsche understands when he writes, ‘we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar’?[liv] Do the shadows of a dead God flicker through the thickets of language, the overgrown garden whose flowers no longer open to the sun? Are the dreams of a pure and transcendent metalanguage shadows of the God who is already dead? God cannot find us sheltering in the thickets of paradise because we know that language has enclosed and hidden us forever. To use a Blanchotian figure: the stars are going out above us; the disaster has happened. We remain in the thickets of a language that can no longer raise itself to the stars.

Blanchot makes scripture testify to the co-implication of transcendence and the reverse of transcendence, indeterminacy and determinacy, the il y a and illeity, bad and good infinitude, the voice of God moving through the garden like the day and the choking undergrowth that has overgrown the garden.

*

What does this mean? Blanchot remarks of the Torah: ‘There are two kinds of writing, one white, the other black: one that renders invisible the invisibility of a colourless flame; the other that is made accessible in the form of letters, characters, and articulations by the power of black fire’.[lv] Later, writing an essay which celebrates the dedicatee of ‘The Absence of the Book and the Beginning of Writing’, Blanchot remembers the lines from the Jerusalem Talmud that describe the way in which the Torah was said to exist before the creation: ‘It was written with letters of black fire upon a background of white fire’.[lvi] According to the Kabbalistic interpretation, Blanchot recalls, it is in the white fire one finds the written Torah; the black fire is the oral Torah. Perhaps Moses could read the white fire; the prophets, too, were able to glimpse a little of the white flame, but only when the Messiah comes will it be legible for all. The testamentary book that the Jews call the Tanakh is unread and unreadable, except by a few. What if the written Torah were to stand in for the indeterminacy at the heart of the Book and all books written thereafter? It is as if the wavering Blanchot calls the neuter were there from the start, and the narrative voice which comes to itself in The Castle already resounded for the readers of the Tanakh.

*

What the Jews bear in common, for Levinas, is the relation to scripture and to the tradition of its reception. And for Blanchot? It is no coincidence that when invoking the unavowable community he will write of an Israel which came together and never began its journey: an Israel which would undertake a journey like that of the ‘other’ Ulysses or the wandering Breton: a lost Israel, an Israel ‘reduced’ such that it names only that space of exchanges between each person wherein each becomes Other for another in turn and speech is permitted its play.[lvii]

Jewish humanism would be that nomadism in which each relates to the Other as to the unknown, the outside and where such a relation has as its price the exposure of the ‘I’ to the outside. Jewish humanism does not have the self as its locus – the separate human subject confident in his powers – or even the community of those selves who are united by a common project. Affirmed is not an aggregate of such selves bound in an institution which would afford each an equal recognition. The Jewish God names what prevents such equality and shatters all institutions which would watch over it. God keeps the place of the relation to the Other as to the infinite, to the outside which exceeds any determination of the space of a community, a nation or a people.

Has Blanchot reduced Judaism out of existence? What has become, in his account of Judaism, of God, prophecy, exodus and the covenant? The witnessing specific to Judaism has been dispersed into a more general account of witnessing. Judaism has been joined to other Blanchotian communities in which the relation to the ‘there is’ of language is at stake. God, like the surreal, would only be one name for the outside, for the neuter as it is indicated by scripture and automatic writing alike. Judaism, like Surrealism, has no absolute status in Blanchot’s text.

Dogma, keeping good company with Cesar Aira and others, is one of the ten novels published in February to which Flavorwire is looking forward.

David Winters and Anthony Brown in conversation about Modernism.

<The fourth chapter of Blanchot's Vigilance. Up for a limited time only.>

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.