Author: Lars Iyer

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.

Dogma reviewed by Alfred Hickling at The Guardian. It'll be in the print edition of the paper on Saturday.

Spurious of one Sanjay Sipahimalani's top 11 novels of 2011 at Antiblurb.

Recent talk at the ICA profiled at the TLS blog.

<The following is a draft from chapter three of Lars Iyer's Blanchot's Vigilance. It will be up for a limited period only.>

Giacometti destroys his statues, dozens of them. His aim is simple: he means to sculpt the human being in a manner sculpture has been as yet unable to achieve. Upon what techniques does he draw? There is the influence of Egyptian art which, according to Schaefer – an authority with whose work Giacometti was familiar – attempts to depict the essence of a person rather than their real appearance.[i] Schaefer attacked the Greek discovery of the artistic representation of perspective because it breaks with the way in which we remember images – frontally or as a profile. Giacometti says enthusiastically: ‘no other sculptures as closely resemble real people as Egyptian sculpture’; but what do they resemble? Not simply the sculptor’s models.[ii] True, the portraits of Diego, Giacometti’s brother, are noticeably portraits of this and not another individual. But perhaps Giacometti has another kind of resemblance in mind.

Giacometti claims in an interview he always turns familiar models into strangers: ‘You are no longer the person I thought I knew. You no longer have any particular characteristic. As for individuality, you become a generalised head, the head of everyone’.[iii] Such impersonality was already a practice in Egyptian art: it is difficult to tell a sculpture of Akhenaten from one of his wife Nefertiti, for example. Laurie Wilson speculates that this was to provide a political stability in maintaining the appearance of an unbroken continuity in the royal line. Perhaps, too, it was a way of keeping something from death, and some speculate that Egyptian sculptures are ‘doubles’ or ‘ka’ figures, depicting an ethereal replica of the body. The aim of sculpture was to preserve the double, the soul, from its 'second' death. Were Giacometti’s post-surrealist figures likewise a way of keeping something alive?

Sartre is in no doubt: the statues attest to the power of the human being to begin. Giacometti presents a living human being and not a corpse; this is his great achievement. Giacometti’s aim, Sartre writes, is ‘not to glut galleries with new works but to prove that sculpture is possible by carving’.[iv] But how will he accomplish this? It is as simple, Sartre says, as Diogenes proving the possibility of movement to Parmenides and Zeno by simply walking up and down. Yet that simplicity is hard to achieve. Giacometti: ‘If I only knew how to make one, I could make them by the thousands …’[v]

Giacometti's workshop is covered in the dust made by his tenacious carving. If he destroys his statues, this is the correlate of a desire to escape the heaviness of the material with which he works. ‘Never was substance less eternal, more fragile, more nearly human’, Sartre comments.[vi] ‘Giacometti's substance – this strange flour that slowly settles over his studio and buries it, that seeps under his nails and into the deep wrinkles on his face – is the dust of space’.[vii]

The dust of space: this is what remains as Giacometti resists the attempt to erect a monument, to fill space. ‘Giacometti knows that there is nothing superfluous about a living person because everything is function. He knows that space is a cancer that destroys being, that devours everything.’[viii] Everything is function: this is why, for Sartre, it is necessary for the sculpture who would seek the true semblance of the human being to pare away all superfluity, to reduce what is sculpted to a bare frame. Giacometti’s intention ‘is not to offer us an exact image but to produce likenesses which, though they make no pretence at being anything other than what they are, arouse in us feelings and attitudes ordinarily elicited by the presence of real men’.[ix]

How is this possible? The classical sculptor is constrained by his own imitative practices. His temptation is to concentrate in the sculpture every likeness to his model he can find. In this way, he seeks to eliminate his own perspective, to attain, with the sculpted form, an absolute semblance; but it is in this ambition that the absolute is lost. For the sculptor is burdened by presumption that the human being occupies perceived space as would any object.

How, then, might one sculpt the absolute? Giacometti accepts the relativity of a perspective, pushing the sculpture back into an indefinite space, away from any attempt to remain faithful to every semblance in his model. For Giacometti, Sartre emphasises, the human being is presented at a distance: ‘He creates a figure “ten steps away” or “twenty steps away”, and do what you will, it remains there. The result is a leap into the realm of the unreal since its relation to you no longer depends on your relation to the block of plaster – the liberation of Art’.[x] The image is liberated from the material, retreating to that distance at which the human being is always held.

Even Rodin still took measurements when making his busts. He didn’t model a head as he actually saw it in space, at a certain distance, as I see you now with this distance between us. He really wanted to make a parallel in clay, the exact equivalent of the head’s volume in space. So basically it wasn’t visual but conceptual.[xi]

Giacometti goes on to claim that to model what is seen would lead to the creation of a ‘rather flat, scarcely modulated sculpture that would be much closer to a Cycladic sculpture, which has a stylised look, than to a sculpture by Rodin or Houdon, which has a realistic look’.[xii] He also outlines the dangers of monumentality – even large sculpture is, he claims, ‘only small sculpture blown up’.[xiii] The five metre tall sculptures in front of the Egyptian temple only become sculpture when seen from a distance of forty metres. Compared to prehistoric art, or to that of the Sumerian or the Chinese, contemporary sculpture remains conceptual, cerebral: it depicts what is known rather than what is seen.

For Sartre, the point is more complex. ‘From mere space Giacometti therefore had to fashion a man, to inscribe movement in total immobility, unity in infinite multiplicity, the absolute in pure relativity, the future in the eternal present, the loquacity of signs in the tenacious silence of things’.[xiv] The sculptor is able to close the gap between the great bursting forth of existence, and the rocky substance of his medium. What we see is what we live; the sculpture is as close it can be to an ethereal replica of human existence; before Giacometti's figures we come face to face with our freedom stripped as it were to its bare frame.

There is another possibility. It is not a question of our freedom, of our initiative or ecstasis, but of a freedom which presses in from the future. The ‘distance’ of the sculpture is such that it reaches us from a future that is not ours, that we cannot determine. Giacometti’s sculptures do not present me with an icon of my freedom, but with a freedom I cannot possess. Nothing in the sculpture is function; it dramatises not the explosive power of human existence, but the struggle of the image to withhold itself from existence. To present this struggle in the sculpture of the human being is to attempt to realise a true resemblance of the human being. But with what does he present us? Not with the loquacity of signs, but the inertness of a thing; not the opening of the future, but the suspension of the present, not the absoluteness of the human being, but the negative absolute as it is made to assume human form. The human being has become a thing; it is not an ethereal replica of the human body I confront, but the body become matter, the body that has collapsed into the body of everything.

What if this materiality, this resistance, is already implicit in our relation with any other person, any Autrui? What if the freedom presented in the sculptures was that of the Other as she resists my power not because of any initiative of her own, but because she is Other for me? ‘Lazarus come forth’ says Jesus to the dead man. Lazarus goes towards him, Blanchot suggests, even as another Lazarus remained wrapped in his winding sheets and stinking of death. For Sartre, Giacometti’s sculptures celebrate life, the great leap into existence. But what if they present something more akin to the cadaver of our friend, that is, the stubbornness of matter as it refuses to resemble the one we knew in life? What if Giacometti reminds us that the corpse reveals a materiality which was dissimulated in life?

*

Blanchot’s remarks on the corpse in The Space of Literature provide an orientation.

He who dies cannot tarry. The deceased, it is said, is no longer of this world; he has left it behind. But behind there is, precisely, this cadaver, which is not of the world either, even though it is here. Rather, it is behind the world. It is that which the living person (and not the deceased) left behind him and which now affirms, from here, the possibility of a world behind the world, of a regression, an indefinite subsistence, undetermined and indifferent, about which we only know that human reality, upon finishing, reconstitutes its presence and its proximity.[xv]

Lost is the relationship between the cadaver and the one we knew when she was alive. The horror of the ‘world behind the world’ must be understood relative to the power we take to be our own.

It is striking that at this very moment, when the cadaverous presence is the presence of the unknown before us, the mourned deceased begins to resemble himself.

Himself: is this not an ill-chosen expression? Shouldn't we say: the deceased resembles the person he was when he was alive? ‘Resembles himself’ is, however, correct. ‘Himself’ designates the impersonal being, distant and inaccessible, which resemblance, that it might be someone's, draws toward the day. Yes, it is he, the dear living person, but all the same it is more than he. He is more beautiful, more imposing; he is already monumental and so absolutely himself that it is as if he were doubled by himself, joined to his solemn impersonality by resemblance and by the image.[xvi]

The corpse does not present the ‘ka’ which survives death, but the materiality which survives life. ‘No man alive, in fact, bears any resemblance yet’, Blanchot writes.[xvii] The friend we know through her many attributes – her gestures, her laughter, the tone of her voice – conceals a materiality which presents itself only after she dies.

Why does Blanchot write that the corpse resembles itself? How does a thing sustain itself as itself such that it can be experienced? It is held together by our interest, our understanding; it is animated by our existence; such is the power of human life as Sartre celebrates it. What of the Other? For the most part, I understand her through the cultural categories through which my relation to others is mediated. You are my employee; I am your client; I know you as a service provider; you know me as a vendor of your company’s products – each time, it is a question of passing over the alterity of the Other in favour of relations which are instrumentally defined. That is to say, others are sustained in their coherency for me in terms of my understanding of their place in the world.

What, though, about the corpse? Something in the corpse resists that power; which means, too, I cannot situate myself with respect to what happened as I approached the cadaver of my friend. To claim the corpse resembles itself is not to invoke a magical power it would possess but rather to indicate the way it withholds itself from my capacity to accommodate myself with respect to its differentiation. Here collapses into nowhere: the place I hold, the hypostasis I maintain, becomes uncertain; my hold on time falters.

Had I not been vouchsafed this experience before, while my friend was alive? Did it not present itself as it were behind all I took to be informal and easy-going in our friendship? Many years after the Events of May 1968, Blanchot remembers that tutoiement, the second person familiar, was demanded of everyone; he preserved the formal ‘vous’ for his friends. What he shared with his friends is analogous to what Breton demanded of the Surrealists – friendship is also, for Blanchot, a relation to the impossible, but it is one that allows each to be experienced as if he or she were removed from the categories which organise our relationships. To say ‘vous’ to the friend is to acknowledge that she escapes my attempt to identify and determine the others around me.

Is it appropriate to write of the image of the Other? To recall: the image foregrounds itself when the thing is cut off from the tasks and projects to which it is usually subordinated; the image thereby resists the basic impulse of our existence to create meaning, to ‘exist’ things by grasping them first of all as potential tools or as raw material. No longer does the thing offer itself to be deployed. Fascinated, I am as though pressed up against the image of the thing even as the image holds me apart at what Paul Davies calls ‘its distance’.[xviii] It is as if what was revealed preceded the thing; as if the image were the condition of possibility of the thing and not the other way round.

What happens when we confront the image of the other person? She holds herself at a distance from any determination; she maintains herself at a distance. In the case of the corpse, this has happened too late; but the closed circuit of my interiority is interrupted as the Other comes to resemble herself. The unknown keeps me at a distance – at its distance.

*

Its distance: is this what Blanchot remembers in a short meditation written in the wake of Antelme’s death?

In The Human Race, his testimony to his experiences in the work camps, Robert Antelme learns that K. is going to die; he’d been in the infirmary for a week. He looks for K. at the infirmary, but cannot find him, although he recognises a few of the patients as he passes a row of beds. ‘Where is K.?’ he asks a nurse. ‘But you passed him. He’s over there’.[xix] Antelme must have passed right by K.’s bed. The nurse points out K.; Antelme goes across; he sees a man with hollows instead of cheeks and expressionless eyes. Formerly, the man had been lying down, now he has raised his head on his elbows. Perhaps he is smiling. Now Antelme goes towards him, thinking this patient was looking at him. But where is K.?

‘I went over to the next bed and asked the guy lying on it, “where’s K?”’[xx] He turned his head and with it motioned towards the person propped on his elbows’.[xxi] Then the patient with the long nose and the smile was K. But this frightens Antelme: ‘I looked at the person who was K. I became afraid – afraid of myself – and I looked at the other faces, seeking reassurance. I recognised them clearly enough. I wasn’t wrong; I still knew who they were. The other person was still leaning on his elbows, head down, mouth halfway open’.[xxii]

Where is K.? Antelme looks into the blue, unmoving eyes of this patient. Then he looks at the other patients, whom he recognises. Then Antelme addresses the unknown patient (the one who has taken the place of K.): ‘Hello, old man’.[xxiii] ‘There was no way I could make myself more visible. He kept that appearance of a smile on his face. I didn’t recognise anything’.[xxiv] Antelme moves away. ‘Still nothing but the drooping head and the half-opened mouth of nobody in particular. I left the infirmary’.[xxv] In one day K. had become unrecognisable. A double had substituted itself for him.

K. was dying; he would die that night. Dying, K. was no longer the man Antelme knew. Now Antelme asks another question: does he, Antelme, the one who knew K., exist? The question is similar to the one Breton asks himself at the outset of Nadja. Who is he, the one once called Robert Antelme, as the body K. once occupied begins to resemble itself? ‘Because I no longer found the man I’d known, and because he didn’t recognise me, I’d had doubts about myself for a minute. It was to reassure myself that I was still me that I’d looked at the other guys as though to recover my breath’.[xxvi] The ‘stable faces’ of the others grant him a sureness in his own existence. But K.? His identity is no longer stable; even his death will not reassure Antelme. ‘It would remain true that between the man I’d known and the dead K., whom we all know, this nothingness had existed’.[xxvii]

Blanchot comments on this passage in his tribute to Antelme:

Not recognising, in the infirmary, a companion he had come to see, who was still alive, he understood that even in life there is nothingness, an unfathomable emptiness against which we must defend ourselves even while being aware of its approach; we have to learn to live with this emptiness.[xxviii]

It may happen when he dies that I will no longer recognise the one who was close to me in life. A dying man stares at me; staring back, I confront a face that has become unrecognisable. The Other holds me at its distance; I cannot be sure who it is I confront. ‘Each living man, really, does not have any resemblance yet’, Blanchot writes; but he adds: ‘each man, in the rare moments when he shows a similarity to himself, seems to be only more distant, close to a dangerous neutral region, astray in himself, and in some sense his own ghost, already having no other life than that of the return’.[xxix] K. has become his own ghost, the phantom double of Antelme’s friend.

The corpse, the friend, the dying man: Blanchot allows his conversationalists in The Infinite Conversation to claim the Other is always ‘close to death, close to the night’ – that the encounter with the Other, with any Other, already implies a relation to the neutral double of the human being.[xxx] No longer is it a question of the exceptional cases in which we come face to face with a dying person or a corpse, but of any encounter with anyone at all. The ‘il’ which awakens in me in response to the dying or the dead awakens in relation to the Other too; to be thus fascinated is to be drawn from oneself, to be summoned by a call which remains free of determination. If this call is free, it is not a freedom possessed by any particular human being; what calls me is not the Other herself, speaking in her own voice, urging me to draw close, but her alterity. This is not of course something she possesses – it is not a property or attribute, but what makes her Other for me. She resembles herself – but she does not do so for herself. She resembles herself for me, that is to say, with respect to my relation to her as it is measured by the power implicit to my existence.

Is this what Giacometti’s sculptures indicate? Perhaps the attenuation of his figures is a way of attesting to the peculiar relation Blanchot calls resemblance. Giacometti struggles to realise a likeness of something which cannot be realised, to present an image of what cannot be represented. He destroys his statues and remakes them because he would attempt to repeat the encounter with the Other, to allow it to reverberate in sculpted matter. His sculptures are not ‘ka’ figures, an attempt to preserve something from death, but would allow dying to press towards us. It is the density of matter, not space, which would destroy everything. Matter is cancer.

As we have seen, the artwork might be said to ‘work’ (which is to say, permit the play of worklessness within the work) as it brings the viewer into relation with the image, the materiality that lies dormant in the material from which it was made. But what is the relationship between this materiality and the Other? It may appear that the materiality of the Other and the materiality of the artwork are analogous since both would be images. But this is too simple. As I will show, the relation with the Other, for Blanchot, occurs by way of language. Materiality (as it names the image, worklessness, the negative absolute etc.) is indeed the bridge between the relation to the work and that to the Other, but this claim needs to be refined through a discussion of Blanchot’s account of language.

*

Blanchot quotes the following remark from Jacques Dupin on Giacometti: ‘the spectacle of violence fascinates and terrifies him’, commenting.[xxxi]

Whence the experience he had of presence. It is out of reach. One kills a man, one does violence to him; this has happened to all of us, either in act, or in speech, or as the result of an indifferent will; but presence always escapes the power that does violence. Presence, in face of the destruction that wants to reach it, disappears but remains intact, withdrawing into nullity, where it is dissipated without leaving any traces (one does not inherit presence; it is without tradition). To the experience of violence there corresponds the evidence of the presence that escapes it.

[…] Presence is only presence at a distance, and this distance is absolute – that is, irreducible; that is, infinite. The gift of Giacometti, the one he makes us, is to open, in the space of the world, the infinite interval from which there is presence – for us, but as it were, without us. Yes, Giacometti gives us this, he draws us invisible toward this point, a single point at which the present thing (the plastic object, the figured figure) changes into pure presence, the presence of the Other in its strangeness, that is to say, also radical non-presence.[xxxii]

Read in terms of Blanchot’s reflections on the corpse, one might say Giacometti’s sculptures show us how human being can come to resemble itself, bringing together, for its audience, presence and absence, here and nowhere. The real and the image alternate, displacing one another in the same space and in the same instant. Blanchot subjects the word presence to the same transformation as the word immediacy. No longer is it reserved for what is evident before me here and now, but to an encounter which escapes with the measure of human capacity. Time does not offer itself the possibility of working to help me situate myself with respect to the encounter in question; space does not grant itself as what can be measured by the light of understanding. Mediation is impossible; the capacity to negate fails me; no third, extrinsic term serves to hold me apart from the Other. Presence is a name for what overwhelms; its immediacy does not permit me to endure before it. It is said that whoever sees God dies; whoever encounters the Other no longer exists as an ‘I’. The distance Giacometti’s sculptures interpose between the viewer and themselves cannot be negated. Presence, non-presence: both words are deployed in Blanchot’s mediations on Giacometti to designate the effect of this distance, which he will also call fascination.

What does this mean? In a passage from The Human Race, when Antelme recalls marching with four thousand other prisoners, led by the SS, on a track through the woods. They hear a deluge of shots; the prisoners do not turn. One of their number has been shot. The column moves ahead. In the silence they hear ‘the sound of solitary fear and nocturnal, diabolical terror’. Terror: but the column march, they can only march. What will happen? Each fears another fifty will die then another fifty until all the prisoners are dead. They will march until there is no more column for the SS to lead.

An Italian prisoner is summoned by the SS: ‘Du, komm heir!’ The SS man is looking for a man to kill; anyone will do. The victim blushes. He knows he has been selected by chance. He does not ask: ‘why me? Why not another?’; there are no criteria. None of the marchers is worth more or less than anyone else. The column is silent. Each tries to ready himself to be chosen at random to die. Each is afraid for himself, but Antelme notes ‘we probably have never felt such solidarity with each other, never felt so replaceable by absolutely anybody at all’. Think of the one who stood next to the Italian. Hearing: ‘Du, komm heir!’ and seeing another go forward in his place, Antelme writes, he 'must have felt half his body stripped naked'.

Terror: someone will die in your place, just as you might die in the place of another. It is the possibility of this mortal substitution which allows each to feel solidarity with the other. But is it the chance of this same substitution, where one prisoner might be taken for the Other, where each comes to resemble no one in particular, that offers the chance of a kind of hope?

What the SS fear is the relation which implicates from the side of the huddled magma – the near-interchangeable prisoners who are brought by affliction to the point of dying. The SS fear to acknowledge they belong to the same human race as the deportees. A fear which leads to more death, but, as attested in Antelme’s book, reveals that there are always too many people to kill, and the mania for destruction has, at its limit, the numberless human race.

The prisoners fear death, but the SS fear the prisoners. Terror and fascination are mixed, which is why, on the march, they neither kill everyone at once nor let them all go. They are bound to them, the SS, even as they know the war will be lost. But to whom are they bound? To the ones they might become, to the Other. It is not a question of empathy but of alterity. Beyond fellow feeling, the sense of what I might share with the Other as an equal, there is an awareness of what cannot be so shared. Unless what Blanchot calls community were thought as a sharing which passes through the relation to the Other – one, then, which involves an experience that cannot be exchanged or measured by a common unit. This is why the son of the camp Lagerführer feared lost among the children of the camps was made, when he was found, to wear an identificatory placard.

Resistance vouchsafes itself in the ones who have fallen beneath need, who had died to everything but a naked desire to survive. It is those who are most weak, the ones on the brink of death, who come to resemble themselves. Is it thus that they present themselves in the same way as the image of things? When his friends found the starving body of Antelme alongside other dead and dying bodies at Dachau was it a thing that they found? Blanchot writes: ‘Each time, we receive from Giacometti this double discovery that is, each time, it is true, immediately lost: only man would be present to us, only he is alien to us’[xxxiii]. For Blanchot, the otherness of the human being is qualitatively different from all other others. How can this be reconciled with Blanchot’s discussions of the negative absolute or the neutral double of the world – of the ‘there is’ of language and the world that has become image? To think through Blanchot’s argument, it is necessary to trace his negotiation of the work of Levinas.

*

Dasein is bourgeois: this is the upshot of Levinas account of the conditions of the genesis of the ego. The ego, he explains, needs material to produce its own identity; the effort to be takes the form of the attempt to organise the world into sources of food and nourishment. Labour and possession are required for the ego to consolidate its being in the world. Likewise, reflection and comprehension are needed if the ego is to protect itself from the uncertainty of the future.

Drawing on Heidegger’s claim that being is in each case mine, Levinas claims the activity of the verb ‘to be’, the verb of verbs, is accomplished in the structure of mineness. Just as Heidegger uses Wesen as a verb, Levinas argues ‘esse’ is ‘interesse’; essence, with the human being, turns upon and hypostatises itself. As such, the ego’s practical and theoretical involvement with the world answers the interests of being. Even Heidegger’s transformation of the notion of the understanding from the ‘knowing that’ of purely theoretical speculation to the ‘knowing how’ of practical engagement with the world is ordered by the need for the ego to maintain the security of its hypostasis. The same holds for the related notions of the project, temporal transcendence, the for-the-sake-of, and being-towards-death as Sartre inherits them and uses them as interpretive tools in his account of Giacometti’s sculptures.

The Other, for both Levinas and Blanchot, is experienced as an interruption of the spontaneous need of the ‘I’ to lay claim to existence, to seize and digest being. The hunger to be, to exist, is also the need to have done with the Other. Practically, I work to meet my needs, consolidating my identity; this is a way of confirming my essence as active interesse. Theoretically, I reflect in order to increase my emprise, com-prehending the world, reducing everything that is different to the measure of the same. Thus it is that the singularity of the Other is transformed into a particular.

That the Other resists this transformation is not a tribute to her agency. The word Other only makes sense as the term of a relation; as Other, she does not exist for herself as an ego with powers commensurate with my own. The Other resists, this is true, but she does so because she is the Other for me, and what she resists is the power implicit in my existence as it confirms the tautology of being. The Other resists, but she does not do so as another ego. This means she is vulnerable to the demands of the labour which confirms the economy of being, of mineness at a practical and a theoretical level. At the same time, she resists in her singularity and throws off violence – she refuses to be killed, which is to say negated, because she addresses me.

It is my response to this silent address, for Levinas, which happens as the primal event of language. Language begins and rebegins in this address; the relation to the Other as it is marked in language animates the dead letter of speech or writing. The Other addresses me; but this does not mean there is anyone ‘behind’ the address; she does not ventriloquise God or speak in place of anyone else. Nor is it a matter of what she would want to say since she does not exist as the Other for herself. The Other resembles herself, Blanchot maintains, holding us at her distance. But when he presents this self-resembling as a relation to language, the response to the Other is analogous to that of the literary author to the anonymous murmuring of language. The Other brings me into contact with the ‘there is’ of language as though she were a living incarnation of the narrative voice. It is in this claim he differs from Levinas.

Early to late, Levinas attempts to avoid the neutralisation which occurs as soon as one attempts to write of the relation to the Other, or even to talk of the Other to someone else. How is this possible? With the word the Other, I betray the Other – to speak or to write of the Other is to risk understanding the Other as a particular. At the same time, this risk is necessary if the Other is to be spoken of at all. Then there must be a way of speaking without universalising, or at least of marking in the text what cannot be grasped by means of the text. This is why he will have to make a special claim for the status of Totality and Infinity as a work of philosophy in the context of a discussion of what he calls fecundity. For Levinas (the apparent misogyny of this example should not concern us so much as its structure) the birth of a son transforms the father’s existence. His son is of him but different from him; the birth of the son happens as a break in the self-relation of the father, opening a future for him which is no longer bound by the structure of the same.

In fecundity the I transcends the world of light – not to dissolve into the anonymity of the ‘there is’, but in order to go further than the light, to go elsewhere. To stand in the light, to see – to grasp before grasping – is not yet ‘to be infinitely’; it is to return to oneself older, that is encumbered with oneself. To be infinitely means to be produced in the mode of an I that is always at the origin, but that meets with no trammels to the renewal of its substance, not even from its very identity. Youth as a philosophical concept is defined thus. The relation with the son in fecundity does not maintain us in this closed expanse of light and dream, cognitions and powers. It articulates the time of the absolutely other, an alteration of the very substance of him who can – his trans-substantiation.[xxxiv]

Thus does the infinite enter the finite order; time is reborn in the son with whom the father cannot completely identify. It is not born for the son until that son becomes a father in turn. Fecundity is no longer measured by what I can grasp or comprehend just as it breaks, for Levinas, from the pell mell of the il y a. Youth is the alteration of a substance that would otherwise remain mired in itself. It overcomes the senescence of finite existence.

Levinas goes on to make a similar claim concerning philosophy, specifically, that which is being set forth in Totality and Infinity: ‘Philosophy itself’, he writes, ‘constitutes a moment of this temporal accomplishment, a discourse always addressed to another. What we are now exposing is addressed to those who shall wish to read it’.[xxxv] Totality and Infinity would, like the son to the father, reach us from the future, and in such a way that it shatters our relation to ourselves as readers. Like the son, it might be said to resemble itself.

Then Levinas would claim for Totality and Infinity the same status as the poem which would stubbornly refuse to offer itself to meaning, being composed solely of sonorousness, of rhythm. As we have seen, however, the poem must lend itself to meaning; Totality and Infinity must allow itself to be read, thereby yielding itself up to the measure of sense. As such, Levinas cannot escape the danger implicit in writing: that the circulation of words dispossesses the author, speaking anonymously and impersonally in his place. But once again, like the poet, Levinas can still attempt to interrupt the articulation of sense – this time, not to affirm the irreducibility of the poem, but of the relation to the Other of which Totality and Infinity would speak.

I can write or talk of the Other as I can write or talk of anything, but in so doing, I am unable to make the differentiation at the level of language between human others and other others. To remain at the level of the said, which is to say, that order of discourse which will only allow me to speak of the Other as a particular, means to pass over the saying which occurs in my acknowledgement of the singularity of the Other. It is this acknowledgement which, for Levinas, is upstream of the content of what is said. Yet the said is interrupted; saying occurs in the acknowledgement of the Other as the Other, which is to say, in its singularity. A singularity which, since it must be thought as a relation, singularises the one who acknowledges the Other.

Herein lies the demarcation between the relation to the human Other and other others put forward by Levinas and, in his own way, Blanchot. For both, although they understand it in different terms, what is called saying separates the Other from the world of things. While this claim is implicit in The Space of Literature, it becomes less so in works subsequent to it. It is marked in the essay on Giacometti in the formulation ‘only man would be present to us, only he is alien to us’ – a lesson we would receive from the sculptures.

How, though, if the Other is not merely the image of a human being, can Blanchot make this claim on behalf of a sculpture? The Other, Levinas writes, is ‘a being which surpasses every attribute. Through an attribute, it would be precisely qualified, that is, reduced to what it has in common with other beings; an attribute would make this being into a concept’.[xxxvi] To reduce the otherness of the Other to an attribute would be to create an idol; the prohibition against making representations of God also holds for the Other. But this is exactly what Blanchot does when he understands Giacometti to have presented the Other, if that is indeed what he has done, in material form.

The relation to the Other, for Levinas, is completely different from the relation to things. Levinas writes, ‘In expression a being presents itself; the being that manifests itself attends its manifestation and consequently appeals to me. This attendance is not the neutrality of an image, but a solicitation that concerns me by its destitution and its height. To speak to me is at each moment to surmount what is necessarily plastic in manifestation’.[xxxvii] Blanchot, by contrast, presents the relation to the Other as analogous to the relation to the image as part of a more general concern with what might be called the materiality of language as it is indicated in its rhythm, sonorousness or texture. Like Levinas, Blanchot will present the relation to the Other in terms of language. But unlike Levinas, it is the image of language, its neutral double which the relation to the Other allows me to experience.

Blanchot is not presenting Giacometti’s sculptures as a depiction of the Other, nor indeed of the ‘il’ who experiences the Other. What, then, is he doing?

What Jacques Dupin has written on Alberto Giacometti is fitting to a work as clear as it is unapparent and always ready to escape whatever it is that might attempt to measure it. After reading these ‘texts’, I can better understand why such a work is close to us – I mean close to writing – to such an extent that every writer feels himself implicated by the work – although it is in no way ‘literary’ – experiencing the need to question it constantly and knowing that he cannot repeat it in writing.[xxxviii]

Why does the writer feel implicated in Giacometti’s sculptures? Because they present an indication of the relation to the Other as it obtains in language. A relation which, for Blanchot, shares several features with the relation to literature to the extent that he will blur the boundaries between speech and writing in The Infinite Conversation. For the Levinas of Totality and Infinity, this blurring is to be distrusted; writing places itself on the side of economy, answering the theoretical imperative that allows everything to be thematised, or else lends itself to the temptations of rhythm and sonority – to that poetry which sings of the world and the things of the world, and sings of the Other as another of those things. The sham sobriety of theoreticism and the drunkenness of poetry are the risks of a discourse which speaks not just in the absence of the writer, which already arouses Plato’s suspicion of writing, but in the absence of the Other.

This is why Otherwise than Being calls for a reduction of language that would allow us to watch over saying, restoring language to the encounter to which it bears witness. Language must be rekindled so that it keeps memory of the enlivening presence of the Other, that is, the excessive signification which means writing always falls short of speech. The reduction of which Levinas writes in Otherwise than Being resembles the special claims he makes for Totality and Infinity. However, Levinas now generalises the claim, allowing saying to happen not just because the Other is present before me, but because the relation to the Other is affirmed in all discourse. It is not just Otherwise than Being which would escape the strictures Levinas places on writing, but all discourse, written and spoken, as it bears witness to the Other and thereby interrupts itself, unsaying the said. Now everything written can be read against its dead letter, that is, as it actively unsays the order of the said. The same holds for anything spoken – discourse now appears out of step with itself; the said no longer has the last word.

In Otherwise than Being as in Totality and Infinity, Levinas allows himself to make a procedural remark on the status of his own discourse: ‘I still interrupt the ultimate discourse in which all the discourses are stated, in saying it to one that listens to it, and who is situated outside the said that the discourse says, outside of all it includes. That is true of the discussion I am elaborating at this very moment’.[xxxix] At this very moment: philosophy, with Otherwise than Being, bears witness to the witnessing which occurs in the spirit if not the letter of language; it is vigilant over vigilance, attesting to an insomnia which awakens language from its slumbers. Otherwise than Being watches over the reduction which happens as saying.

Blanchot’s Writing of the Disaster which, among other things, is a response to Levinas’s second magnum opus, is also a vigilant text. Over what does it watch over? It may appear that Blanchot simply takes over Levinas’s theoretical lexicon, aping the arguments of Otherwise than Being in order to repeat what he finds in the work of his friend. But the theoretical context in which Levinas’s term saying reappears is, with Blanchot, decisively transformed.

Take, for example, the role Levinas’s notion of scepticism plays when it is repeated in The Writing of the Disaster.[xl] According to the well worn philosophical trick, scepticism is made to refute itself: to articulate the thesis, ‘there is no truth’ is to already make a truth claim; the thesis contradicts itself. Or else, with Hegel, scepticism is the way in which the coherency of a given worldview brings itself into question; it thus operates a name for the motor of the dialectic, and is reconcilable with the completed philosophical system. For Levinas, by contrast, scepticism names the unsaying of the said. This is possible because saying is not to be understood as articulating a thesis; as such, it escapes self-contradiction. For the same reason, it is not identifiable within the system and escapes all attempts at reconciliation with the said. With the reduction performed in the text of Otherwise than Being, philosophy thinks in two times; it is marked by an irrefutable scepticism which unsays the said and steers writing away from the temptations of art.

What does Blanchot intend when he uses the term scepticism? The following quotation offers an indication:

Scepticism, a noun that has crossed out its etymology and all etymology, is not indubitable doubt; it is not simply nihilist negation: rather, irony. Scepticism is in relation with the refutation of scepticism. We refute it, if only by living, but death does not confirm it. Scepticism is indeed the return of the refuted, that which erupts anarchically, capriciously, and irregularly each time (and at the same time not each time) that authority and the sovereignty of reason, indeed of unreason, impose their order upon us or organise themselves definitively in a system.

Scepticism does not destroy the system; it destroys nothing; it is a sort of gaiety without laughter, in any case without mockery, which suddenly makes us uninterested in affirmation, in negation: thus it is neutral like all language. The disaster would be that portion of sceptical gaiety, never at anyone’s disposal, that makes seriousness (the seriousness of death, for example) pass beyond all seriousness, just as it lightens the theoretical by not letting us trust it. I recall Levinas: ‘Language is already scepticism’.[xli]

Part of this quotation makes reference to Blanchot’s suspicion of etymologism. The appeal to scepticism would no longer see language as traceable to its Greek roots, thereby awakening another memory – that of an indefatigable reciprocity between words and things, a dance which will not settle into a primal word.[xlii] What is important in the present discussion is the way in which scepticism is linked to the question of irony. It is in terms of the exploration of the notion of irony that Blanchot’s account of scepticism and saying might be understood.

*

When I speak ironically it is with the expectation that only some may grasp what it is I am saying. This is not a simple snobbery – it is not just that discourse itself is too common, too lowly to allow the philosopher to speak, but that there are different ways of hearing that same speech of receiving and understanding what is said according to one’s training in philosophy. To learn about the views of this or that philosopher is insufficient; what matters is to appropriate philosophy for oneself, escaping the cave to enter the real world beneath the real sun.

For those who have not escaped the cave, there is the chance the Socrates’ irony will at least point the way out. One knows at least that the Socrates of the dialogues is meant by Plato to be the real philosopher; the sophists and others with whom he discourses are pretenders. When Socrates says to Agathon in the Symposium: ‘you are inspired!’ his indirect message is clear: you are not inspired. Unlike Agathon, the informed reader can understand what Socrates means. What do we learn? The difference between a philosopher and pretend philosophers, between wisdom and sophistry. Why, though, does Socrates not just say what he thinks? Because his perspective is one which can only be appropriated after years of training. Simply to repeat an argument is not enough; the dialogue leads Socrates’ interlocutors up to the point where they might grasp the complexities of the issue for themselves. The same holds for the readers of Plato’s dialogues.

Irony, then, is carefully controlled; it is a pedagogical tool which operates in an economy where Alcibiades can crown Socrates with the laurel wreath Agathon won for his play. It is clear to Plato’s reader who the real master of poetry is meant to be. Socrates is already in command of speech: he says what he knows and knows what he means to say.

That he is made to do so in the written dialogues of Plato who so distrusts writing is ironic. Plato distrusts writing; but what does he distrust? The unmasterable irony of writing that exposes his books to the risk of misreading, compromising the uprightness of speech, that rectitude in which the speaker attends the words he speaks. A text can never master its own textuality; it is public and therefore must give itself to be read in the absence of its author. This is what a writer like Bataille embraces, dreaming of the unknown readers who will encounter his book. Bataille, as we will see, affirms the ‘there is’ of language in his writings and in conversation. Plato and Levinas are, by contrast, committed to the idea that a philosophical message can reach the reader intact, thus overcoming the ambiguity of writing. But what happens when writing is permitted to speak in another way? When writing gives itself to the bad faith of reading and ironises everything it is meant to convey?

Blanchot does not content himself with elevating written discourse above spoken discourse, absenting himself in order to let writing speak, but would attest to the way in which speech, whether spoken or written, allows the ‘there is’ of language to resound. What is called speech, for Blanchot, refers to writing and to speech, as I will show by considering in turn the relationship between speech and literary writing and speech and the relation to the Other.

*

There is little dramatic irony in Homer. The Homeric hero lives in the glory of his acts, in the splendour of immediate action. Action is the thing; characters rarely pause to think, and when they do, it is to puzzle choices before them: there is no monologue which is not part of the unfolding of the action. With Christianity, the chance of the richness of irony takes a huge leap when Augustine develops the first person narrative in the Confessions. No longer is it a matter of external observation or external action; Augustine gives us an allegorical presentation of an inward life which comes to climax in the conversion of book eight. With Augustine, the way is prepared not only for allegory, but for the psychological account of inner life. Inner monologue is no longer a pause in outward action. There is a new complexity in the displacement of perspective; an old man narrates the experiences of a young man; the plot is one of self-transformation.

With Rousseau, there is a mutation of interiority. The narrator of the Confessions is not a type like Augustine’s narrator, who would exemplify the attempt to live in conformity with Christ. Rousseau’s detailed portrait of his own emotional development is intended as an end in itself. His quest to display and justify himself before the world is intended to compensate for what he saw as his ill-treatment in his life; to win the world’s sympathy is not enough: he wants to be seen as a good man because he was true to the springs of his emotion. 'I may omit or transpose facts, or make mistakes in dates', says Rousseau in the opening paragraph of the seventh book of the Confessions, 'but I cannot go wrong about what I felt, or about what my feelings have led me to do; and they are the subject of my story’. This is why Rousseau sought to leave with the Confessions a witness in his favour, defending his good name against the plot against his reputation. The Confessions would set out his life from the appropriate perspective, interpreting events so that its pattern reveals the ‘blind fatality’ which draws him towards catastrophe. Catastrophe follows catastrophe – the book ends on the brink of a new disaster which Rousseau promises he will narrate in part three. The book breaks off there, but there is a sense, as with Kafka’s The Castle, that the book will never end. It is born and reborn, for Rousseau, from a terrible sense of foreboding. But what does he fear?

The dresser crab encrusts its shell with the disparate materials it finds on the ocean floor. Likewise, writing, the raw desire to write, clothes itself in whatever it finds. The one for whom words will not come, who cannot begin, is like a crab without a shell. He suffers from not writing. The wind that rips across his exposed body is the form of his pain. But to write, too, is to suffer. The sinners in Eden are ashamed because they are nude; the writer is ashamed of a surfeit of clothing. Every word exposes him; every sentence he encrusts in his shell is a sentence too many. He suffers from non-writing in the form of writing. Blanchot: ‘Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. May God help me. Which I translate modestly: In the space of writing – writing, not writing – here I sit bent over, I cannot do otherwise and I await no help from the beneficent powers’.[xliii] With Rousseau, Luther’s ‘here I stand, I cannot do otherwise’ becomes ‘I cannot stand and I can do nothing’; God cannot help him. Of what does he confess? He confesses to nothing; the Confessions, in his place, lets speak the ‘there is’ of language.

If Kafka does not attempt to write a confession it is because he is closer to language, to the streaming of language. His diaries mark that great moment when the ‘merciful surplus of strength’ gives birth to a literature which leaps beyond him. It is not Kafka’s suffering that is the secret topic of his writings, but the suffering of writing – a formulation that is absurd unless we understand that language refuses itself to the measure of human power. Now the ‘there is’ of language is permitted to refer to nothing but itself, opening a labyrinth into which the reader disappears. The literary text is no longer of the world, no longer a representation, an attempt at verisimilitude; it attains a kind of irony beyond anything which results from the author’s conscious manipulation of the relationship between characters and audience. Language ironises itself, interrupting the economy of the said.

The Castle, Blanchot notes, ‘does not consist of a series of events or peripeteia that are more or less linked, but of an ever-expanding sequence of exegetic versions that finally only bear upon the very possibility of exegesis itself – the impossibility of writing (and of interpreting) The Castle’.[xliv] K. goes from exegete to exegete, from commentator to commentator. Of what do they tell him? Of the experience that awaits us at the heart of reading. But what is this experience? ‘It may be that recounting (writing) draws language into a possibility of saying that would say being without saying it, and yet without denying it either’.[xlv] Saying becomes another name for the récit, the narrative voice which is the happening of the work.

The reader is in the same quandary as Antelme was before K. in The Human Race. ‘It would remain true that between the man I’d known and the dead K., whom we all know, this nothingness had existed’: the same nothingness opens itself in the instant between the lofty work of literature called The Castle by the celebrated author Franz Kafka and the book you opened by chance in the library which begins, ‘It was late in the evening when K. arrived’.

‘To speak in the neutral is to speak at a distance, preserving this distance without mediation and without community, and even in sustaining the infinite distancing of distance – its irreciprocity, its irrectitude or dissymmetry and without one or other of its terms beings privileged (the neutral cannot be neutralised)’.[xlvi] Irreciprocity, irrectitude, dissymmetry: each resonates with Blanchot’s own account of the relation to the Other as if the relation to the Other were only the relation to the narrative voice.

The other speaks. But when the other is speaking, no one speaks because the other, which we must refrain from honouring with a capital letter that would determine its unique presence, is precisely never simply the other. The other is neither the one nor the other, and the neutral that indicates it withdraws it from both, as it does from unity, always establishing it outside the term, the act, or the subject through which it claims to offer itself.[xlvii]

Blanchot does not refer, here, to the personal Other, Autrui, but to l’autre as it names the neuter. Yet it shares several features in common with Levinas’s Autrui. It is linked to a kind of saying: ‘it says nothing, not only because it adds nothing to what there is to say (it knows nothing), but because the narrative voice subtends this nothing – the “silencing and keeping silent” – in which speech is here and now already engaged; thus it is not heard in the first place, and everything that gives it a distinct reality begins to betray it’.[xlviii] What does this mean? It speaks without content; if, as Blanchot goes on to claim, even as it can take the voice of a character or a narrator, it cannot be confined to their voices. It is impersonal; it does not mediate information but presents itself in a manner analogous to what Blanchot writes of the Other. The narrative voice resembles itself. Thus it is possible to invoke the immediate presence of the language which, like the Other, does not exist at the same level as me. Like the relation to the Other, the relation with the language of The Castle is dissymmetrical; I speak as I am brought into contact with the inexhaustible murmuring of language such that I lose my rectitude. I do not speak; the ‘il’ speaks, and it does so without expecting speech to be reciprocated. Nothing is exchanged; there is only the donation of the narrative voice in the event Blanchot allows himself to be called saying.[xlix]

With literature, something else happens. Ironical complexity permits all manner of permutations on narration, but these techniques are only more complex renderings of what is already at stake when, in a certain kind of literary writing, the voice of the narrator is supplanted by the narrative voice. Now no one in particular speaks and the narrative itself no longer strives for verisimilitude.

Unmastered irony, the irony of a writing that would no longer permit the rectitude of the philosopher: this is what reveals itself when language holds us at its distance. When Blanchot allows himself to write of an ‘ironic outbidding’ of the reduction, this should be understood as what he would later call scepticism and saying: as the ‘there is’ of speech that resists the one who would command it as it occurs in literature and in the relation to the Other.[l]

*

What, then, about the irony, the scepticism of spoken discourse? When Blanchot remembers his conversations with Bataille, it is not to present his friend in the manner of Plato’s Socrates: true, there is a seriousness in his conversation, a sense that everything is at stake; what takes place between the speakers is a play or a game of thought. It is not the content of what is said which matters, but that it is said at all. What counts is not the order of discourse, spoken and written, which Levinas calls the said, but what he calls saying.

In what sense can this be called irony? It is a question of irony which no longer allows itself to be mastered, but which is implicit in language itself insofar as it escapes any attempt to bind it to what it is possible for you or I to say. Even though it is at play in all discourse, struggling with measure of human power, this unmastered irony reveals this struggle only in exceptional circumstances such as those Blanchot experienced in his friendship with Bataille.

Most often when we speak, and also when we hear someone else speaking, we do not fail afterward to experience a feeling discomfort, as though some shame were attached to using words, whether to say important or insignificant things; in the first case, because we have betrayed them by speaking too adroitly or too awkwardly, in the second because we have betrayed the seriousness of speech itself. I do not mean to say that every conversation with Georges Bataille was free of this feeling, but rather that speech then took up its own malaise, and as soon as it was sensed, assumed it and respected it in such a way as to offer it another direction. Here speech’s lack interceded on speech’s behalf, becoming the way that, through a decision each time renewed, one turned toward the other so as to respond to the frankness of a presence (just as the eminence of being, its height, cannot be separated from its decline).

[…] In the precaution from which Georges Bataille never considered himself free, even when speaking with a very old friend, there was no prudence nor even simply a concern for the interlocutor. There was much more: a silent appeal to attention so as to confront the risk of a speech spoken in common, also an accord with this reserve that alone allows one to say everything, and, finally, an allusion to a movement toward the unknown to which, almost immediately, two persons together who are bound by something essential are as though obliged to bear witness.

A precautionary speech, turned toward the interior, and by this precaution designating the impossible central thought that does not let itself be thought.[li]

Why would we feel shame when we speak, or hear someone else speak? Because to speak of serious matters is to risk betraying them by speaking too easily, as if the topic of discussion were entirely under our command, or too frivolously, thereby losing the seriousness of the topic altogether. To speak of insignificant matters is to pass over a seriousness no longer tied to that of a particular topic, but to speaking itself. The presence of speech would be a serious affair, one in relation to which we would feel shame unless, like Bataille we were able to allow this seriousness to speak.

How is this possible? By allowing language to reveal its malaise as it is vouchsafed in my inability to say something, to find the right word, failing, thereby, to turn language into something over which I could exert power. Language suffers; it undergoes a malaise. What does this mean? It comes to resemble itself as it refuses to lend itself to human power. As such, the one who speaks exhibits a kind of reserve with respect to speech. This was Bataille’s gift, and the gift he allowed those who conversed with him: speech was able to speak in what they said; saying was given its due.

No longer does speech lend itself to the economuy of the possible, subordinating itself to the communication of a message. Each conversationalist, like Moses, is a stammerer, but what stammers is the whole of language. This whole, the 'there is' of language, is not the Other’s speech, as if the Other possessed a power to speak that the ‘I’ does not, but the impersonal saying which affirms itself for the 'I' because of the relation to the Other, giving the 'there is' of language as it were a new direction, allowing the ‘I’ to acknowledge it in turn.

One could say of these two speaking men that one of them is necessarily the obscure ‘Other’ that is Autrui. And who is Autrui? The unknown, the stranger, foreign to all that is either visible or non-visible, and who comes to ‘me’ as speech when speaking is no longer seeing. One of the two is the Other: the one who, in the greatest human simplicity, is always close to that which cannot be close to ‘me’: close to death, close to the night. But who is me? Where is the Other? The self is sure, the Other is not – unsituated, unsituable, nevertheless each time speaking and in this speech more Other than all that is other. Plural speech would be this unique speech where what is said one time by ‘me’ is repeated another time by ‘Autrui’ and thus given back to its essential Difference. What therefore characterises this kind of dialogue is that it is not simply an exchange of words between two Selves, two beings in the first person, but that the Other speaks there in the presence of speech, which is his sole presence; a neutral speech, infinite, without power, and where the unlimited in thought, placed in the safekeeping of forgetting, is at stake.[lii]

Each in turn becomes the Other for the other person; each presents himself as the corpse who will not respond to Jesus’s call to come to life. Each becomes the ‘other Lazarus, the stranger who cannot be experienced by an intact ‘I’. This is experienced as a kind of speech – as a plural speech which happens as the opening of language to Difference, that is, to a saying which cannot be exchanged, but is given each time from one to another.

What Blanchot calls the seriousness of language is unrelated to the content of what is said. Each speaker, as he acknowledges the Other, which is to say the seriousness of plural speech, of the neuter, is vigilant in turn. Writing this essay, Blanchot would be vigilant over vigilance, remembering a scepticism or irony of language that would otherwise be forgotten.

The writing of speech, the speech of writing: Blanchot uses these formulations to indicate the interruption of the continuity of discourse. Vigilance is the locus of this interruption as it opens in the suspension of the measure of the speaking or writing ‘I’. It is thus that the ‘there is’ of language is witnessed, even as there is no determinate ‘subject’ of witnessing or a determinate ‘object’ to be witnessed.

What separates Blanchotian from Levinasian vigilance with respect to speech, to writing? Totality and Infinity presents a claim ostensibly similar to Blanchot’s; the relation to the Other, according to Levinas, obtains as language, as discourse. In this way, the Other might be said to resemble herself: the relation to the Other is not one of identification but of differentiation. Speech happens not because of this differentiation but as this differentiation; it is my response to the alterity of the Other.

For Blanchot, in contrast to Levinas, I am related to the Other such that I experience the materiality of language. What does this mean? The ‘there is’, for Blanchot, as for Levinas, is what is experienced in suffering, affliction and weariness. But Blanchot also thinks the ‘there is’ in terms of the malaise of language – the way it turns itself aside from those who would assert their power over its impersonal murmuring. Language suffers; it undergoes a malaise: these formulations should not mislead us; it is not a question of invoking an occult force implicit to language itself, but of indicating the way in which language resists our powers. One meets this ‘there is’ in The Castle and in Breton’s Nadja; it awaits us as the récit in the most compendious novel, and surprises us in the automatic poetry of the Surrealists. The narrative voice is a name for the ‘there is’ in the speech. But something like the narrative voice is also at stake for each of the participants in the ‘game of thought’ Blanchot presents in his essay on Bataille.

For Levinas, language begins as I face the Other, acknowledging her alterity. Saying accomplishes the reduction of the economy of the said as it neutralises the singularity of the Other but also the reduction of the drunken song of the poet, that only loosens the ties which bind us to the world of things, singing of a world where the Other has not yet appeared. To be vigilant is to have been awoken by this reduction, this interruption of being. But this vigilance is quickly compromised; the Other is forgotten in her singularity and I, too, forget the way I have been elected to my own singularity. Whence the need to repeat this reduction in turn, to redouble vigilance in the letter of Otherwise than Being. Levinas’s text would watch over all language; it is vigilant over vigilance as it occurs, if we have ears to hear it or eyes to read it, in all language.

With Blanchot, irony becomes a name, like saying and scepticism, for the materiality of language. Considering the statement, ‘the meaning of meaning would be neuter’, Blanchot allows a conversationalist to invoke ‘an ironic outbidding of the epochē’, referring, here, to the way in which ‘meaning operates or acts through a movement or retreat that is in some sense without end, through an exigency to become suspended’.[liii] What does this mean? The order of power and possibility are held in abeyance; the measure of time and space fails and the economy of meaning with it. Meaning finds itself inscribed into an aneconomy. The epochē that allows the phenomenologist to commence her labours is likewise inscribed such that thinking begins not with the lucid and self-aware transcendental ego, but with the ‘il’ that is deprived of any relation to itself. The outbidding of the epochē occurs because of the unmasterable irony of language.

Ironical discourse is necessary for Plato because he stands within philosophy itself and cannot address his readers directly. We have a sense as readers of Plato of the traits the philosopher would exemplify; if Socrates is an impressive figure, it is only as he embodies the seriousness of the love of wisdom. We are persuaded of his greatness not because of the miracles he performs but because of the power of reason. He has no authority other than that power. We cannot seize this power for ourselves if we merely repeat Socratic formulas. If I am to understand why Alcibiades takes the laurel wreath awarded to Agathon for the greatness of his poetry and places it on Socrates’ head rather than simply admiring the pathos of that action, I must take the leap into philosophy. Otherwise I remain as Johannes de Silentio does before the figure of Abraham: awed, but living in bad faith.

What if the natural language in which philosophy is always embedded bears a force of its own, a kind of irony which prevents this leap? What if the inexhaustible murmuring of language prevents the would-be philosopher finding a place from which to speak?

Georges Bataille had the power to speak no less than the power to write. I allude not to the gift of eloquence, but to something more important: the fact of being present through his speech and, in this presence of speech, through the most direct conversation, of opening attention even unto the centre. Not that he was prepared to play a Socratic role, initiate some sort of teaching, or even act in the subtle fashion that the words one utters one allow. Even less than Nietzsche would he have wished to move on the impulse to be right or to exercise influence, whether by the intermediary of signs or by example.

Independently of both content and form, what this power of saying made manifest to every interlocutor is that speaking is a grave thing: as soon as one speaks, even in the most simple manner and of the most simple facts, something unmeasured, something always waiting in the reserve of familiar discourse is immediately at stake.[liv]

The Bataille with whom Blanchot presents us in The Infinite Conversation does not stand within philosophy, addressing those of us who remain on its outside. He does not aim to instruct, but rather to let speech affirm itself in its irony, its scepticism. Bataille does not so much possess a power over speech as over what would allow him to remember speech’s powerlessness. His vigilance is such that he can permit the seriousness of language to resound, inviting his interlocutor to affirm it in turn.

For Blanchot as for Levinas, it is a question of maintaining a vigilance over vigilance. Speech happens as the malaise of language that brings forward the ‘il’ in place of the ‘I’ – or, better, reveals the ‘I’ was always an usurper, taking the place of an impersonal streaming which dissolves all places. Like the inspired Blanchotian poet who allows worklessness to resound in the work, Bataille exhibits power enough to allow this experience of language to resound. Bataille does not speak from within philosophy, addressing those who have yet to pass through that training which would allow them to deploy language in the service of a mastered philosophical irony. He lets speak that seriousness of speech which interrupts the seriousness of philosophy.

Let us return to Levinas. Blanchot is not rejecting Levinas’s account of the singularity of the Other, dispersing it into the singularity of all others, of everything. He does not seek to elevate literature above philosophy, placing the laurel wreath back on Agathon’s head, but to show how the ‘there is’ of language marks itself in literature and philosophy. For Levinas, the Other in her singularity interrupts the neutrality of discourse (the said) as well as the attenuation of that neutrality which he claims happens as poetry. As William Large argues, this is because the Other is said by the Levinas of Totality and Infinity to attend or assist the words she speaks in such a way that there is a surplus, an excessiveness over of the content of what is said.[lv] Levinas thereby betrays his own insight that alterity is to be understood as a relation because he treats the Other as the source of alterity.

Levinas finds himself in the position of the Plato of the later dialogues who, in order to guard against the poison of writing, gives Socrates more and more dominance over his interlocutors and that of which he would speak. He becomes a monster of continuity, threatening by his power and authority to displace the message Plato would convey by means of the dialogues. This is why Plato sought to interrupt by making others the protagonists of the Laws and the Sophist, and by allowing Parmenides victory over the young Socrates. Nowhere is this more clear than in the Symposium, where Socrates is made to describe the lessons about eros he learnt from Diotima. Perhaps Diotima becomes, according to a vigilant, ironic reading of the text Plato would not permit, a name for what Blanchot would call the unknown, for the ‘there is’ of language as it shatters Socrates’ authority.

In an analogous manner, the figure of the Other in Levinas’s text threatens to usurp the place of the alterity to which the Other would bring me into relation, as if it were no more than a powerful ego. It as though it is the Other’s qualities which would account for alterity, and not the relation itself.[lvi] For Blanchot, the Other brings us into relation to the scepticism which outplays the letter of Levinas’s text. Now it is a matter of another, unmastered irony, wherein writing can no longer be subordinated to the presence of the Other.

I'm reading at the following event, 8PM, The Bridge Hotel, Newcastle:

A BENEFIT EVENT FOR MORDEN TOWER AT THE BRIDGE HOTEL

An evening of music, prose and poetry at The Bridge Hotel to raise money to support the cost of licensing Morden Tower for live events, featuring live music from:

:zoviet*france: with Rhodri Davies || Richard Dawson || Popular Radiation || Gwilly Edmondez || Wrest || The Noize Choir || Hapsburg Braganza || Adam Parkinson || Posset || John Pope || Jamie Allen & Will Scrimshaw

and poetry and prose from:

Jackie Litherland || Ellen Phethean || Lars Iyer || Tom Pickard || Radikal Queen || Valerie Laws

Morden Tower is part of Newcastle's mediæval town wall, built in about 1290. From the mid-Sixties it became a major venue for readings of contemporary writing, including internationally renowned poets such as Basil Bunting, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Seamus Heaney. In more recent decades it has also gained a profile as a live music venue with its eccentric and intimate qualities providing an unconventional auditorium for artists such as Chris Corsano, Sir Richard Bishop, Jack Rose, Keith Fullerton Whitman, :zoviet*france:, Alasdair Roberts, and A Hawk and a Hacksaw. This event will contribute to maintaining a stable future for a unique venue.

http://mordentower.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morden_Tower

Entry £7.00 | all proceeds to Morden Tower

<Draft of chapter two from Lars Iyer's Blanchot's Vigilance. Up for a limited time only.>

Keep on as much as you like. Trust in the murmur's inexhaustibility.

Breton[i]

It is easy to understand Surrealism as a failure – as the moment in which the artistic vanguard could have realised itself. In one sense, its achievements are clear; they fill our museums. But the Surrealists sought something greater: the abolition of an art that would hold itself apart from the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Surrealism might seem to have survived only as a style, yet its task was not to change art, but to realise it by freeing it from the artistic field, drawing out the consequences of an artistic obsolescence the Dadaists had already understood, and rendering it political.

Yet Surrealism always risked appearing to be politically irresponsible, opening itself with protean enthusiasm to dreams, trances, practical jokes, automatism, the contradictory, party games and collaborations in a pursuit of the surreal, affirming above all an openness to chance. But these techniques were the signs of an attempt to discover a mode of research, of experiment, suitable to the age of Marx and Freud; their goal was to rethink experience, to expose each individual to the risk implicit in their hidden desires, to bring about a revolution on the grandest scale.

As Breton emphasises, the Surrealists would ‘uproot thought from an increasingly cruel state of thraldom’ in order to ‘return it to its original purity’, to adopt a tenet of ‘total revolt, complete insubordination’; ‘everything remains to be done, every means must be worth trying, in order to lay to waste the ideas of family, country, religion’.[ii] The surreal was not to become a pastime; Surrealist writing and painting were to remain experiments and not works of literature or art, answering to the unyielding need for their creators to combat ‘poetic indifference, the distraction of art’.[iii] But few can answer this exacting demand. As Breton admits, ‘unflagging fidelity to the commitments of Surrealism presuppose a disinterestedness, a contempt for risk, a refusal to compromise, of which very few men prove, in the long run, to be capable’.[iv] The Surrealist is, for Breton, never Surrealist enough; the Surrealist experiment demands an unyielding commitment to risk – to the dictates of desire that implies the resistance to nationalism, militarism, racism, colonialism, and religion.

Bataille observes that there was, on the part of Breton, ‘a desire for common consecration to a single sovereign truth, a hatred of all forms of concession regarding this truth, of which he wanted his friends to be the expression, otherwise they would cease to be his friends’.[v] Surrealism is nearly as well known for its internal disputes as for the artworks associated with its name. There is no doubt that the group was extraordinarily well organised, but its discipline came at the price of purges and excommunications. Bataille is not unsympathetic; Breton’s failing was not to have proposed the affirmation of a communication of friends around ‘the truth’, but to have reduced friendship to certain ‘outward forms of fidelity’.[vi] Breton, no doubt, was capricious and arrogant, but these traits coexisted with others that permitted him to answer to the Surrealist demand. Those who left the group did so out of a commitment to a new form of communication that would allow them neither to retreat into the solitariness of the life of the writer nor to content themselves with forms of sociability that depend upon reciprocity and mutuality.

For Blanchot, writing after Breton’s death, Surrealism demands the maintenance of a friendship with the surreal that is more important than any particular relationship between individuals. As he suggests, although Breton gave himself a guiding role, orienting its proceedings and co–authoring its programs, this was only in order to recall its participants to the demand of Surrealism insofar as it made every one of them ‘each one’s Other [l’Autre]’.[vii] But to claim that Surrealism is an affirmation of friendship does not mean that surrealists were simply friends, bound to one another by shared interests and mutual respect. Surrealism is, Blanchot insists, ‘always a third person in the friendship; an absent third term through which passes and through which issues this relation of tension and passion that effaces characters as it gives rise to and motivates initiatives and attractions’.[viii] The friendship of one Surrealist for another invokes the surreal itself.

Certainly, the friendship between the Surrealists overturns social categories to the extent that they break with the model of a certain mutuality and reciprocity. Nothing is expected in return; friendship, as a response to a demand, must remain unilateral and intransigent, because the Other is another Surrealist. It exposes the Surrealist to a reserve that cannot be dominated or contained. In this way, the surreal tears open the ordinary notion of friendship, binding a group of extraordinarily individualistic individuals to a common cause by refusing to allow what they share to collapse into something simply held in common. This is what Breton’s intransigence achieves – as Blanchot notes, ‘he had the particular power not of being the one any more than the others, but of making surrealism each one’s Other’; he would have the Surrealists expose themselves to the demand of the Other [l’Autre] – ‘of living it with friendship in the most rigorous sense of this exacting term: making the surrealist affirmation, in other words, a presence or a work of friendship [oeuvre d’amitié]’.[ix] The practices – automatic writing, sleeping experiments, etc. – with which one associates Surrealism are, according to Blanchot, rendered possible by the practice of friendship that Breton required. To fall short of the friendship in question would be to fall short of Surrealism. But this implies that friendship is always revocable since it is liable to contract into a simple reciprocity and never quite measures up to the demand of Surrealism, that is, to the collective, communal affirmation of an encounter that would happen by chance.

On Blanchot’s account, then, Surrealism would name an encounter with the surreal in and as friendship. But the encounter in question cannot be a deliberate choice; it happens, and the Surrealists attempt to witness its advent, holding themselves in the space it opens and awaiting its return. Surrealist friendship permits no concordance between its terms; the surreal, in this context, designates a point of juncture that is also a point of disjuncture, a haunting of mutuality and reciprocity that withdraws itself even as it occurs. It opens a relation to ‘the Outside’ or ‘the unknown’ that can never be secured and to this extent means that Surrealism, as a practice, can never arrive as such.

By 1945, as Blanchot writes in his first major essay on Surrealism, it no longer names a school; it might even seem irrelevant, but ‘a state of mind survives’.[x] Surrealism lives on, wandering from the grave where it was seemingly laid to rest. Surrealism is not dead but dispersed; it is a ‘ghost’ that cannot be exorcised. For Blanchot, it is difficult to assume an authority with respect to Surrealism, assessing its failure or success, for it does not belong to a milieu, to a place or time in terms of which it could be explained and accounted for. The Surrealist demand is not the exclusive property of those associated with its name, nor indeed of those who would take up its name today. Surrealism, in this sense, belongs to no one and those who think themselves enfranchised to judge, to gauge its success or to recount its history, do so at their peril – for, as Blanchot warns us in a later essay, Surrealism, or a certain ghost of Surrealism, will rise up and ‘demand justice’.[xi] This is why its ghostly demand, its call for justice, has eluded us.

*

October 4th 1926. André Breton wanders aimlessly toward the Opéra with a newly purchased book by Trotsky under his arm. The offices and workshops are emptying out, and Breton muses to himself of the workers leaving for home, ‘it was not yet these who would be ready to create the Revolution’.[xii] Then, as he crosses an intersection, he sees a young, poorly dressed woman ten feet away; unlike everyone else on the pavement, he notes, she carries her head high; but if she has a kind of pride, she is also ethereal (‘she scarcely seemed to touch the ground as she walked’).[xiii] There may have been, he remembers, a faint smile wandering across her face; she was made up strangely, her eyes flashed out.[xiv]

She speaks of her poverty and he asks himself: what is happening in her eyes?[xv] She tells Breton the name she has chosen for herself: ‘Nadja, because in Russian it’s the beginning of the word hope, and because it’s only the beginning’.[xvi] Then she asks Breton a question which repeats the one he asked himself in the opening lines of the book: ‘Who are you?’

Who are you? Margaret Cohen notes of those same opening lines that they make play with a French adage ‘Dis-moi qui tu hantes et je te dirai qui tu es’, ‘tell me whom you haunt (in the sense of frequent) and I will tell you who you are’.[xvii] Breton makes it apparent that he appropriates this expression in other than its colloquial sense in the following passage:

I must admit that this last word [haunt] is misleading, tending to establish between certain beings and myself relations that are stranger, less avoidable, more disturbing than I intended. It says much more than it means, it makes me play while still alive the role of a ghost, evidently it alludes to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am.[xviii]

As Cohen observes, ‘Breton goes from suggesting that haunting is related to the places and persons that one frequents to reflecting on how this dependence starts to undermine the integrity of the I itself’.[xix] ‘I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my differentiation [différenciation] from them’.[xx]

Differentiation: Breton asks himself ‘who am I?’ and writes: ‘Such a word [haunt] means much more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part, evidently referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am’.[xxi] Breton ‘plays a ghostly part’ – what does this mean? ‘What matters is that the particular aptitudes my day-to-day life gradually reveals should not distract me from my search for a general aptitude which would be peculiar to me and which is not innate’.[xxii] What will he find? How will Breton answer what is scarcely a question but a kind of demand issuing from the reserve into which Nadja herself will disappear? How will he bring himself into relation with an event which might be said to happen without occurring, flashing up and disappearing such that he will never be sure it took place?

Does Breton really watch over differentiation? He may appear too domineering – after all, he is callously indifferent to Nadja’s incarceration, to her madness; the surrealist researcher, supposedly committed to the Revolution, becomes indifferent to this impoverished woman; the writer who would give himself to the blind play of chance cannot follow her into madness. Perhaps, though, Nadja was written to protect him from Nadja and he domineers because he is afraid, knowing his own identity is fragile. But what is that fragility compared to Nadja’s? What is his weakness when, unlike Nadja, he will recover his strength in order to write? Who am I? Breton does not reply, like Nadja, ‘I am a soul in limbo’. To flirt with differentiation is not yet to undergo its risks; Breton remains the writer who would extract a lesson from experience, holding himself back from his encounters in the diary he keeps from day to day. Yet if he didn’t write, if writing did not spring forth from his pen every day, how would he have witnessed what he experienced? To write is not simply to congeal experience, idealising it, as if the encounter with Nadja lay outside language. Breton writes, too, because he is vigilant, because he would, by writing Nadja, hold himself into the draft of her madness. He survives it, true; he has the strength to write, but if nothing was preserved, what then?

‘I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my differentiation [différenciation] from them’. Nadja testifies to differentiation only because Breton was preserved in his power to write. The danger is to contrast the creation of works with that of a more general practice of existence, as if existence itself did not already depend upon work, upon the attempt to sustain the hypostasis which permits each of us to say ‘I’. Nietzsche wrote nothing in his last years; if Hölderlin was able to write in the years of his madness it is because that madness withdrew for a moment, granting him a merciful surplus of strength to write a few fragmentary lines. Plato already knew that madness is linked to poetry – but he knew, too, the poet would have to survive the madness of inspiration in order to write.

Inspiration is not a simple receptivity. The receptiveness it presumes requires an answering desire to suspend reason or wilful deliberation – a willingness to admit an empowering spirit into the work, to render it productive. The artist must embrace dispossession, acknowledging the authority of a possessing voice, but it is also necessary to assume responsibility for the work, to shape and realise what has been received so that it might inspire others in turn. Breton, then, is inspired; the encounter with Nadja permits him to draw upon a deeper level of self-expression, an enhanced fluency. Still, the objection arises that the differentiation he experiences is not real: his identity remains too solid, too permanent. But upon what does this solidity and permanency rest? As I will show, the surreal is claimed to void language and experience of subjective content; Breton hears in its murmuring the impersonal workings of the unconscious as it augurs the great transformation of the world.

The promise of Surrealism depends upon the fragility of identity, upon the weakness which inhabits the same auto-affirmative strength implicit to existence. Breton’s strength is to pass through weakness rather than conquer it; he aims to bear witness to the play of differentiation, to the ghosts it awakens and the freedom it summons from the future. The greatness of Surrealism lies in the faith it places in the impersonality of inspiration, asking each to endure it in the name of a revolution to come – that great equality wherein each is given over to that afflatus which was once thought the privilege of the poet. It is a collective work; ‘I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my differentiation from them’ – a striving that asks others, Breton’s readers, to struggle in turn.

What does inspiration become? An experience of the dissension of sense – of the great nonsensical ‘there is’ of language as it withholds itself from the power of human speech. Breton places his strength at the service of weakness, of that great receptivity Surrealism would permit. When he asks Aragon to throw a seven hundred page novel on the fire this is not an act of random cruelty, but an attempt to avoid subjecting differentiation to the creation of an artwork the culture industry might admire. When he appears to abandon Nadja to the mental hospital, it is because the surreal is no longer at stake in their relationship. Nadja was never a Muse for Breton, but a collaborator, a friend. If Breton’s book bears her name, it is only as an indication of an encounter wherein the surreal was at stake – an indication and not a term, for it is not Nadja herself who interests him, but the friendship that would allow both to draw close to the surreal.

Nadja is not about Nadja but nor is it entirely about Breton. Who am I?, Breton asks. He is answered by a differentiation as it marks itself into the composition of Nadja. Whence Breton’s story of the amnesiac who asks a clerk in the hotel lobby for his room number and then, having gone there, jumps from the window and returns to question the clerk once again. Whence, too, the fugue which allows Desnos to take on Duchamp's personality, or Eluard’s mistaking Breton for a deceased friend. Then there is the story of the thriller in which a Chinese man replicates himself thousands of times and invades New York; and the painting by Watteau in which the same couple is shown over and over. Finally, there is Nadja herself, who appears to be only one of a series of women Breton encounters, real and unreal (Madame de Chevreuse, Mélusine, Solange and the actress who plays her; the young woman who recites Rimbaud to him in the rain).

Who am I? Breton asks and seeks to learn of his identity by exploring the places he haunts and the encounters which haunt him. He searches for himself in the ambulism which would allow him to follow the labyrinth laid out by his unconscious phantasies as it entangles him in a complex realm in which the real historical significance of the sculpture of the Porte Saint-Denis and the statues of Dolet on the Place Maubert and Rousseau on the Place du Panthéon are bracketed and put out of play. Unbound from their function of commemoration and celebration, the monuments loom forward in their obscurity, just as a phantasmagoric Paris looms around Breton as he wanders with Nadja by his side.

Nadja, a text which bears the name of hope, is marked above all by a restlessness, a wandering; this is a text which must be understood according to its own avowal to record everything. Who writes? Breton himself? Only if the name of its author is allowed to mark in Nadja that vigilance over vigilance which allows the surreal to reverberate. But what does this mean? How are automatism, freedom and surrealism bound to differentiation? What would it mean to do justice to the surreal?

*

In the first Surrealist manifesto, Breton gives an account of the genesis of his first piece of automatic writing. One evening, just before he falls asleep, Breton claims to perceive a phrase which was something like: ‘there is a man cut in two by the window’; this is accompanied by ‘the faint visual image […] of a man walking cut half way up by a window perpendicular to the axis of his body’.[xxiii] An uncanny image, which Breton wants at once to use as for a poem. But as he does so, it was succeeded by a whole series of phrases which, he writes, ‘surprised me only slightly less and left me with the impression of their being so gratuitous that the control I had then exercised upon myself seemed to me illusory and all I could think of was putting an end to the interminable quarrel raging within me’.[xxiv]

Breton confides in his fellow surrealist Phillippe Soupault; they decide to practice the technique together. A single day yields fifty pages; comparing their work, Breton and Soupault find it to be similar; the difference of the texts, Breton decides, lies only in the different tempers of the men. Who speaks? An inexhaustible murmuring which would resound through each of us, any of us, as we open ourselves to automatism. A murmuring, then, which would allow each of us to become a poet and liberate poetry itself from the poetic field (from the preserve of literature, of literary culture). For it is now a question of the surreal, which is to say, of existence, of life in its totality, of the total human being.

Who speaks? Beware of the interpretation that automatism excludes premeditation and conscious control. The Surrealist does not simply allow the pen to wander across sheets of paper; it is not a matter of mental relaxation, as if one would merely have to passively wait for the treasures of the unconscious to reveal themselves. Active consciousness has a role; great effort is required to yield to the claim of the magnetic fields. It is necessary to keep watch over the desire to create a literary work; the Surrealist experimenter must not reread what she has written and fall victim to the images that are conjured by the words on the page; she must remain at the edge of the writing as it pushes forward into the unknown.

Automatism requires a new mode of interrelation between consciousness and unconsciousness – passivity is required, but so too is activity; if the unconscious holds the initiative, consciousness is required such that its message can be carefully transcribed. There is the risk the writer is tempted by a kind of branching – that two or more thoughts will present themselves simultaneously, endangering the recording process. Or the imaginative charm of the poetic images may distract the experimenter, arresting the movement of differentiation. More broadly, the researcher has to resist the conditioned reflex which would allow the uncontrolled élan of automatism to be brought exclusively under conscious control. Yet control is required if the Surrealist is to avoid the terrible temptation of laying claim to the words which spring from her pen as her own. She must remain a machine part, a recording device attuned to the ‘magnetic fields’ of the unconscious. The spontaneous dynamism of the unconscious must be rendered explicit; it is not merely sleeping philosophers that we must become, but thinkers who can effect a synthesis between our dreams and waking life.

Who speaks? What speaks? Who occupies the locus of that vigilance which keeps watch over speech? The answer to both questions is the same: the magnetic field which quivers through our depths. Our depths? – rather, it is as though automatism turns each of us inside out in order to give issue to that murmuring speech which streams in our absence. Then the 'who?' of Breton’s 'who am I?' finds no answer other than the murmuring, the speech of automatism as it overruns the human power to speak and to act.

Is Nadja written automatically? The book passes from philosophical musing to sentimental novel; it takes the form of a memoir and then a case study; a concern for documentary realism coexists alongside lyrical flight; forty-four photographs seem to mock the idea of providing evidence for the events it describes. It may seem Nadja is too artful to be truly automatic, that it yields to a kind of narrative teleology, the satisfaction of an ending. But automatism is not arbitrary – the attempt to follow a series of semantic and phonic associations which sometimes leap from the text to the street (as in the case of the presentiment of the sign BOIS-CHARBONS) and sometimes from the street to the text (the whole of Nadja) is borne by an unconscious impulse. From Mad Love:

Desire arranges multiple ways to express itself […] the least object to which no particular symbolic role is assigned, is able to represent anything. The mind is wonderfully prompt at grasping the most tenuous relation that can exist between two objects taken at random, and poets know that they can always, without fear of being mistaken, say of one thing that it is like the other….. Whether in reality or in the dream [desire] is constrained to make the elements pass through the same network: condensation, displacement, substitutions, alterations.[xxv]

Breton draws on his own experiences of applying Freud’s practice of free association which had drawn the psychoanalyst towards the phenomenon of dreaming. Freud saw dreams as symptoms which would allow of an interpretation that would uncover their true significance by clarifying the associative links which led to them. The ‘manifest’ dream, that is, the way it is remembered and recounted by the patient, conceals the true meaning of the dream because of the self-censoring desires of the superego. For Freud, it was necessary to understand what he called the dreamwork, that is, the way in which the ostensible contents of the dream attest to the play of latent desires in a kind of thinking that is saturated with desire.

These latent thoughts can be divided into prelogical ways of thinking – condensation, displacement, plastic representation and a rational, logical component called secondary revision. Condensation should be understood as the combination of latent dream thoughts into a single manifest element and displacement as the way in which, in the dream, the apparently innocuous detail can become highly significant and the apparently important event can be treated casually. Plastic representation is that process through which important people in the patient’s life are represented by a stock of common symbols (the king = the father, etc.). The latent content manifest in prelogical thought is retrospectively ordered by secondary revision, through which the patient, under the guidance of the censoring superego, is able to construct a narrative out of the material of the dream.

The shared goal of psychoanalysis and Surrealism is to surprise and catch unawares the play of latent desire not just in dreams, but in phantasy, parapraxes, myths, symptoms. In Mad Love, Breton gives an account of his visit with Giacometti to a curiosity shop. Breton tells us he was obsessed with the phrase, le cendrier de Cendrillon, the ashtray of Cinderella. He encounters a spoon, which, for some reason, he feels is linked to the ashtray of the phrase even as it suggests the symbol of the shoe, the slipper of Cinderella. A series of associations is produced: ‘slipper-spoon-penis-perfect mold for this penis’; thus, according to Breton, the mystery announced in the phrase le cendrier de Cendrillon is solved: the series spoon-shoes-slipper, the search for the foot that fits, is about a desire for love.[xxvi] He now recalls Freud’s suggestion about Dora’s mother's jewel case: ‘The box […] like the reticule and the jewel case was once again only a substitute for the shell of Venus, for the female genitals’.[xxvii]

For Breton, desire opens a path through the world; it is a matter of attending to the signs of this desire. For Freud, the neurotic patient might be cured if those signs are understood in terms of the latent content to which they bear witness. The paths of Freudian psychoanalysis and Surrealism diverge in their respective methods of research. Freud is a man of science, Breton a poet; Freud separates unconscious desire from reality, and Breton seeks to bring together desire and the real, claiming our conception of the real is produced by our desire. This is what Breton indicates when he writes, ‘I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak’.[xxviii]

Surreality: most have taken the phrase ‘future resolution’ to indicate that the surreal would indicate a kind of transcendence which would be reached through dialectical synthesis. Suzanne Guerlac argues Breton’s notion of resolution might be read electrochemically. She reads resolution in relation to the verb résoudre, understood in terms of the resolution of a problem. Yet it also carries the meaning, to reduce, transforming something into its constituent elements or causing it to disappear (to reduce a broth in cooking). Breton’s se résoudre en is given in Robert as follows: ‘Hail clouds resolve [se réduisent en] into water’.[xxix] Guerlac draws the conclusion that instead of considering Breton's declaration in terms of a philosophical (or logical) problem in need of dialectical solution, we should read it as a description of an alchemical process.

Is the resolution, then, a kind of reduction? The surreal does not occur anywhere other than the real but it is not simply given. Effort is required by the Surrealist to hold handed-down ideas in abeyance, permitting access to the matters themselves, to absolute reality. This is why Breton is intransigent, guarding against the danger that Surrealism becomes a battery of artistic techniques rather than a struggle for revolution, and watching over the relationships between Surrealists themselves, lest they become indistinguishable from those between people in the world.

When will this happen? Only when it can do so for all, when automatism is generally unleashed, which is to say, after the revolution. But when will the revolution come? It is Nadja, not Breton, who has faith in the people who, one day, will erupt in revolution.[xxx] But Nadja was ‘sucked back into the whirlwind of everyday life’.[xxxi] She disappears into insanity; Breton, reporting her incarceration, can only lyricise about the injustice of mental hospitals. Nadja disappears from the narrative and Breton turns, in the last section of the text, to a new, unnamed beloved, who, he seems to think, incarnates the surreal itself.

Without doing it on purpose, you have taken the place of the forms most familiar to me, as well as of several figures of my foreboding. Nadja was one of these last, and it is just that you should have hidden her from me.

All I know is that this substitution of persons stops with you, because nothing can be substituted for you, and because for me it was for all eternity that this succession of terrible or charming enigmas was to come to an end at your feet.

You are not an enigma for me.

I say that you have turned me from enigmas forever.[xxxii]

Who is she? The one for whom, Breton writes, no one else can be substituted. Nadja, by comparison, was only the last of a series of lovers which has now come to an end. Yet we know from his later books that this new lover, rejecting him, will indeed be substituted; Breton will love others. But in Nadja, he is preserved in his faith that the unnamed addressee of its final section would halt the endless play of substitution. Why, then, does his book bear the name Nadja and not that of his lover to come? One might suspect that this title speaks the truth – that the non-substitutable would indeed be substitutable and there is only ever the open-endedness of those associations which transforms the world itself into passage. In one sense, Breton fails surrealism. In another, as he writes after Nadja of other lovers, he witnesses the truth: he is condemned to write because there is only substitution, only an infinite play of proxies.

The surreal does not lie on the other side of the written text of Nadja, as if it were a matter simply of finding the right way to name or describe it but can only be indicated in that text. An indication Breton might be said to betray as soon as he tries to bring the chain of substitutions to an end. But one, indeed, which undoes this betrayal in turn as it requires he write Communicating Vessels and Mad Love, preventing him from ever allowing the surreal to come to rest in a term. In this way, it is not Breton who is vigilant, but the automatism of his texts as they allow themselves to free associate in the direction of their author’s unconscious desires. And, too, they might be said to be vigilant without him, pressing beyond his attempt to seize on the surreal in the convulsive beauty of his unnamed beloved. Breton fails the surreal, this is true – but his writing does not. He falls short of his own intransigence, but his writings press towards the matters themselves. It is only in this movement, this passing, that the Surrealist reduction is accomplished.

*

For Husserl, the reduction allows the philosopher to achieve an appropriate self-responsibility; for Heidegger, too, the aim is authenticity, but the reduction itself is something which cannot be brought about through an act of will: this is what it means, for him, to philosophise as a finite being. For Blanchot, something stranger occurs, which seems to do away with the idea of philosophical self-responsibility altogether. Now the reduction is linked to an experience of language as it reveals itself in literary fiction. Firstly, fictional writing suspends reference – it does not represent the world, or, through its operation, carry through the free eidetic variation that Husserl advocated as the path to uncover the essence of an object. Secondly, it suspends the intentionality of the author and reader as they seek to animate a fictional world on the basis of what is presented in language. In so doing, it foregrounds what might be called the materiality of language, the immanent field of the ‘there is’ as it resists meaning. Is this what is named by the inexhaustible murmur?

In a particularly terse section of The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot allows conversationalists to put forward some propositions about the reduction. One conversationalist asks whether ‘the meaning of meaning would be neuter, neutral’.[xxxiii] The other replies: ‘let us say that meaning is not posed, neither positive nor negative, yet affirming itself as though outside every affirmation and every negation’.[xxxiv] This reply is to be expected: the neuter, etymologically speaking, is neither one nor the other – neither negation, then, nor what might be posited and affirmed through negation; neither positivity as it rests in itself, nor negativity as it undoes what is given.

The first conversationalist replies in turn:

Again, neutral, if meaning operates or acts through a movement or retreat that is in some sense without end, through an exigency to become suspended and by an ironic outbidding of the epochē. It is not simply the natural position or even that of existence that is to be suspended so that meaning, in its pure disaffected light, might appear; meaning itself can only bear meaning by placing itself in brackets, in parentheses or quotation marks, and this through an infinite reduction thus finally remaining outside meaning like a phantom that dissipates by day and that nonetheless is never lacking, since to be lacking is its sign.[xxxv]

The neuter is indicated through a reduction that is without end, never terminating such that it could be delimited and stabilised, and without sense, insofar as it reveals only that wavering between being and nothingness Blanchot calls the il y a. No one is there to whom anything could be revealed; there is only the ‘il’ as the ‘subject’ of the experience and the il y a or the neuter as the ‘object’ of experience. Yet what is revealed thereby is part of the economy of meaning; it belongs to meaning’s articulation. One conversationalist says, ‘Meaning would therefore only exist by way of the neutral’; the reply comes: ‘But insofar as the neutral would remain foreign to meaning – by which I mean, first: neutral as far as meaning is concerned; not indifferent, but haunting the possibility of meaning and non-sense by the invisible margin of a difference’.[xxxvi]

Indefinite suspense, the eternal epochē: is this what Breton seeks to avoid in Nadja? Is it this fear which Breton attempts to overcome via the Blanchotian equivalent of repression, that is, the desire for determinacy? Nadja’s madness is only a figure for that experience which would bring about that exposure, that turning inside out which Blanchot places at the heart of his work and allows himself to call the surreal. It is as though, for Blanchot, Surrealism contained its own latent content – that what is manifested as the desire for the surreal is only a desire for the neuter, and that the dreamwork is only a name for determination and interiorisation. In The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot dreams of a psychoanalyst ‘for whom a sign would come from the disaster’; Freud would be one for whom this sign had not come even when he uses the word ‘es’ for what we in English know as the id.[xxxvii] This ‘es’ is not yet the Blanchotian ‘il’. It is in the name of the struggle with interiorisation, with determinacy, that Blanchot will attempt to do justice to Surrealism. A peculiar justice, insofar as it will transform what Breton calls absolute reality into the negative absolute, the vigilance of the surrealist into the vigilance of the il and automatism into the play of what Blanchot calls the neuter.

*

For Blanchot, the day is that place in which it is possible to begin, when the human being can engage in those projects before it; the possible is its dimension. If the night is the contrary of the day, it is only that place wherein one rests in the midst of tasks and projects; it is still governed by possibility. Thus, day and night, action and repose belong to the same economy; to sleep after the day is done, to prepare for another day, is to remain secure in the measure which permits the project.

But there is another experience of both the day and the night. First of all, ‘the essence of night’:

In the night no refuge is to be found in sleep. And if you fail sleep, exhaustion finally sickens you, and this sickness prevents sleeping; it is expressed by insomnia, by the impossibility of making sleep a free zone, a clear and true resolution. In the night one cannot sleep.[xxxviii]

Then, secondly, there is the day which ‘survives itself in the night’, which ‘exceeds its term’: the ‘interminable “day”’ linked not to the time of the project, but to ‘time’s absence’.[xxxix]

The interminable day, the essence of night: what do they name? They are linked, Blanchot writes, to ‘the threat of the outside where the world lacks’.[xl] The world refers to the field which is understood in accordance with what is possible for the human being, that is, according to the measure of what the human being is able to do. Both alternatives keep the measure of this 'ability to be able' intact; preserving the human being as the one for whom tasks and projects are possible. That which is outside my capacities is still organised by the measure of those capacities themselves.

What, then, does it mean to invoke the ‘threat of the outside’ – of an experience ‘where the world lacks’?[xli] No longer, in this case, can tasks be weighed up in terms of what I am able or unable to accomplish. It is necessary to conceive of an event which no longer falls within the field of possibility – as though the economy of possibility finds itself inscribed within a space which it is unable to control, one which opens onto an outside which is no longer its outside. Or, once again, there is an inadequacy of the field of the possible to itself, inhabiting it and dividing it at its source. It is in these terms one should understand what Blanchot calls the essence of night and the indeterminable day as well as the experiences to which he links these terms: the dream and the image.

In the essential night, nothing can be done; sleep is not the place of repose, but of restlessness. Coming from outside the world, outside the order or the economy of the possible, the dream is not the secret repository of our wishes, assembling the residues of our daily experience beneath whose manifest content the psychoanalyst would be able to find latent desires. It must be thought, according to Blanchot, in terms of an insomnia or awakening in which it is no longer you or I who dreams – you or I, that is, understood as those beings who can make their way in the world.

Who dreams 'inside' me? But isn't the dream, on Blanchot's account, what is outside me? ‘The dream’, writes Blanchot, ‘is the reawakening of the interminable’.[xlii] It is the return of an experience which cannot be delimited. Like the essential night, it does not permit rest; it presents no secure foothold from which to launch oneself into the future. It entails, rather, the collapse of the beginning and the repetition of an experience without any determinate content. This experience shatters not only the 'content' of the dream, but the idea that a dream could be a receptacle of meaning, latent or otherwise. There is no ‘content’ to the dream since there is no interiority of the dreamer. The dream is the breakthrough of the outside; it is not your dream or mine, but something like the dream of the night – a dream from which the dreamer must be reborn each time she dreams. A rebirth which suspends the temporal order of the possible.

Shattered time: the 'manifest' content of the dream, which evidences, according to Freud, the secondary processes through which its scattered ideations are synthesised into a narrative unity, always passes over the disjunction to which the dream belongs. For Freud, the unconscious is timeless, but the latent desire the dream reveals belongs to an experience of time which is neither 'in' time (the time of the project, of the possible) nor outside it. This leads Freud to posit a common, perhaps transcendental account of the symbolic universe to which we would all belong thereby indicating an experience of, as it were, the 'outside' of time 'in' time.

Who experiences the dream? It is necessary to reconceive the locus of experience – not is it the personal ‘I’, the one who is able to sleep or wake, but the exposition or unfolding of this ‘I’: the 'il'. The chance of this unfolding is there from the start, inhabiting experience as a kind of possible impossible. It is not a recurring dream, but what recurs in every dream; it is not the bearer of the personal secret, the key to a psyche which the psychoanalyst might unlock, but the exposure of the inside to the outside, the disclosure of the prior imbrication of the possible and the impossible, of time with time's absence. ‘Perhaps one could say that the dream is all the more nocturnal in that it turns around itself, that it dreams itself, that it has for its content its possibility’.[xliii] To what latent desire does the dream attest? To the desire to be extinguished in the instant where the 'il' comes forward to take your place. The desire for the essence of the night, the interminable day.

Just as the dream of which Blanchot writes has no content, the image is only an affirmation of what breaks through our ordinary dealings with things in view of particular projects. Like the dream dreamed at the heart of the dream, the image is an experience of the real at the heart of the real, the reserve that is the opacity of things which do not place themselves at our disposal. This correspondence between the dream and what awaits us in the day is not surprising, for both bear upon the same enigma; if the essence of night and the interminable day are one, it is because they bear upon what Blanchot calls the image.

*

In Nadja, Breton recalls a flea-market he used to visit to buy curios,

Again, quite recently … I went with a friend one Sunday to the ‘flea market’ at Saint-Ouen (I go there often, in search of those objects that can be found nowhere else, outmoded, fragmented, useless, almost incomprehensible, perverse in short, in the sense that I give to the word and that I like).[xliv]

Remembering this passage, Blanchot writes:

a tool, when damaged, becomes its image (and sometimes an aesthetic object like ‘those outmoded objects, fragmented, unusable, almost incomprehensible, perverse’, which André Breton loved). In this case the tool, no longer disappearing into its use, appears. This appearance of the object is that of resemblance and reflection: the object's double, if you will. The category of art is linked to this possibility for objects to ‘appear’, to surrender, that is, to the pure and simple resemblance behind which there is nothing – but being. Only that which is abandoned to the image appears, and everything that appears is, in this sense, imaginary.[xlv]

Blanchot directs us away from the psychoanalytic technique of free association to Heidegger's famous analysis of the hammer in Being and Time instead. Heidegger explains how the hammer, in breaking, removes itself from that network of references in which it was enmeshed. It is no longer something which is part of the articulation of one of Dasein's projects, but is, like Breton's perverse object 'fragmented, unusable, almost incomprehensible'. It is a short step from the account of the breaking of the hammer to what amounts to a phenomenological reduction in his early philosophy: that experience in which I become in my anxiety only a lieu-tenant keeping place for the nothing.[xlvi] In both cases, there has been a lapse in my capacity to produce meaning. Such production is understood, by Blanchot, in terms of the existence of the human being in which it throws out webs of signification wherein particular things are ‘caught’ and, so to speak ‘existed’. That is to say, things show up as being meaningful, as being imbued with meaning in view of the transcendence of Dasein.

Yet not all things allow themselves to be caught in this way. Would the items at the flea-market tell us something we have missed about the world? They would intimate, rather, something about its hither side, which Blanchot presents when he invokes the other ek-stasis – not the initiative of the self, based on power, upon the opening of possibilities, but the interruption of this power and this possibility as the ‘neutral double’ of the world obtrudes.[xlvii]

The image speaks to us, and seems to speak intimately to us of ourselves. But the term ‘intimately’ does not suffice. Let us say rather that the image intimately designates the level where personal intimacy is destroyed and that it indicates in this movement the menacing proximity of a vague and empty outside, the deep, the sordid basis upon which it continues to affirm things in their disappearance. Thus it speaks to us, apropos of each thing, of less than this thing, but of us. And, speaking of us, it speaks to us of less than us, of that less than nothing that subsists when there is nothing.[xlviii]

For Heidegger, Dasein is only a 'temporal transcendence' which leaps beyond itself and towards a future which it understands in terms of specific tasks and ultimately as its own care for its own existence. According to this tradition, the self is not a substantive and self-present unity, but an opening to the future, an ecstasis which understands itself in terms of its thrown projection into the world. The 'I' as the 'I can', the self as potentiality: all relations between the 'I' and the world must be understood in terms of the measure implicit in the 'I'. It is as though the 'I' were the Ulysses of the Odyssey, adventuring, risking himself, but always in view of the task of returning to Ithaca, to his Kingdom. In truth, his adventures do not change Ulysses; likewise, the 'I' of projects and tasks itself remains constant in its dealings with the world.

Yet in the relation to the image, as Blanchot sets it out, something different occurs. No longer are things experienced in terms of a mediating self-relation. It is as though the relation itself were suspended and it can no longer reach the thing as an object. In place of the self, there is the experience where 'personal intimacy is destroyed' and there is only 'the menacing proximity of a vague and empty outside'.[xlix] It is no longer a question of my transcendence into the world as it were grasping and digesting being but of being taking its distance from me. I no longer ex-ist in the Heideggerian sense but am ex-posed; what I encounter does not permit me to draw back into myself. I am brought into an encounter with what outstrips me, with what refuses to be interiorised. A kind of reversal occurs; I encounter something which does not merely limit my power to bestow meaning, but escapes the measure of sense altogether.

This reversal is what I encounter in the ‘other’ image. It cannot be confined to the shadow of a particular thing – or rather, it reveals what is other than all things to the extent that they can resist me, refusing the attempt to grasp and seize beings that is inherent to my existence. It is not the ‘other’ image of a particular thing I confront as it would be linked in a determinable relation to its ‘original’. The ‘other’ image is not delimitable; it is as though the encounter with the ‘other’ image is only the trigger for a broader collapse.[l] The narrative voice, I argued in chapter one, resounds through the voices of the characters and the details of the story. The reader can no longer remain intact as a spectator; she is fascinated to the extent that she is brought up against language as it operates symbolically. The experience of the ‘other’ image is analogous: confronting the image of a particular thing, I am pressed up against the ‘neutral double’ of all the things in the world.

What comes first, then? Meaning? Non-meaning? The original? The copy? There is an ambiguity, which is to say both at once. I might experience the image as what is primordial or profound ‘in’ things and the ‘original’ – things in the world – as what is superficial. Or we might experience things in the world as what are more real or more significant than the image. Put another way, the world might appear solid and sure, but at any moment, this solidity and security give way as I am turned over to the uncertainty of the image.[li] Then again, the ‘reality’ of the image often seems illusory and I forget those periods of fascination, of intimacy in which I can no longer make my way with confidence in the world. Yet when I am fascinated by the image, there is no determinable content to my experience; if this contentlessness might be said to be affirmed as the content of my experience there is no one there to experience it. What is left to me but to forget what I cannot undergo in the first person?

Outside the psyche, outside memory and the possibility of memorisation there is a kind of unfolding in which the 'I' is turned inside out. Who am I, in the experience in question? No one. Personne. What exists? There is no world either, if this is understood in terms of a totality of involvements, a contexture in which things make sense in accordance with the for-the-sake-of-Dasein. What speaks in this experience? 'The deep, the sordid basis upon which it continues to affirm things in their disappearance'; of what does it speak? 'of less than this thing, but of us. And, speaking of us, it speaks to us of less than us, of that less than nothing that subsists when there is nothing'.[lii] There is no one there to be vigilant – but vigilance is there nonetheless. Does this mean someone or something else is vigilant in me – that I have been possessed as by an alien force? It points, rather, to a dispossession; I am occupied not by a subject or a substantive but by an impersonal streaming.

It may appear the 'I' always survives its encounters with things and with persons as long as it is alive, leaping forward into the future, always retaining the capacity for hope. But there is always the chance of an experience which makes it tumble in the midst of this leap: this is what happens in physical suffering, according to Blanchot, but also in writing’s sickness unto death. The leap is interrupted. In this suspended instant, self-relation itself is suspended; the self is torn apart like Orpheus by the Maenads. Something remains – not the self, it is true, but something like an awareness of the river upon which the torn body of Orpheus was cast (an awareness of the river 'in' his dispersed body): of the river which flows in my place, the outside streaming in what was once my interiority. No one is there – but there is a way of understanding this ‘no one’ as designating an impersonal vigilance – the ‘il’ which thereafter leaves its trace in memory. The inside is exposed to the outside; the surreal is only what reveals itself to the vigilant ‘il’, which is to say the neuter.

Which comes first, image or object? Both come at once; both are implicit in my experience of the world and myself. What Heidegger calls ecstasis or transcendence is not negated by what Blanchot calls the ‘other’ ecstasy, the plunge into immanence; likewise, what Heidegger calls the understanding of being is not dissolved into what Blanchot calls the ‘there is’. There is never a simple field of existence without existents despite what Levinas implies in his early studies; existence and the ‘there is’ or the neuter must be thought together. To seek the future resolution of these two states into an absolute reality is to miss the fact that they cannot be resolved; if Surrealism can be understood in terms of a kind of reduction then it is one that maintains these states in their tension, struggling one against the other.

*

After Dada, it was no longer a question of lending support to an ailing artistic institution, but of liberating inspiration itself from the artistic field. One finds both the demystification and democratisation of the inspiration in the insistence that anyone is capable of answering its call. The poet and the artist are not defunct, but their value is no longer artistic. Inspiration, released from the artistic sphere, is for everyone. The work of the inspired artist is only a sign of a Surrealist practice to come. The great danger for the Surrealist is to understand the poem as a vehicle for the poet’s self-expression: to subordinate it to the desire on the part of the poet to realise a finely crafted work. The poets remain ‘instruments too full of pride’; they are unable to allow themselves to become, like the Surrealists, ‘simple receptacles of so many echoes, modest recording instruments’.[liii] ‘Language has been given to man so he may make surrealist use of it’.[liv] But how might one engage with this gift? How does it engage us? It can be presented as a kind of trauma.

The capacity to remember depends upon a certain freedom with respect to the past. For the psychoanalyst, this freedom runs up against resistances. The patient’s complex can be dissolved when it is understood in its secret relation to past events. Analysis depends upon a power to remember beyond the confines of individual, conscious memory. Automatic writing is also supposed to yield up a secret, but it can do so only to those who are no longer regulated by the closed economy of consciousness. In one sense, automatism is a power to remember what has been forgotten, bearing witness to the lost continuity of the unconscious. Automatism would attempt to seize upon this trauma, this murmuring, making it speak at last. But as it does so, it runs up against an irresolvable contradiction in language itself.

For the most part, ordinary language uses the name to identify the thing, idealising it, taking it into the universal. This is to lose the thing in its real existence: the thing and its name are not identical; the word can only encounter the thing as an instance of a universal, as a particular that awaited idealisation. A certain literary writing, by contrast, understands that the negation of the word gives the thing a new, ideal existence as a word. In Blanchot’s words, it ‘observes that the word “cat” is not only the nonexistence of the cat but a nonexistence made word’, that is, a completely determined and objective reality.[lv] This sort of literary language would become thing-like, transposing the singularity of the thing into language. Listen to a single word, Blanchot writes, and you can hear nothingness ‘struggling and toiling away’: ‘it digs tirelessly, doing its utmost to find a way out, nullifying what encloses it – it is infinite disquiet, formless and nameless vigilance’.[lvi] Thus the work of literature indicates something unreal and non-representational, letting non-existence exist as a kind of ‘primal absence’, not as the sign of absent things but as a thing itself, as an object made of words.[lvii]

Language, in the literary work, would attempt to coagulate into its own substantiality, the immanence of its textures, rhythms and sonorousness as they resist the transcendence of meaning. It would seek to rid itself of everything it might name with the aim of achieving a physicality of its own, a perfect immanence. The word no longer disappears in the act of signification. Its arbitrariness with respect to its signified gives itself to be experienced in the very heaviness of the word. As such, it joins itself to the heaviness of every word and of all language. The word ‘cat’ becomes image; it is the trigger of a more general collapse – one which, too, implicates the language user, insofar as the word ‘I’ searches in vain for what it designates. What gives itself to be experienced is the ‘there is’ of language itself, its neutral double. There emerges the presence of what appeared previously to be an absence, the being of what was taken to be nothingness: language becomes symbolic as the oscillation of being and nothingness can be heard in every word.

To write, as Blanchot observes of Mallarmé, ‘is not to evoke a thing but an absence of a thing’; ‘words vanish from the scene to make the thing enter, but since this thing is itself no more than an absence, that which is shown in the theatre, it is an absence of words and absence of things, a simultaneous emptiness, nothing supported by nothing’.[lviii] Yet words must mean if literature is to be readable; the poem, made of language, cannot become a thing. The literary work needs to become a cultural object, available and accessible. Likewise, there is the chance the literary writer becomes the virtuoso whose work evidences a mastery of narrative modes, of incident and characterisation as it reflects back the glories of the world.

The work of literature becomes what Blanchot calls the novel when it fails to become an autonomous thing unto itself. In so doing, it becomes impure and non-absolute because it depends on the world it mirrors: ‘Willing to represent imaginary lives, a story of a society that it proposes to us as real, it depends on this reality of which it is the reproduction or equivalent’; it is always in collusion with a certain mimetologism.[lix] In this sense, literature hovers at the crossroads of verisimilitude and the creation of an autonomous thing. It is never a pure thing or a pure representation; it comprises both movements and cannot do without them. Literary language depends on a paradox, on an irresolvable contradiction.

The Surrealists want to resolve this contradiction not in favour of the human being, but of the impersonal murmur of which all literature is only an echo. Surrealism is the faith that language might permit the great overcoming of the antimonies and contradictions which prevent us from realising our total existence. All difficulties will be resolved; this new language we speak will attain what language always struggled to be. At last, language can attain itself as thinking rather than a means of thinking, seizing upon the truth of immediacy, of immediate life without mediation. Language will no longer be an instrument through which the human being might realise its freedom. Automatic poetry is freedom, not freedom incarnated, but freedom absolute as it acts and manifests itself. My freedom, for Breton, does pass through words, it is realised in them; I discover in writing a relation to myself without intermediary. Is it my freedom any longer? Is the relation in question a relation to myself? Rather, a freedom which traverses us as we are given to automatic writing, and a relation which cannot be situated in a term.

Who is the one given to automatism? No one. Who writes? Personne. What gives itself to be written? The il y a of language, which the surrealists know as the inexhaustible murmur. Whence the surrealist attack on the hackneyed notion of individual talent, on the artwork as hallowed cultural object, on the great museums and galleries of our culture. For it is an equality that is issue; we are equal with respect to the gift of automatism.

Surrealist poetry is a poetry of freedom, of spontaneity, of automatism. How then to understand the Surrealists’ affirmation of Marxism, of communism? How to understand the poetry that would give itself in service of the revolution? Because to write freely is also to take responsibility for what freedom is not; it is to brace oneself against the conditions of society, to flash against the darkness of our present condition – to flash, and, in this flashing, to expose the cracks and interstices, the great contradictions in the present state of society.

The Surrealist has faith that the problems which we take to be important are only a function of the contradictions implicit in our society; it is only after the revolution that one can begin to understand what freedom might mean. Freedom will be grasped negatively until it is grasped no longer as freedom from oppression or exploitation. And on the day after the revolution? The day after surrealism achieves itself? That is the day from which automatic poetry is written. A day which calls us on the pages we read and write. It is bound to the outbreak of a freedom to come; it is already there, ahead of us. Inspired, automatic writing is also critical; if it appears uncommitted, this is only because it is belongs to another order of commitment, because it burns like a star which has consumed everything but itself; it is total, absolute.

Human possibility, human capacity: are these words appropriate for a poetry which reaches us from the future and calls us towards an unimaginable equality? Perhaps it is better to write of what is humanly impossible, or what at least reaches us from the day which approaches us from the other side of time.

Yet for all this, words must mean; the Surrealist cannot overcome the contradiction in language once and for all. Even as Surrealism looks to the reduction that would come after the revolution, this ‘after’ can never actually happen. Automatism, naming human impossibility, the potency of an impersonal freedom, cannot achieve itself as the action of free human beings. If it is free, it happens without the human being, that is, impossibly, not because it is a natural event, occurring like the blooming of a flower or the opening of the day, but because it does so in the withdrawal of the animating power of human existence. An impersonal freedom happens ‘within’ human freedom. I speak, I act as it, too, speaks and acts. I write as it writes; I think as it thinks inside me. The Surrealists are right to observe there is nothing mysterious about this event; to claim it does not occur is only to indicate the way in which it withholds itself from the time of projects and possibility; to allow that it happens is to envisage an event which is impossible but that nevertheless is always happening. Surrealism holds open the indication to such an event, attesting, even in its non-occurrence to the suspension of the instant which breaks with the ordinary course of time.[lx] But how does this indication occur? How is it marked in the Surrealist work?

Breton’s Nadja sets out to retrace the course of a series of episodes that pertain to his encounter with the young woman who bears its name. Its author presents his text as an ongoing narrative of a sequence of events as they occur. He gives the impression that the book that will come to be called Nadja would lay itself open to whatever happens. It seems entirely by chance that Breton meets the wandering spirit whose presence confounds him, who lends her name to his book. Who is she? A woman who sees visions, who is close to what Breton would call the surreal. She surrealises the city through which she passes, seeing ghosts in the Place Dauphine and a fiery, spectral hand hovering above the Seine. She is unpredictable and enigmatic, playful yet grave, her conversation a mixture of the trifling and the profound; she offers startling exegeses of the essays of La Révolution surrealist, composes allegorical sketches and seems to be able to predict the future.

Breton is fascinated. What happens, though, when he tries to grasp Nadja in the book which bears her name? Breton risks appearing as a literary author among other authors, a writer for whom experience is the raw material for the creation of a work. For Nadja is more than the threshold of the surreal. She is also the woman who subsists on menial work, willing, as she tells Breton, to stop at nothing to obtain money. Breton finds her too demanding: she wants money and affection; her conversation is interminable and self-absorbed. The real Nadja who exasperates Breton, the woman who threatens to leave Paris to take up a position as a domestic servant, disappears from the book that bears her name. Breton tells us quickly and callously that she was incarcerated in a mental institution. He turns from Nadja to the woman to whom the latter part of his work is addressed – to the new lover who has, he writes, ‘turned me from enigmas forever’.[lxi] As such, Nadja is merely a stage in the author’s Bildungsroman. Breton turns his attention away from the woman who he presented as an enchantress. Far from opening itself to the risk of an encounter, Breton’s text appears to preserve itself from risk by taking refuge in a narrative in which the encounter with Nadja occupies a carefully allotted role. Nadja becomes, ultimately, a literary work of art and disappears into the literary establishment from which Surrealism was supposed to break. Breton would tell us a well wrought story about madness, about mad love.

Has Breton failed? Perhaps, as Timothy Clark observes, Breton aestheticised the surreal in his récit because he operated with an excessively determined and, in the end, thoroughly traditional conception of the surreal.[lxii] But perhaps Nadja allows an aperture through which the surreal can reveal itself. Yes, Breton incarcerates Nadja in the book that bears her name and in so doing bricks himself into his work, foreclosing the relation to the surreal he sought. But Nadja is haunted, a ghost passes through the walls and the surreal affirms itself as the absence of the work, of a worklessness that Breton cannot banish. Whilst to work is, in the broadest possible sense, to identify or to permit identification to occur, worklessness cannot be understood as a countermovement of equal force. It names, rather, a lability, a withering or differentiation that inhabits work. Blanchot indicates the failure of identification as it marks itself in Nadja, showing us that Breton’s work shelters a relation that testifies to the perpetual incompletion of work even as it calls for completion.

True, Nadja cannot become a work of pure worklessness; worklessness takes neither the form of a book nor tolerates any particular determination. Yes, Breton succumbs to the temptation to realise a literary artwork, but this temptation is the condition for the artwork appearing at all. His récit points beyond itself to worklessness, to what Blanchot calls ‘the absence of the work’ which, he says, ‘cites the work outside itself, calling it always in vain to its own worklessness and making the work re-cite itself, even when it believes it has its sights on “the outside” that it does not fail to include’.[lxiii]

This is why it is insufficient to indict Breton as the ‘Pope’ who prevented Surrealism from realising its potential. Breton fails as he must. One cannot, as Bataille would argue, understand Surrealism as a practice of existence that would preserve itself from particular works. The surreal, as Blanchot shows, is affirmed in those same works. Surrealism appears to fail in terms of its aspiration to join the artistic and political avant-gardes, yet it succeeds in another sense, that is, by affirming and redoubling the affirmation of an opening to the outside, to the unknown. This is Surrealism’s vigilance, its ghostly demand, the call for justice to which Blanchot responds in turn, where justice, now, is understood in terms of the call of or from what he calls the work, the absence of the book. But this remains too abstract. How is worklessness marked in the work? How does differentiation leave its trace?

*

Death, I argued in the previous chapter, is the condition of possibility of sense for the human being, the animal who speaks. This means there can be no return to life before language. As Blanchot writes, ‘man was condemned not to be able to approach anything or experience anything except through the meaning he had to create’.[lxiv] Adam’s act of naming is the start of a more general idealisation of everything that exists, but it simultaneously encloses the human being within the order of being. Yet the mastery over speech conceals a weakness or susceptibility to another experience of language. An experience which is vouchsafed when I cannot find the word I was looking for, when words fail me, or when, like Moses, I stammer. Who stammers? Who seeks a missing word? The one who, in this moment, has been swept aside by the great tide of a language which will not allow a speaker to emerge.

Blanchot figures this double experience of language by retelling Homer’s account of Ulysses’s encounter with the Sirens in the Odyssey. For Blanchot, Ulysses’s journey home stands in for the ‘I’ for whom everything that exists is opened and unfolded as to a unitary point of convergence, the ego. Like the Ulysses of the Odyssey, the task of the ‘I’ is to trace a circular itinerary through what is unknown, experiencing it, undergoing it, before returning to what is known. It is as if everything I meet came from me (from the hypostasis upon which I depend) since the heterogeneity of the thing is always and already subordinated to the measure of powers which belong to the ego. There is no possibility of heterogeneity, of anything that could occur that would outstrip its circular journey. It is this self-identification that lies at the root of both the solitary subject and language itself.

For Blanchot, however, literary writing suspends this circular movement. On the one hand, literary language is the same as everyday language; it must mean, conveying its signified to the reader. On the other, it attests to a struggle with which everyday language tries to have done. Literary language wants to preserve the materiality or physicality of language and, by doing so, allow language itself to become an image that would redouble the becoming-image of the world.

It is the ‘there is’ of language, its becoming-image that he presents as the Siren’s song. As he emphasises, it appears to be neither extraordinary nor inhuman; it possesses an extraordinary power to be sure, but one that lurks within all song. Nevertheless, to be lured by the Sirens is to be attracted by what is extraordinary in the most human of capacities. It is to discover another voice at the heart of the human one – a song that cannot be possessed by a singer. Human singing is joined ultimately to what is inhuman; to sing is always to sing ‘with’ the song of the Sirens – to join one’s voice to theirs, but in doing so, to relinquish one’s voice. The singer is joined by an inhuman voice, by the murmuring of language itself.

The ‘wonderful’ song of the Sirens was both ‘common’ and ‘secret’; it is ‘simple’ ad ‘everyday’.[lxv] The song was heard, and in such a way that it allowed more discerning hearers to heed a secret strangeness within ordinary singing. It stands in for the literary text, which, like the encounter with the song, belongs to ‘strange powers’, to ‘the abyss’.[lxvi] To hear the abyssal song of the Sirens is to realise that an abyss has opened in every utterance. The word ‘cat’ no longer vanishes in the act of successful signification but remains and along with it the whole of language, the il y a of language as it becomes image. But just as the literary writer is unable to realise the impossible ‘object’, to allow the poem to become a thing, the sailor cannot reach the source of the song.

It is for this reason that the Sirens’ song can never be said to be never actually present. Rather, it only implies the direction of the true sources of the song; the song of the Sirens is ‘only a song still to come’, one that would lead its listener toward ‘that space where the singing would really begin’.[lxvii] The Sirens seduce because of the remoteness of their song; their song is only the attraction of a song to come. Likewise, the unattainable ideal of the literary ‘object’ is seductive because of its very unattainability. Those sailors who are led towards the source by the song, steer their ships onto the rocks that surround the Sirens’ isle, finding that in reaching the ostensible source of the song, there is nothing but dying; they disappear. The sailors discover in this region that music itself is absent and their goal unattainable: there is no attainable literary ‘object’, no possibility of making the literary work into a thing. From this perspective, the writer is too early because the goal recedes and the work becomes unrealisable. The sailors have always weighed anchor too soon; the source of the song is always infinitely distant; they die broken-hearted because they have failed not once, but many times. But the writer is also too late; the goal has been overshot, she was already unfaithful to her impossible task.

Ultimately, the search for the ‘essence’ of the song, its source and its wellspring, disappoints because there is no such essence. The desire to discover the source of the song will always lead to disappointment whilst it is understood to promise a marvellous beyond. Yet one should not assume that the song is a mere lie. It calls the literary work into being; the song to come appears to dissimulate itself because it can never come to presence. But the search for the ‘object’ of literature remains admirable. Blanchot shows the relationship between the two demands in the example of Ulysses. But his is not Homer’s Ulysses: Blanchot’s Ulysses becomes Homer; he writes the Odyssey and, in so doing, he stands in for the literary author who sets out to write a novel just as his journey figures as the secret itinerary of the author.

*

Now it is true, Blanchot concedes, Ulysses did overcome the Sirens in a certain way. Indeed, he has himself bound to the mast, his wrists and ankles tied, in order to observe them, to pass through what no other human being had undergone. He endures the song; his crew, ears plugged, admires his mastery. Ulysses appears all the more impressive for the way in which his response to the song of Sirens allows him and the sailors he commands to regain a mastery that was challenged or had been lost: the mastery over song itself. Indeed, Ulysses’s apparent courage allows the sailors to regain their grip on the human activity of singing; they are no longer daunted by the inhumanity of the Sirens’ song. Moreover, Ulysses’s actions cause the Sirens to understand that the song is nothing special: it is merely a human song that sounds inhuman, and the Sirens are merely animals with the appearance of beautiful women. The Sirens can no longer delude themselves that they bear a privileged relationship with the song they thought was in their power. They recognise themselves in the sailors over whom they once had power, but they are fated to remain as far away from what they seek as the sailors. This knowledge turns the Sirens into real women; they become human because they belong, with the sailors, on the hither side of the origin they too would seek.

(Almost as soon as the Sirens become women, Blanchot tells us, they die. But he tells us nothing of the fabulous animals that are turned into women and undergo their own deaths (and perhaps their own resurrection). He writes of Ulysses’s death and resurrection, but Blanchot does not consider the fate of the Sirens after their deaths. Why does Blanchot kill them before they might explore their own form of existence, passing over the possibility of their return or resurrection?

Like Breton, Blanchot would exhibit a friendship for the surreal. But again, like Breton, one must not confuse those who are near the song with the song itself. Nadja is not the surreal but one who shares the opening to the surreal with Breton. Likewise, the Sirens are not their song, but share Ulysses’s fascination with the song. Implicit to Nadja and to ‘Encountering the Imaginary’ is the importance of separating the term from the relation. True, Nadja passes into insanity and the Sirens drown, but this is to say nothing of what might be possible for them. What would it mean to rewrite Nadja from the perspective of Nadja or ‘The Sirens’ Song’ from that of the drowned women? Nothing, if it is not done with respect to the relation to the surreal, which is to say, in the friendship that brings each together in an experience shared only as each becomes ‘il’. It is a question of equality; each is equal insofar as he or she exists in a unilateral and dissymmetrical relation to the surreal. Does this relation neutralise sexual difference? Certainly the ‘il’ is neither male nor female; in becoming other to myself, I am distanced from any attribute by which I might be identified. This is a claim emphasised by Blanchot when he writes of May 1968, even as one can identify in those texts a rhetoric of fraternity and filiation which Derrida will rightly claim to find problematic.[lxviii]

How, though to understand a claim which can be found in the pages of The Unavowable Community, ‘there are no run-of-the-mill women’?[lxix] Should this claim, by contrast, be extended to all human beings and, indeed, to every singularity (tout autre est tout autre, according to Derrida’s idiomatic expression)?[lxx] There is a tendency in Blanchot’s writings from ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ onwards for women to be made to stand in for the singularity of the ‘object’ of which the literary author would write.[lxxi] After noting that certain poets ‘have felt that the act of naming is disquieting and marvellous’, and making the point that the name ‘may give me its meaning but it first suppresses it’, Blanchot uses the example of a woman: ‘for me to say, “this woman”, I must somehow take her flesh-and-blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her’.[lxxii] In so doing, he substitutes a woman for the flower Mallarmé uses as the example of singularity in his ‘Crisis in Verse’ upon which Blanchot draws. But why does he do so? As an act of misogyny or to remember that the annihilation of women in their flesh and blood is the basis for the circulation of words?

Against those who would object ‘with barely withheld indignation’ that the main example in ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ of the destructive power of language is a woman, Rodolphe Gasché protests that ‘the choice of the example is not fortuitous’. Reflecting upon ‘the linguistic and ontological conditions under which a thing in general […] can become Other to begin with’, Blanchot can do this most ‘poignantly’ ‘by taking “woman” as the example’.[lxxiii] How should one understand this poignancy? Is it because Blanchot knows that woman is a privileged figure of the Other who is excluded from discourse? This would account for the way in which Blanchot allows his retelling of Greek myths to form the centrepiece of both The Space of Literature and The Book to Come in which a male hero, who stands in for the literary author, is made to approach a female figure of alterity who stands in for the auto-dissimulating ‘object’ of authorial desire.[lxxiv] This comes perilously close to reinforcing the traditional image of woman as the Muse who grants a male artist the power to create whilst absenting herself from the creation.

What would it mean for a woman to speak of herself and her adventures? Écriture féminine does not escape the economy of possibility once and for all.[lxxv] It is a matter, once again, of permitting an indication to occur, to name the possible and respond to the impossible. Is this response one which would be specifically feminine – or is the feminine just one of the names for those who have been traditionally excluded from the discourse of the master? If the latter is the case, then there is nothing absolutely specific and different about écriture féminine. That the Surrealists are guilty of a casual sexism mirrored in the avant-garde groups which succeeded it (typing out revolutionary documents, according to Guy Debord, was women’s work; Marguerite Duras would later express frustration that women’s role would be to make tea for the male revolutionaries) does not count against what they affirmed as automatic writing. The same goes for Blanchot, insofar as automatism becomes, with him, the way in which human beings are given over to the impossible. Automatism is for everyone, anyone, male, female, male-and-female or any of a thousand tiny sexes – for anyone, which is to say, for the ‘il’ that comes forward in each of us. It is no surprise that Blanchot will figure the ‘il’ as the uneducable child, the untameable beast, and the Other who falls beneath the proletariat. To become ‘il’ is to be given all at once to a becoming-child, to becoming-beast, to a becoming-Other, and perhaps, too, to become woman.[lxxvi])

It would appear, then, that the literary object is, in the end, just a special kind of language, an imitative re-echo of the song human beings have always sung to themselves. The literary work, that would strive to be something more than another cultural artefact, more than a novel that would reflect the world back to itself, must be content with this modest role. Just as the Sirens become real women, the unattainable literary ‘object’ appears to become a goal just like any other; the literary writer is a human being like other human beings.

Yet the story is more complex. Blanchot suggests that although the author might appear to want to strike out and make a thing of words, he is held back by cowardice. Blanchot condemns Ulysses because the hero of The Odyssey exposes the Sirens’ song for what it is without exposing himself to the risk of seeking its source. The bravery of his exposure to the Sirens’ song is only apparent; Ulysses holds himself back from the greater mystery as to the relation between the human and the more-than-human implicit in singing itself. Whilst the sailors might believe Ulysses is heroic, Blanchot knows that Ulysses does not want to succumb to the desire that would lead him towards the source of the Song. Ulysses is reluctant to fall, wanting to maintain his mastery. He cannot let himself disappear, but would endure and save for posterity the experience that is granted to him because of his uncanny privilege. Likewise, the writer conceals a similar reluctance, simultaneously heeding the abyss in every utterance and refusing to heed it, refusing to hear what would overcome his powers and cause him to disappear. Like Ulysses, who would endure the Sirens’ song without letting himself be seduced by the Sirens’ song, the writer merely feigns adventurousness.

Ulysses stops the ears of his crew with wax and has himself bound to the mast of his ship; the novelist is able to write. Yet this cannot preserve Ulysses from the Sirens’ song; nor can the novelist withhold himself from the effects of the language he employs. Unbeknownst to Ulysses and to the sailors who watch him grimace in what they take to be ecstasy, he does indeed succumb to the enchantment of the Sirens’ song. Ulysses is not free of the song; his technical mastery does not prevent it from enticing him on into the other voyage which is, Blanchot explains, the voyage of the récit. Ulysses’s ruses do not prevent his fall. Although it appears that Ulysses emerges from his encounter with the song unscathed, returning to Ithaca to reclaim his wife, his son, and the domestic hearth, Ulysses drowns just as others have drowned before him. Ulysses is ensorcelled by the song and dies; he has embarked on another voyage.

Likewise, the novelist appears able to successfully navigate through the process of literary creation; he is the virtuoso who re-invents our world and enriches our language. Yet a struggle marks the birth of the novel – one which is dimly figured in the stories of alcoholism and suicide. How might one explain this ‘other’ voyage? It may appear Blanchot is on the trail of a secret desire that leads him to despair. Yet for Blanchot it is not a question of the will; ‘no one can begin a journey with the deliberate intention of reaching the Isle of Capraea’; the ‘other’ voyage, the one which begins with the disappearance of the author, is marked by ‘silence, discretion, oblivion’.[lxxvii] Silence, discretion and forgetfulness dissimulate the voyage from the narrative of the novel – this is why the author does not know of the fascination that rules over what he takes to be ‘his’ creation even as he seeks, at the same time, to anchor himself in the world, to console himself with literary prizes and to keep a journal which anchors his writing in the passing of days.

Ulysses is a cowardly figure who seeks to preserve himself against his disappearance, but he really does ‘fall’ or ‘disappear’; the encounter with the song overcomes his mastery. Although we can imagine Ulysses regaling Penelope and Telemachus with stories of his exploits, there would be one tale he is unable to recount. If Ulysses were to begin one day on a book of reminiscences – if he were, as Blanchot suggests, to become Homer himself, relating the story of his exploits, an entire dimension of the encounter with the song would hold itself in reserve. Yet it is this encounter with the song that allows the author to assume the power to write; Ulysses-Homer could not begin his book without having undertaken the journey as Ulysses. For every Homer, every novelist, there is, for Blanchot, always and already a drowned Ulysses. In asking us to entertain the notion that Ulysses and Homer were one and the same person, Blanchot separates out the moments of the composition of the novel in accordance with the two versions of the story of Ulysses’s encounter he recounts.

Imagine Ulysses-Homer sitting down in peace to begin his memoirs. Telemachus and Penelope are close by; he writes under the protection of his home, his Kingdom, and is confident in the powers that accrue to him as a novelist. But even as he picks up his pen to write, Ulysses-Homer undergoes a peculiar transformation: this novelist is no longer the real Ulysses who cleverly resisted the song, but the ‘other’ Ulysses, one who is stirred by the dream that he could follow the song to its source. This Ulysses sets himself the impossible goal of laying bare the power of song itself, and as such, must be defeated in this aim, which demands, as its toll, that he, Ulysses, disappears as Ulysses. Likewise, no novelist as a novelist can endure this disappearance. The source of writing does not reveal itself to him. In refusing to allow itself to be measured by the wiliness and native cunning of Ulysses, the origin envelops Ulysses himself, drowning him as it drowned the Sirens when they became real women. The Odyssey, and this title stands in for that of any novel, is the tombstone not only of the Sirens, but of Ulysses the sea-captain, the novelist-adventurer. The fact that the real Ulysses survived his encounter with the Sirens does not mean that the other Ulysses can secure his grasp upon the source, the potency of writing itself. That potency is denied him because he can never reach it as Ulysses. He falls, he must fall (and he even wants to fall) because he cannot seize upon that which he would seek.

There is thus another voice and another event; there is a Ulysses who is the shadow of the first who does not return to Ithaca, completing the circle and thereafter settling down to write his memoirs. The novel that Ulysses-Homer writes likewise depends upon his drowned double who lies at the bottom of the ocean. The human time in which Ulysses-Homer sets himself the task of writing the novel called The Odyssey gives way to that suspended instant when he is sent on another journey. The birth of the novel cannot be understood without reference to this aneconomic suspension. The psychologist of creativity will never grasp the relationship between the power of creativity and the other voyage into the impossible. Nor can the philosopher broach the question of the temporality of time without taking this inordinate instant into account. It is only the critical commentator who could attend to the hidden vicissitudes of the birth of the novel, who is privy to the instant that secretly inscribed itself in the novel. Blanchot tells us that the novel tells another tale, a récit that is unknown to its teller and to an entire industry of cultural reception.

*

The récit, a history of French literature might tell us, names a literary form of which Breton’s Nadja and Duras’s The Malady of Death and Blanchot’s own Death Sentence and When the Time Comes are examples: short, novella- or novelette-length fictions that are focused around some central occurrence. As Blanchot writes in ‘The Sirens’ Song’, although ‘the récit seems to fulfil its ordinary vocation as a narrative’, it nevertheless bears upon ‘one single episode’ in a way that does not strive to narrate ‘what is believable and familiar’ in the manner of the novelist.[lxxviii]

In Breton’s récit, it is the series of meetings with the young woman who bears its name. In one sense, Breton is aware of the singularity of the récit – he insistently rejects conventional genres; Nadja, unlike the novel is not keen to pass for fiction. It does not draw attention to its artifice, presenting itself as a form of entertainment, as a diverting series of episodes. Breton’s récit narrates an encounter that is extraordinary not only because the young woman its narrator meets is exceptional but because this encounter transforms the world. For Clark, Nadja enacts ‘an unprecedented mode of writing whose provenance is a new experience of the streets as a space of inspiration and mediation to the unknown’.[lxxix] As Clark observes, it is neither simply a fictional work nor an autobiography; it does not relate anecdotes from afar, but indicates its own relation to the events: ‘the actual writing of the text is affirmed as part of the writer’s own exploration of the events he is living’.[lxxx] It does not merely imitate Breton’s experience but is part of the articulation of an event as it escapes the measure of the experiencing ‘I’. Breton is not, like the Blanchotian novelist, the creator-God who freely and sovereignly sustains his creation. His récit would interrupt both the assurance of the novelist who creates and preserves a world and the assurance of the reader for whom the world the novel imitates is the same world he inhabits.

Breton’s récit narrates an extraordinary event, but it also names the unattainable ‘object’ of literary fascination, the source of the Sirens’ song. He insists that the récit does not recall or re-stage the event, but brings it about:

The récit is not the relating of an event but this event itself, the approach of this event, the place where it is called on to unfold, an event still to come, by the magnetic power of which the narrative itself can hope to come true.[lxxxi]

It might appear that Breton seeks to write about his encounter with Nadja, but his récit hides another and more fundamental encounter, one that is the condition of possibility of any narration. The event that Breton would narrate is joined in his récit by another narration and another event – that of the interruption of his capacities as an author, the figure for which is the song of the Sirens. Breton, in short, has forgotten what he set out to remember; he has lost what he sought to find.

To recall: the sailors were too impatient, and dropped anchor because they thought they had reached what they sought. But the only way to find the source of song was, Blanchot said, to undergo a prevoluntary fall or disappearance. Just as it is impossible to endure this disappearance in the ordinary course of events, it would also be impossible for anyone or anything, the récit included, to endure the event. Ulysses is condemned only to approach the event until he disappears; likewise, the author of the récit can do no more than approach until he too disappears, and in so doing, is caught up in what happens as the récit.

Is this what Breton understands when he asks, in his final query in the last lines of the penultimate section of his book, ‘Who goes here? Is it you, Nadja? … Is it only me? Is it myself?’[lxxxii] These lines, responding like an echo to the opening question of Nadja, ‘Who am I?’ mean for Blanchot ‘that the whole narrative is but the redoubling of the same question maintained in its spectral indifference’.[lxxxiii]

Who writes? For Blanchot, Breton’s récit testifies in an extraordinary way to the encounter with the Sirens’ song as it redoubles his enigmatic encounter with Nadja. True, Breton encounters Nadja and sets out to write a book that relates this encounter. But writing Nadja, recasting his adventure on an ideal plane, Breton must lose her anew, making do with a papery Nadja, made of words. The redoubled loss of Nadja calls for another loss, for Breton yields himself up as a writer, that is, as one who freely, sovereignly, would sign his name to the book that is ostensibly his. It is as if the act of narrating set a trap for him. To take up writing, to narrate an encounter, is to allow himself to become the lure to a trap which threatens to snap shut. That the author escapes it, recovering in order to finish a work, is not a tribute to his ingenuity. To be sure, Breton finishes Nadja, but his narrative depends upon the detour he was compelled to undertake as soon as he took up his pen. He is lost, as Blanchot writes, ‘in a preliminary Récit’, in an event that begins when he starts to write.[lxxxiv]

What does this mean? On the one hand, novel and récit name two separate genres; a text like Nadja, which bears on a single event, is different from that of The Last Chronicle of Barset which ties together a whole cluster of events. On the other, they name tendencies within the act of telling itself, to the extent that anyone who begins to write a literary fiction does so as a ‘novelist’.

The récit is also a name, for Blanchot, for the suspended instant, the reduction which is implicit in literary creativity. What appears to be completely new about Surrealism, breaking it from the entire history of literature, is the way it would attempt to seize this reduction through the practice of automatism. In one sense, surrealism must fail in this ambition – no one can transcribe the ‘there is’ of language, the great impersonal murmur so that it could become present on the page. But the murmur in question, like Levinas’s ‘there is’, does not exist as something separable from this world. It is part of language, belonging to it, even as it can only be indicated.

It is the greatness of Surrealism to have maintained this indication by struggling against the notion of the work of art or a conventional political practice. The ‘preliminary Récit’ of which Blanchot writes is one name for the event which awakens this struggle, or, as it were, the happening of the surreal itself. The greatness of Surrealism lies in the vigilance it maintains with respect to the surreal.

To claim that vigilance happens in Nadja or Mad Love, which is to say, in literature, is not to betray Surrealism by understanding it in terms of the artworks which are linked to its name. To be sure, the reduction sought by the Surrealists – the coming together of dream and reality – indicates itself in the text, but it is also marked into the practice of friendship, of that relation between the Surrealists in which it was the surreal that was at stake. The latter is a second order vigilance, aiming to preserve what has already happened as the ‘preliminary Récit’.

*

Homer’s Odyssey traces the journey of Ulysses to his homeland, but it does not bear upon those intermittences and discontinuities that would expose the economy of the journey to a troubling event. The Ulysses of the novel is always safe; even when he risks himself, he does so assured of his survival. He is always the man who undergoes adventures without risking a profound self-alteration: his ruses allow him to accomplish deeds that appear brilliant, but are actually hollow. This Ulysses seems to have mastered the song itself and to be able to recall the vicissitudes of his encounter at leisure, writing safely beside Penelope and Telemachus. But the watery death of the other Ulysses, for whom The Odyssey is a tomb, is testament to the fact that the contrivance of Ulysses could never allow him to endure what he could not endure in the first person.

The novelist believes, like Ulysses-Homer, that he is in command of that which he would narrate, but Blanchot argues otherwise. On Blanchot’s account, he is like the wily Ulysses – he can only become a novelist by refusing to relinquish himself to the call that solicits him. If he is able to write books it is only because he is cut off from the original source of his inspiration by his own ruses and machinations. But his work attests to an inhuman effort to heed what the novelist cannot endure: the narrative voice, the récit.

The Blanchotian récit marks the memory of the experience that the novel leaves behind in order to become a novel. The struggle at the birth of the novel is therefore the struggle to do away with the event to which the récit bears witness, that is, to leave the ‘dead’ or ‘disappeared’ Ulysses in the water, abandoning death in favour of the deathless life of the whole, discontinuity in favour of continuity, the absence of work for the labour which gathers everything together. In leaving behind the récit, the novel also leaves the event itself behind. The novel is, for all its riches, only a narration of what it is has already lost. Yes, it dazzles; the novel reproduces the richness and detail of the world. The Blanchotian novelist dreams of the Unity where discontinuity would be merely a sign of the failure of the understanding, a mark of our finitude. In this way, the novel appears to exert, in advance, a grasp of the whole, of the time and space in which everything unfolds. At the same time, the Blanchotian récit inscribes itself into the novel, continually differentiating itself from it such that the ‘there is’ of language indicates itself.

Blanchot’s account of the ‘other’ voyage of Ulysses stages the joining of the inhuman voice of the récit to that of the novelist. The journey of this Ulysses is not circular. The primordial relation through which he would constitute himself as a self-centred and hedonistic subject is interrupted by a call that contests his self-realisation. The closed circuit of interiority is opened; Ulysses no longer experiences himself as an ‘I can’ who can pass unhindered through the finite order of being. The song of the Sirens is unintegratably foreign. Ulysses can only give himself over in response to this call and, thus summoned, is prevented from recoiling or turning back upon himself. The infinite resistance of the song to Ulysses’s powers cannot be understood in terms of a clash of contradictory wills because Ulysses cannot exist with or alongside the song. His disappearance means that he is henceforward unable to unfold his potentialities in a realm in which willed action is possible. No higher synthesis will allow him to mediate the song of the Sirens and integrate it into his own endeavours. Rather, he is co-constituted by the call; his selfhood is simultaneously economic and aneconomic. He is defined by the wiliness and the cleverness that attest to the auto-affirmative strength and vitality that permit his boundless curiosity; but he is also steered by a lethal susceptibility to the song of the Sirens.

At once, Ulysses is driven towards what satisfies the circular demand that would permit his economic return to himself and towards the aneconomic differentiation that denies this return. It is precisely this irresolvable play of economy and aneconomy that allows Ulysses to stand in for both the writer of the novel and the récit. It is this play that determines the relationship between novel and récit, preventing their resolution into a higher synthesis, that is, the incorporation of the récit as an episode in a novel. The récit does not name a literary genre that is separable from the novel, just as the Blanchotian event is not separable from the ordinary course of time. Novel and récit are moments of the same movement of invention. The dissension between novel and récit in Blanchot’s writings can be found in any action. Literature and the reduction it carries out attest to this dissension.

*

In Blanchot’s retelling of the encounter with the Sirens, Homer’s Odyssey becomes a memoir: it is the story Ulysses tells of his return, of the completion of the circle. Ulysses not only undergoes his encounter with the Sirens, but relates this encounter himself. Nothing happens to him that he cannot relate: his is the memory that can recall everything, lifting it out of oblivion and recounting it in turn. Ulysses becomes Homer, the virtuoso of memory, the adventurer who, after his adventures, can relate his own story to entertain others. Ulysses-Homer writes, in the narratorial voice, of his triumph and his return.

Yes, Ulysses returns to his kingdom and sets right all wrongs. But the Ulysses who returns to Ithaca, to the family hearth, to settle down and write, is followed by another Ulysses. Blanchot, in the guise of a sea-traveller, has followed Ulysses on both voyages, remembering what Ulysses does not, and disclosing this gap in Ulysses-Homer’s memory in his ‘The Sirens’ Song’. Who would recognise this worn and threadbare Ulysses who returns to his home in order to remember what outstrips the memory of his homeland? Yet it is this trauma that is marked at the heart of the novel as the récit. This Ulysses, ineluctably marked by death, has been vouchsafed a secret that cost him his intimate relationship with his and any homeland, rendering his Odyssey infinite. This Blanchotian Ulysses drowns; at the same time, he is able to bring us, his readers, tidings of the ‘other’ voyage the literary writer has undertaken.

It is this Blanchotian Ulysses who waits at the elbow of the Ulysses-Homer, composer of the Odyssey. This Blanchotian Ulysses remembers the other story, the exile or the wandering of Ulysses. As the critical commentator who follows Ulysses, losing and then rediscovering him, Blanchot triumphs because he alone can retrace this journey. Blanchot is capable of remembering what Ulysses forgets. His is the power to bear witness to the extraordinary happening of the récit but, as such, is a mastery of that which cannot be mastered.

How are we to understand the adventures of this Blanchotian Ulysses? Blanchot is not the adept who has had an experience and would teach others about it; he does not keep a secret. He remains on the lookout, waiting for the chance for his writing to be seized by an unknown current. He relinquishes his grip and allows his mastery to be taken from him, but this is what allows him to escape the trap, to recover himself from the preliminary Récit. Blanchot is thus open to what the author of Nadja is not. He writes, with ‘The Sirens’ Song’, a text suffused with the origin, a text that lies within every literary-critical essay he has written and every work of literature.

Surrealism fails and redoubles the failure implicit in any literary text. Automatic writing strives to become impersonality itself, the product of the machine part which echoes the pre-personal freedom of language. ‘The Sirens’ Song’ maintains, as explicitly as possible, the struggle at the heart of literature, the ‘preliminary Récit’ that re-echoes in every novel. To claim simply that it does so as literary criticism and not as literature is to miss the point: literary criticism is also literature if it allows the récit, the event at the novel’s heart, to resound. The novel is only an account of that event and to this extent is already a work of commentary insofar as the narrative voice lets speak the repetition, the reduction, upon which literature depends.

‘The Sirens Song’ is not a récit of the récit because, like automatic writing, like Nadja and any work of literature it is made of words which mean; it names the possible and responds to the impossible. ‘The Sirens Song’ is not about the vicissitudes of the author so much as the experience of reading. As such, it redoubles the struggle literature maintains, setting itself back into the reduction, into the vigilance over which it watches. In this way it awakens in its readers one who might exhibit a vigilance over vigilance, watching out for the experience of the ‘il’ who suffers from language, from the neutral double of language.

Back at work on Wittgenstein Jr.