Author: Lars Iyer

The word 'I' is not a concept, that would grasp this particular tree in terms of a universal. Nor does it refer to that particular in its singularity, since the 'I' is wholly taken over by anyone who speaks. But here, it is not as if there first exists a subject who then expresses himself using language. The 'I' is a position afforded by language that gives birth to the subject.

Benveniste (via): 'In some way language puts forth "empty" forms which each speaker, in the exercise of their discourse, appropriates to himself and which he relates to his "person"'. But note the capacity of the speaker to relate such forms to himself depends upon his birth as a speaker. He does not take up the empty form of the 'I', since he, as a subject, does not pre-exist the personal pronoun. Then language is not first of all personal, but the condition of the subject who can then use pronouns. Somehow – strange miracle – the subject takes up a position with respect to the impersonal streaming, the 'empty forms' of language. It appears as a subject.

The subject does not pre-exist language. And yet now there is a self that can speak. 'Can speak' – but from where does this power come? Is the self (is it yet a self?) fated to language? Can it not not speak? Either way, as subject, it has the power to speak: the ability, with respect to language (and not just over language), to be able. Somehow, it is given that power. The power comes from that movement that catches up the not-yet-self, the pre-subject, and makes of it a subject.

Fated to speak, then, and to have power over speech. But only by taking over and animating the empty forms of language. Forms, concepts, that pre-exist the subject and will outlive it. Language that streams without it – without you or I – but to which we owe what we can be. The murmuring of language that streams behind us like the tail of a comet, and streams after us, the tail of other comets, speakers, who come to themselves as you came, and so did I.

But is there a way in which the subject might also disappear, losing the place it seems to have achieved – and even its own subjectivity? Or rather, alongside the subject, might one not think of another locus of experience, this time as it belongs to a streaming of the empty forms of language over which the 'I' has no power? Such is what Foucault asks us to think in his essay, 'The Thought Fom Outside'.

2. Foucault reflects on the Cretan Epimenides' statement 'all Cretans are liars'. Is Epimenides speaking the truth? This question generates what logicians have called the self-referential paradox, which can be solved, says Foucault, if we understand how a distinction is made in this statement 'between two propositions, the first of which is the object of the second'. The sincerity of the Cretan is called in question by the content of what he says; he may be lying about lying.

But this depends upon the idea that the speaking subject is simply the speaker about which it speaks – to speak is also to say that you speak. And yet, the position of the 'I speak' is not assured. Foucault finds in this simple statement also 'an absolute opening through which language endlessly spreads forth, while the subject – the "I" who speaks – fragments, disperses, scatters, disappearing in that naked space'. Language cannot be tied to the form of the 'I', and as such, Epimenides' statement is not longer part of any system of representation.

In short, it is no longer discourse and the communication of meaning, but a spreading forth of language in its raw state, an unfolding of pure exteriority. And the subject that speaks is less the responsible agent of a discourse (what holds it, what uses it to assert and judge, what sometimes represents itself in it by means of a grammatical form designed to have that effect) than a nonexistence in whose emptiness the unending outpouring of language uninterruptedly continues.

How do we access this exteriority of language? How does it reveal itself, language as the outside?

Foucault's essay concerns literature, and specifically the work of Blanchot. It is Blanchot who would have revealed to us, in his fiction and criticism, the play of the outside. And of course it is from Blanchot the word outside comes, but to name what? A simple answer would be to say what revealed itself to him as he wrote literature, and as early as his first fictions. This, I think would be the answer of those for whom his relationship to philosophy followed his own experience and was secondary to it. But as Steve quotes him,

To write in ignorance of the philosophical horizon, – or refusing to acknowledge the punctuation, the groupings and separations determined by the words that mark this horizon – is necessarily to write with facile complacency (the literature of elegance and good taste).

The philosophical horizon was formed, for Blanchot, by Heidegger, by Hegel (Kojeve's Hegel); there was also the encounter with Bataille and Levinas … Whenever I think of the notion of the outside, it is with reference to the notion of interiority that we continue to find in Heidegger, which is thought in terms of 'mineness' – upon the hollow of the 'I', albeit an 'I' stretched into the future, distended – an 'I' that is given in terms of the possibilities that lie open before it, and the projection, the temporal transcendence against which things unfold.

For the early Levinas, the relation to being is impersonal; it does not allow mineness to be hollowed out, but, when it is encountered directly, undoes the form of the 'I' that Heidegger's being elects it to be. Dense formulations! A paragraph where there should be a book! But the 'I' for Levinas emerges out of a prior field – emerges, but can also fall back there, into the pell-mell that precedes the subject and that always threatens to return.

This is why, for Levinas, being is a threat, and is to be thought of in terms of possession, of impersonal participation; existence is not a leap into the future, a projection on the basis of the prior leap of transcendence, but the result of a struggle, ever active and ongoing, whose achievement is the sense of a future we as human beings hold before us precariously and, too often, in delusion.

Something similar holds for Blanchot, but the tone is different – being, existence without existents, is encountered not only in horror, but in a kind of melting delight – there is joy (as Bataille might say) in the little deaths that deliver each of us over to possession, to dispossession. Which is, perhaps, only to say that Blanchot revives the ancient sense of inspiration as it implies another, stronger force with which the artist must be in contact: an alien power, masked by figures of gods or Muses, that asks of the would be-creator that he or she must first undergo a loss of self, an exposure.

It is only by returning from this initial detour that creation can begin; the stamp of the artist upon the work depends first of all on that contact – possessing, dispossessing – with what Blanchot also calls (confusingly, provocatively) the work, meaning by this (paradoxically) being as it draws the creator from existence, as it interrupts that projection, that plan, according to which the finished artwork is to be made.

Contacting being, touching it, hearing it, pressed against it – which is to say nothing at all, for there is no 'it', only chaos, only a pell mell, only that turning over and over of what has no final shape or form – there is, for a moment at least (a moment that does not endure in the time of possibility, of the ability to be able, but turns it aside) no ec-stasis of the subject, no future …

Sometimes, Blanchot will call this désoeuvrement. The artist's plan, the strength of his or her powers gives way to worklessness, to unworking. What Blanchot calls the work is exactly this: worklessness, the inability to work. That is his version of Levinas's account of the horror of being, just as Levinas's account is his version of the experience Blanchot places at the heart of writing, of artistic creation. Levinas and Blanchot, thinking together, suffering apart but in another way together, formulated these thoughts together, and each in his own way.

Yes that is what I think of with the notion of the outside: an account of an experience that falls outside of the form of the self and that requires an ontology, a metaphysics, than Heidegger's (and which I have not begun to sketch here, pointing lazily and shorthandedly to its results).

3. It is this experience that lies at the heart of Blanchot's fiction and his criticism, which, it should be remembered, broadens to encompass the plastic arts as well as the written ones (and even touches upon music). I think it is this criticism Foucault remembers when he sketches a genealogy of literary experience as the outside.

Sade and Hölderlin, for him, introduce an experience of the outside, 'the former by laying desire bare in the infinite murmur of discourse, the latter by discovering that the gods had wandered off through a rift in language as it was in the process of losing its bearings' that would be uncovered in its implications only subsequently. These contemporaries of Kant and Hegel wanted other than to interiorise the world, humanising nature and naturalising the human being, or to overcome alienation: they belonged outside the history of humanism.

The same in Nietzsche and Mallarmé at the end of the nineteenth century, respectively in the discovery, respectively, that metaphysics is tied to its grammar, and with the idea that poetry demands the speaker's disappearance. And it reappears in the twentieth century with Artaud, for whom the cry and the body rends discursive language, in Bataille, who performs the rupture of subjectivity, and in Klossowski, in whose work the double, the simulacra, multiply the 'Me' into dispersal.

But Blanchot, Foucault writes,

is perhaps more than just another witness to this thought. So far has he withdrawn into the manifestation of his work, so completely is he, not hidden by his texts, but absent from their existence and absent by virtue of the marvellous force of their existence, that for us he is that thought itself – its real, absolute distant, shimmering, invisible presence, its necessary destiny, its inevitable law, its calm, infinite, measured strength.

4. Foucault's text is published in Critique in 1966, a special volume dedicated to Blanchot. Paul de Man recalled that contributors to the journal were told to hurry: Blanchot, gravely ill, was going to die at any moment; of course Blanchot survived de Man and Foucault, dying only in 2003.

Blanchot himself, it has been said, offered to meet Foucault (he had been instrumental in getting Madness and Civilisation published); but his younger admirer, who said he once wanted to be Blanchot refused, wanting to maintain the mystery. Whether it is true or not, it reflects what Foucault observes in the paragraph above: Blanchot absent in such a way that his work was allowed to stand in his place, and this not by accident.

True, Blanchot made several important political interventions in the late 50s and early 60s, as he would again during the events of May 1968 (where he would meet Foucault, but without telling him who he was, since this would be to go against the implicit rule of the Events: that each was to act anonymously, refusing (Sartre was frustrated by this) to draw on fame and prestige), but he was removed from the intellectual circles of which other intellectuals were a part.

He'd spent most of the previous decade in isolation in a small town on the south coast of France, writing the works for which he was now renowned; soon enough (after May), he would retreat into near total reclusion (though he still saw some friends). And this is not by chance. In his refusal of publicity, interviews, providing photographs, Blanchot lived in consistency with his theory of literature, which insisted on the priority of depersonalisation – not of the ecstasis of the human being, but of the other ecstasis revealed in art (but not only in art).

Blanchot's retreat is an attempt to live in consistency with the implications of this other ecstasis – with this outbreak of being in the raw, without existents, to which the author owes his or her existence. How could Blanchot lay claim, in his own name, to what his fictions and criticism revealed, when it was his own name that had to be lost for them to be realised, his own name, and ours, too, as readers, if we are able to be touched by the outside, if it rises to the surface of those pages to meet us.

This is why Blanchot above all is not just another witness to the thought of the outside. But what kind of thought is this? Not, it is clear, the thought 'I exist' – to experience language as the outside with Blanchot is to be unable to say with Descartes, 'I am, I exist' – to write, or voice the Cogito. That it is written, or spoken, means it also slips away from the form of the 'I' as it seems to come to itself in language. The knot is untied – language is experienced in its dispersal there where the 'I' once was. Or rather, the 'I' is the gap, the silence, that lets the echo of another experience of language resound – that murmur without determination, that rustling that does not resolve itself into words.

Language itself – but as it has retreated from anything that can be uttered by a determinate subject. Language itself – but what, then, is it? Observe Foucault's distinction here:

Language, its every word, is indeed directed at contents that preexist it; but in its own being, provided that it holds as close to its being as possible, it only unfolds in the pureness of the wait. Waiting is directed at nothing: any object that could gratify it would only efface it.

In its own being: Foucault allows what is said by language to be separated by its own saying, its own happening. Contentful language, language as it refers, as it points to the world, is distinguished from language itself, language in its being, which is said to wait, but for nothing in particular. To wait – to remain beneath, behind, but also present in what is said by way of language.

What would it mean to refer to the being of language? Perhaps something similar to what is named by being – by impersonal being, by being as horror or being as dispossessing. It is the being of language that is experienced by Blanchot, according to Foucault. Language, then, as it forbids that ecstasis that would animate it and allow it to say what the 'I' would want. Language that pushes back, that reaches towards us by way of its own ecstasis, allowing us to read, but only insofar as we too are read; allowing us to express ourselves, but only as it expresses itself, reaching great pseudopodia into our mouth and lungs, and up through our typing fingers. Language like a sleeping giant whose dream is that world in which we can speak and hear, read and write. Yes, that is what Foucault points to when he writes of the being of writing, and thinks language as the outside.

5. But what does Foucault mean by the thought of the outside, the very title of his essay? To think is to grasp, is it not? To think is to subsume the singular to the particular, and the particular to the universal. It is a matter of the concept, of the general, of abstracting from the concrete and the specific. And thinking involves the unfolding of a human capacity: it is something of which we are capable, that opens from our innate capacity ashomo sapiens: we, alone among animals, are able to truly think; thought lies within our power, and it is thus we conquered the world and flew to the moon.

But is there another thought and another thinking? Is there a way in which we might be dispossessed by thought, that the being of thinking has hatched its eggs in our brains? Can it be said that another thinks in us, in our place, usurping the place of the 'I' - ourplace?

Inspired thinking is older than philosophy, and returns to haunt it. What else was Socrates doing when he stood rapt on the porch of Agathon? Communing with his diamon. Perhaps there is a kind of thought that is likewise diamonic – not, now, as it names contact with the gods, but with what the gods had always hidden. For Foucault's Holderlin, the gods disappear through a rift in language, and it is this rift that the diamonic might also name.

The power to think is not always ours. Or rather, thinking implies another thinker in us but away from us, a double who thinks in our place. Is this what is meant by the thought from outside? Is it this exposed double who thinks in our place, displacing us? Are we thought as well as thinkers; is thinking passive and not only active, and all the way to the depths of the unconscious? Strange the name of Freud is absent, here, from Foucault's meditation – for what else is the unconscious but lost thoughts, dissevered from their affects?

To Blanchot, for Foucault belongs to another kind of thinking. 'It is extremely difficult to find a language faithful to this thought', notes Foucault. Theoretical reflection will tend to incorporate the outside in the interiority of the thinker'. Thinking is measured by the thinking 'I'; the 'I think' linked to the 'I am' of the thinker. How, then, to speak of another kind of thinking, that attests not to the 'I am' but to another locus of thought – to the bearer of the fact of thinking, of the that-there-is-thinking? How to invoke the passion of thought?

Literature, the language of inspiration is an alternative. But literature is all too ready to fall back into readymade images 'that stitch the old fabric of interiority back together in the form of an imagined outside': the outside is imagined by not experienced; the prose of a tale is not affected by what it would represent. Might one dream of a prose that is at one with what is experienced?

Foucault goes on to write incomparably about Blanchot's fictions and his criticisms. Like many of the essays in this great period of philosophy, it is almost too dazzling to read … searing the reader, reducing him or her to silence. And like those essays, it exhibits a dizzying density, as though awaiting a calmer, darker age in which its meanings will be unfolded. Ah the style of the école normale - if that's what it is! Casual brilliance, luminous density and – style: so much more beautiful than what is possible today (at least in my imagination). Who wrote these works? Who published them?

Let me leap impatiently to the pages where Foucault reads Blanchot under two headings – attraction and the companion. What does this mean?

The song of the Sirens, in Blanchot's famous retelling of the story from the Iliad, is, Foucault says, 'but the attraction of song' – it is nothing in itself, but a kind of promise. But what does it offer Ulysses? 'nothing other than a duplicate of what he has lived through, known, and suffered, precisely what he himself is'. The song is a name for language, which must mean and refer. It seduces – but it draws you towards destruction – to that death, that work of negativity upon which language depends, in which the immediate is taken up into language, and that blooming tree before you is no longer, in discourse, that tree.

The singular becomes a particular, and, as such, a participant in those universal forms that lift themselves from the here and now of sensuous immediacy. An operation that depends on what Hegel has called negation or death. But for the artist, of whom Ulysses as hero is a figure, it is the power of negation that itself fascinates, and the sailor would have himself lashed to the mast of his ship in order to hear what has summoned others to their deaths.

To hear the song of the Sirens as the work of negativity, to seize it as what it is, as pure power, pure possibility, allowing the artist to seize upon a Language more essential than language – lifting the poetic word from the crude currency of everyday speech. But language must nevertheless mean; it must refer – negativity, the inverse of the world of stable and enduring meanings, asks as its price the death of the artist as hero.

Then Ulysses' boat is wrecked as others were before it; he drowns – even as, at the same time, he survives. Time divides in two – or rather, we must speak of time and its other, and of the other time that speaks of itself in the language that Ulysses, becoming, as Blanchot images, Homer, and sitting down to write his memoirs, cannot help but use to speak of his trials.

Beyond everything he narrates, beyond his personal history, language speaks of itself, and therefore of his drowning. Language speaks and subtracts author and narrator from the tale. Language speaks and who speaks – no longer Ulysses, no longer the hero, but the narrative voice that conceals itself as a récit in the telling of literary works. It is this voice that attracts the writer, and that attracts readers, too.

Attraction, then, is what draws the author to realise a work, and holds sway over the reader. For Blanchot, creation depends upon a dispossession; the work has a double sense, naming the completed artefact, and the relation to language as the outside upon which the literary work depends (there is also a sense in which the outside can be used with reference to plastic art).

What, then, of the figure of the companion? Ulysses is lured from himself as hero, as the writer in the first person … and the 'il'endures in his place (endures the vacancy of his place, as it waits eternally for the 'I' to return. Waits as the lapping of the 'I', like the 'subject' of Klosswski's eternal return, reborn eternally as no one …)

The companion names the double, the other, drowned Ulysses, the other who takes my place, being close to me, attracting me, fatal but also alluring. But repelling me in the same movement, pushing me back so I can preserve myself as 'I' – both at once, once and the same and neither one nor the other (ne uter).

Foucault:

The movement of attraction and the withdrawal of the companion lay bare what precedes all speech, what underlies all silence: the continuous streaming of language. A language spoken by no one: any subject it may have is no more than a grammatical fold. A language not resolved by any silence: any interruption is only a white stain on its seamless sheet. It opens a neutral space in which no existence can take root.

A neutral space, the space of the ne uter - the alternation between 'I' and 'il' where existence can never be sure of itself, of its own power: this is what resounds in the language of the récit and makes of the narrative voice no more than 'a grammatical fold'. A fold, a pleat of a single surface – interiority is only that pocket hollowed out in a prior, seamless field, and that, as hollow can also be turned outside, its crease ironed away. Interiority as the alveoli of the lung, a glove finger that can be unfolded and smoothed out …

I think reading Blanchot is elective; it matters that you are claimed by his work and that it becomes necessary to read further. But claimed by what? Blanchot's literary critical and philosophical writings are secondary, in his own estimation, to his fiction with respect to the central movement of his thought. How do we read the fiction, lacking as it does conventional plotting or characterisation? How do we understand that peculiarly tenseless time upon which it seems to give, and that is also brought forward in Blanchot's theoretical writings as it is claimed to occur in the fiction, the philosophy of others – and eventually, as happening in the very relation to the human Other as it is the condition of our experience of the world?

Fiction and reflection assume, with Blanchot, a peculiar unity, but one whose sense cannot be given outside their textual performance, as Kierkegaard supposes he can provide his own work when he writes The Point of View of My Work as an Author. There is a sense that the divide between fiction and theory does not count for Blanchot, and in which everything he has written is by way of narrating an experience whose theoretical elaboration must always be tentative, insofar as it must pass through language (a point that may well hold for Kierkegaard too, placing the meaning of his work outside the retrospective claims he made for the aims of his authorship), and language gives itself to be experience in the manner Blanchot seeks to answer in the general endeavour (a movement of thought, of research) to which his fiction and his theoretical writings belong.

But an experience of what sort? Blanchot's concern with language as the 'outside' remembers an experience of language over which the 'I' has no power. Sometimes, Blanchot presents it as a kind of silence, but this should not be understood too quickly: gaps in language are readily assimilable by the common order of sense. Silence stands in for an interruption of language as it is experience in the absence of the form of the subject. This may seem absurd, since the position of the 'I', the subject, is presupposed in all speech and writing. But the Blanchotian subject is unstable; it does not come to itself once and for all, but can break down, its power scattering like sand, like J.'s pulse in Death Sentence. And so with the experience of the outside, where what is reached is the hither side of language, language unsubordinated to the intentions of anyone.

This is not mysticism. The experience of language as the outside is perfectly ordinary, says Blanchot; it is the way we live the everyday and the idle chatter that fill it. Heidegger has a horror ofDas Man, the anyone in particular whose willingness to talk about everything endlessly distracts it from struggling to lay claim to its own existence. But to pass the word along, gossiping about this and that is to experience language as it is disowns any particular existence, in a manner exactly analogous to those elected to undergo reading and writing in the way Blanchot describes.

How is the outside given in literature? Summarising in a late essay some of his famous arguments about writing, Blanchot takes up Hegel's general claim that doing takes precedence over being. Consciousness, for Hegel, is the act of relating to oneself, from which the world outside the 'I' cannot stand apart. Consciousness and world interpenetrate; the talents, strengths and abilities of the individual unfold through his actions. For Hegel, it is through the transformation of the world through negation that we might learn who we are, which means we can only know what we were working on as the exercise comes to an end.

Hegel can write the preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit only once the owl of Minerva has spread her wings, making sense of his project as a whole – and the project that the whole of human history has been. Hegel can only know the project by what has already been done – as a re-ject, as Sinthome once wrote, playing on the etymology of this word. Hegel's philosophy is lived, his thought is experiential and experimental; but still, Hegel himself had faith it might be brought to an end. He writes a preface, which as everyone knows, makes sense after you've read thePhenomenology, and rounds off the book, and with it, the whole of human history.

The Blanchotian writer, however, is engaged by what can never promise to round itself off, nor even, properly speaking, to begin. He experiences language, the claim of language, as it refuses to provide the support from the presentation of particular theses, nor indeed for the subject who would articulate them. Literature, for Blanchot, bears upon a fascination with the literary act itself, insofar as it brings the writer into contact with an experience of language as the outside, as it is turned from its usual role of referring to things in the world, of facilitating communication. True, one can never turn language altogether from this role. But by way of the capacity to refer, by way of communication, Blanchot shows us how a different sense of communication, even a kind of community is shared between the writer and the readers of a book.

What, now, is important, is the way language, in respect of its capacity to refer, is experienced in its retreat. Blanchot argues that the writer senses this retreat in his or her awareness of the fascination of what he calls the work that lies beyond any particular book. The work is Blanchot's name for the experience of the murmuring anonymity of a language that permits of neither subjects nor substantives – of the fact of language, whose impersonal streaming he allows to run close to the surface of his own fiction, and detects in the fiction and poetry of writers he admires.

The literary writer will discover what he has achieved in a finished book even as a re-ject, since he cannot present what he has done thetically, as a theoretical position or argument that can be stated unequivocally. His own work is like a riddle he cannot solve, but to which his life as a writer is bound. Who is he? An answer cannot be found to this question, since if, like Hegel, one believes one is what one does, then the writer can be said to be perpetually in lieu of what he sought to achieve. The work rides ahead of him, without him; but it also stretches back behind him, beyond him such that he was only ever a latecomer to the creative process he set in motion. As unseizable Eurydice, as the Sirens' song, the work never lets itself be grasped as a project that unfolded through the writer's life.

Is it even his project? In a sense, it is: he initiated the course of writing, and saw it through to the end, such that a book could be published. And yet in another, the origin of writing lies back beyond the writer; the work names what engaged the writer from the first, or even before the first as it sets itself back from the beginning he made and outlasts the end of the project (whether it was one book or an oeuvre). As such, it is as though the writer were only the completed circuit through which the current of language could pass, seeking only to relate to itself in writing – in the act of writing, the literary act, the power to achieve it that writing only lends to a writer. Then any literary book – and perhaps some philosophical ones too – tremble with what they cannot say; with the work, with the experience of language as it interrupts human initiative.

Death, famously, is Blanchot's name for the relation of the writer to the work that is experienced as the withering of subjective power. Death, as it cannot be annulled and elevated by the work of Hegelian negation, invades and weakens it from the first and from before the first. Before the work, the writer is nothing yet, but after it, still nothing, since it is not linked together with his labour.

As such, the author is a mere actor, given over to an 'intermittent becoming' that leaves him, with respect to the experience to which he belongs, none the wiser. Certainly, the writer can take on the airs of a creative genius, laying claim to the work of art as it reflects the triumph of his sovereign will, but this is bad faith itself with respect to the work and its origin. For the author never quite coincides with himself; there is always a double who shadows his labour. A second Orpheus has disappeared into the underworld; a second Ulysses lies drowned in his wrecked ship on the seabed.

To exist is to act; to be is to do – but how can you take responsibility for your literary work when it implies your dissolution? What is specific to literary responsibility as it also includes the double who is also you? Invited in 1975 to submit work to the journal Gramma which was concerned with his work, Blanchot declined with these words, 'My absence [from this issue] is a necessary step rather than any decision on my part. I would like nobody to be surprised nor disappointed by it. Publishing is always more difficult. Publishing on the basis of the name is impossible' (anecdote via).

Blanchot's absence from the journal parallels the absence he was so scrupulous to maintain, refusing to meet scholars, to attend events celebrating his work, and refusing to be photographed by his publishers, or, except on one occasion, to be interviewed. What effort did it cost him not to see visiting scholars, or to accede to the demands of the great machines of publicity? Perhaps a great deal; perhaps very little. Either way, it is completely continuous with his work. Blanchot's refusal to appear is bound up with the demand of writing, which lets itself be experienced in its retreat.

But if it is as a writer that Blanchot disappeared in the postwar years, following his own political disaster, it is also as a writer that he reappeared, lending his support to the efforts of those determined to resist the claim to Algerian independence. As he says in his only interview, granted to clarify the aims of the so-called 'Manifesto of the 121', he is an essentially apolitical writer. But let us not misunderstand this to suggest political quietude. It was as a writer, too, that Blanchot sought to join his voice to others in the failed collaborative project of the Revue Internationale, which occupied him and others in the early 1960s. And it is as a writer that he takes part in the Events of May 1968, again working collaboratively. Blanchot grants that what he calls 'literary responsibility' is different to 'political responsibility'; but he also says both kinds of responsibility 'engage […] us absolutely as in a sense does the disparity between them'. This engagement (so different from what Sartre meant by that term) reveals itself in Blanchot's commitment to what he will allow himself to call communism, in both the foreword to The Infinite Conversation(1969), and the anonymous writings he allowed to circulate during the Events.

Communism and friendship are words Blanchot will often use in proximity to one another. Reviewing a book by his friend Dionys Mascolo in 1953, Blanchot argues that there is an alternative to the account of need and value as it is found in Marxism. Friendship, for Blanchot, suggests a way in which we might look to a future world that is not comprised of human beings who have become little more than things. We must live two lives, says Blanchot – one in which we struggle against the values that conceal the truth of our condition from us, and another wherein we live according to what we share, which Blanchot, from the late 1950s onward, will call speech.

A concern with speech, and its implication in relations of power, is of vital importance in the earliest of Blanchot's fictions, as is a marginal reflection on friendship and community. It is in dialogue with Bataille and Levinas that Blanchot will develop a philosophy of speaking, where the relation to the human Other is understood to suspend our familiar relations with the world. Unlike Levinas, Blanchot will not locate the origin of speech in the extralinguistic presence of the Other. If the Other can be said to be 'higher' than me, for Blanchot, it is only because of the thundering silence to which the Other gives issue, which I, as an interlocutor, am always struggling to determine. Friendship is an experience of this thunder, this silence.

With the word friendship, Blanchot would preserve the sense that what matters is not simply what is said between us, but that it is said. Levinas will capture this distinction in his later contrast between saying, the address of the Other, which all language, whether spoken or written, is claimed to bear witness, and the said, which is to say, language in its ordinary acceptation as it facilitates communication concerning a shared world. Blanchot borrows Levinas's formulation to make a contrast between ordinary language, as it conforms to the course of the time of the subject, and the language of the outside, as it escapes the subject, even as it fascinates it. Just as Blanchot will say that fiction represents nothing, witnessing the fascination with the work by way of its details, its narrative incidents, what he calls speech is concerned only with itself, with the fact that it happens in the relation to the Other. Speech, now, is thought not in terms of what I say to the Other who silently exceeds language, but with the experience of language as it belongs to the outside, and hence also to the future.

Communism and friendship name, among other things, practices with which Blanchot was always engaged, and in company. Bident's biography movingly reminds us of Blanchot's friendship and alliances with Levinas, Bataille, Char and Antelme, but also with Mascolo, Schuster and Duras. Derrida was in regular contact with Blanchot, driving him, I've been told, to his last visit to Levinas, who died in 1995.

But communism and friendship also describe the relationship that reaches to those of us who are claimed, elected by his writings. How to carry forward what Foucault called in his tribute from 1966, 'the thought from outside'? Perhaps we can begin by recalling the play of the Other Blanchot also was in his fictions, his criticism, and in the great narrative that was his oeuvre. And is it not, if we are elected by his writing, this double who also steps forward in us as we read it? Language helps us speak of a world we have in common, certainly. But what we also have in common is another sense of the world that reveals itself only rarely.

Common presence: these words translate the title of a poem and an anthology by René Char, and that Blanchot evokes in passing inThe Unavowable Community. But they might also remind us of Heraclitus, important to both Char and Blanchot, for whom thelogos is said to be common. Common presence: does this refer to Char's version of the logos which maintains itself beyond what we take to be opposites, but which Heraclitus tells us in his fragments are always in struggle and interchange? Blanchot's too, perhaps, as he doubles Heraclitus's fragmentary attempt to think that struggling discord the Greek called harmonia. Blanchot's favoured word neuter expresses the neither … nor he himself put in place of the certainties of philosophy (of a certain kind of philosophy), in his own kind of fragmentation. The phrase common presence, recalling Char, recalling Heraclitus, was used by Blanchot in the context of his account of 'the people of Paris' who assembled spontaneously and marched silently in memory of the protestors crushed to death in the Metro station of Charonne. 'Common presence': 'the people of Paris'. What kind of presence do we have, as readers of Blanchot? What do we bear in common?

One might take Blanchot to be an altogether calmer writer than Bataille; after all, he has at his disposal a pellucidly readable style – his essays are written in the serenest French. But his fiction – and in particular, his récits - places the same clear style at the service of the most opaque of thoughts.

Who has not had the experience, reading of him, of being unable to discern what is happening in the events he reports, and especially in the second half of some of his récits, where everything becomes unclear: who is speaking?, what is happening? Still, although most of the récits are written in the first person, and it is tempting to reflect on their autobiographical origins, it may seem that Blanchot holds us apart from his life; that his fictions are like the multiple rooms the narrator of Death Sentence rents at the same time.

Rooms, spaces that must be left to cultivate an absence undisturbed even by him, the narrator – he likes to muse upon the absence in those rooms he has rented, and does not like to receive visitors in order to preserve what he can of absence in the apartment in which he is currently domiciled. Absence – now conceived as it pushes itself into experience, as it asks to be experienced as the most vehement of presents.

Blanchot's narrators will call it cold, vast – the rooms and his corridors in his fiction seem to expand to encompass the whole universe; how is it possible even to cross such a room? how many steps will it take? But each step, too, is a step not beyond – it is the absence of movement, its paralysis, an arrest that also fascinates Blanchot and that he will let his narrators present as a dying without term.

Where is Blanchot in all of this? Is he the narrating 'I'? Is he the one who speaks, or looks to discover himself speaking – or, beyond that, to listen to the other side of language as it speaks – the 'it speaks' that resounds, murmuring beyond anything you or I might say. I refer to that thickness of literary language which he often evokes – a kind of density that removes, in fiction what an author had intended to write. A literary remove – the space of literature as it simultaneously expels the author and solicits him, asking for books to write themselves from his pen, even as it burns blackly beyond him as the work, unseizable and, in its distance, free.

Let me say too quickly that it is this same distance that absents Blanchot's récits, that seems to void them, denucleating them, drawing their reader to that point that seems to maintain itself atits distance. And that it must absent them for him, too, according to his own literary criticism – that Blanchot is certainly the author who completes his books, has them published, and refuses to publicise them in interviews, or appear in public, but that he is also the adventurer who is lost in the detour of his fiction – of a kind of literary desert, far greater than the Biblical one, that aches, vast and absent, on every page of his work.

And now imagine Blanchot, like the narrator of Death Sentence, revelling in the absenting of himself he accomplished in his fictions. Imagine him, writing another one – one more récit - and happy in that absence he has already effected, in those books that bear his name but that also tear it apart.

Who is he, the writer? Not the author who lives in the world, in an apartment in a prestigious suburb of Paris. Not the one only a few friends saw, who lived surrounded by photographs of friends, it is said, and who was gradually losing his ability to hold a pen. Blanchot the writer lives in that absence that burns in his books and comes to us in that suspension when our reading asks in vain for linear continuity, and his récits seem to fall back into a language that absents itself from all reference to the world.

From all reference – and yet, and yet … The narrator of Death Sentence says little of the events of the war. That's not what concerns him, he says. Tiny, seemingly insignificant events impose themselves on the second part of his narrative. The first is almost a well-rounded tale; it bears upon an event that barely seems to complete itself; the death of J., the dying of J. And the second? Event links to event in an obscure, almost free-associational pattern. But there's an urgency to the telling, a sense of movement. Something important is being communicated. Something great significance asks to be said.

If it is to do so, it is by way of reference, of the measure of some literary verisimilitude; the world of Death Sentence, though removed from us in time and space, is still our world; we can make our way across the narrative, which is composed almost entirely of concrete events and only occasionally breaks into that strange abstraction that comprises the second half of the fictions that follow.

'Virgil, that's Broch', says Blanchot in his reading of The Death of Virgil. And who is the narrators of his fiction? Who writes his criticism? What speaks in his narrative? What rumbles there? The war? No – beyond the war. Beyond the world. Or an absence that devours it from within. A hovering, an incompletion – isn't it language, somehow, that is allowed to speak? Language, and so that what is told becomes an allegory of what cannot be told, or that speaks only indirectly?

There is nothing 'behind' the details of the narrative. A book proceeds. Characters, plot – there is still something of these in Death Sentence. And yet what, too, speaks by way of them? What seems to cloud the clarity of speech – what great opacity, what looming cloud that obscures the sun? Blanchot, that's Monsieur X. – that's all we learn of the narrator's name: X. – but as it marks what spot?

The work is freeing itself from the book. The work – the unseizable that draws after it all writers, all readers for whom literature vouchsafes itself in its remove. The work – and it burns beyondDeath Sentence now. Burns – and after we put the book down, after we read the final sentence. It is over – but it is not over. There is something unreadable in reading, as Steve reflects. Books like Death Sentence (but are there many of those?) are still as though untouched by reading; they remain perpetually uninhabited – room-husks that ache with absence that is our own absence; mirrors in which we cannot see ourselves. 'Read me'. 'You will not read me'.

Language cannot appear as what it is; it cannot speak itself, the fact of its own communication; it cannot reach back into its own origin. It comes in every other guise than itself – in a fiction, for example, in the form of incident, of character. But how, nevertheless, to join writing to writing? How to let a fiction speak – provisionally, hintingly – of what language is?

By doubling, in the narrative, the what-it-is of the world – for the same dissimulation rules its coming-to-appear. By affirming the erosion of the world as it would double the erosion of representational language. The origin of the world – the fact that it is, and the fact that this fact is irreducible to what is experienced – finds its correlate in the origin of language. Both origins are entwined in the passion of narrative, in the fraying of a fictional world.

What is meant by world? That contexture of relations that gather things into a meaningful whole. A contexture ordered by a sense of the possible, of the future that is possible there, even when it takes the form of a fiction. Mr Darcy can propose to Miss Bennett; it is eminently possible. Alice can shrink and grow. What of the origin of the world? The collapse of the sense of the possible, of the possible as sense. It becomes impossible even to cross a room. Can this impossibility be spoken directly in fiction? Only in terms of the possible – only as it breaks the measure of the self for whom things can be done. Narration, say. Crossing a room, say. Thus the kind of paralysis that seems to strike the narrators of Blanchot's récits.

What is meant by language? In one sense, what enables communication; what allows things to be expressed. It overlays the possibility that governs the sense of the world. But in another, and understood as origin, it is what the first sense of language cannot communicate as its condition, as its possibility. Language, that is to say, cannot speak that it is; it cannot speak the fact of its own existence. Or if it is to do so, it is only by way of the possibility that language affords – that is, by way of that faith in sense upon which language depends.

The prose of Blanchot's récits is clear, pellucid at the level of the phrase. But at the level of the sentence, the paragraph? Who understands what's going on? How would you paraphrase the 'action' of the second half of The Last Man, or The One Who …? It is not that Blanchot abandons clarity, but he lets it speak of what is too great to communicate. And this takes the form, in his narratives, of the impossibility of action, of clear thought, of the endurance of the form of the 'I'.

Likewise in his essays on writers. He is concerned not only with the accomplishments (and unaccomplishments) of a particular fiction, but the life of those authors who sensed the demand of the fact of language. The reading of Kafka, say, passes by way of a review of his hesitations about writing, his dreams of leaving it behind for Palestine, for marriage. The reading of Rilke of the search for the 'proper' death writing deprived him. These essays, like Blanchot's fiction, speak of the origin of language – they let it speak. And in this sense, there can be no absolute generic difference between the essays and the fictions, and it should be no surprise that they eventually come together in fragmentary works.

Each time, it is a matter of the récit, of that French genre concerned retrospectively, musingly with a past event. Each time, with Blanchot's writings, the origin of language, as it is entwined with the origin of language, of the world that takes the place of that event. The origin of language speaks by way of the origin of the world. And does it work the other way around? Isn't there a kind of mirror play between both senses of origin, as each can only substitute for the other? It is not ultimately with reference, with the meaning-to-say with which his writings are concerned, that should be clear. Unless there is sense of reference that points to what cannot be said, and of a meaning-to-say that no longer refers back to narrator or author.

Exodus, the second sequel to Spurious, is now confirmed to come out in 2013. The novel is already complete.

Dogma, the first sequel, is coming out on February 25th 2012. You can pre-order Dogma at Amazon UK or Amazon USA. Or order it directly from Melville House themselves, meaning you can receive it a month early.

I've begun another, non-W. novel, at the eponymous blog: Wittgenstein Jr. 

Follow me at Twitter: UtterlySpurious.

I'm speaking with Laura McLean-Ferris and Paul Pieroni at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the 11th January, on the topic, 'The Trouble With Productivity'. 

Dogma will be published worldwide on February 25th, and I will be in New York and Boston to launch Dogma in late February/ early March. 

I will also be speaking at Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway, Ireland, in late April. 

Dan Green responds to Daniel Davis Wood's essay, which reads Spurious as a kind of response to 9/11.

Daniel Davis Wood enlarges on his essay, responding to my comments in a recent interview at 3:AM at his blog.

Another long interview, touching on the same topics, due soon at Full Stop, as part of their 'The Situation in American Writing' feature.

Spurious features in the best of the year lists of John Self and Biblioklept (the latter also thinks my Manifesto was the best online essay of the year).

There is a kind of fiction where the fictional world wears through – the characters leave it, perhaps, to go in search for the author; or they hear the clatter of the typewriter used to write the novel, as in one of Spark's books. There are novels where authors become characters, and characters authors – why not? But what about a fiction where it is language, that of which the story is made that is allowed to tell its tale?

The concern of French genre of the récit is retrospective – it does not follow the unfolding of events like the novel, but looks back musingly upon them, allowing what has occurred to return in various ways, to the extent they can never be said to be completed at all. It names, thereby, a genre characterised by reflection rather than action, bearing on a single episode, or group of episodes as they present themselves as an occasion for meditation.

Blanchot's récits muse on past events, to be sure – we think ofDeath Sentence ('these things happened to me in 1938') and When the Time Comes, which seems obsessed with an incident that occurred at some point in the past, in the South, even as it unfolds novel-like in the present – but it is a certain experience of language to which they are directed.

A few loose, casual notes on this experience.

Language and Death

The old prejudice: words written down are dead, poor proxies for real presence. Better speech as it is animate, as it is brought close to the animating voice or presence of a speaker. A kind of detour, then, as if the flat surface of the page were an open doorway. Only it is language that now leads into itself – that, even as it refers to the things, to the world as a horizon of intelligibility, suspends the capacity to refer, allowing the words themselves to become heavy, impenetrable, rendering opaque the communication they were supposed to let happen.

Unless it is what is communicated is that heaviness – the impenetrability of words is now rendered present not because the text is written in an invented language, a kind of gobbledegook, but because it pulls apart, in itself, sense and nonsense, sense from nonsense, not in order to divorce them altogether, but to show the latter is the material support of the former; that the heaviness of words must bear even the lightest of messages.

But what of the communicator of the words? Alongside what the writer wants them to say, there is a second message. This is nothing to do with the style of the writer. Or rather, it is what, by way of that style, turns what is said in another direction. Communication depends upon the material base of this style – upon what words are used, what phrases, and how. It depends not only on the way words are animated – the way the impersonal forms of language are given life – but by the way they deanimate what is said.

Language entails a detour from sense, from intended sense. Words slide – and with them, whole phrases, sentences and paragraphs. Nonsense bears sense away even as the words remain on the page, making sense. And what of the one who would receive the communication? What makes sense to her depends upon the materiality of words, their sense. It does so by way of what also deanimates words. The life of what is said depends upon death. That is the condition of writing.

And what of speech? Does that heaviness not bear what is said in that case, too? Isn't speech likewise divided, linguistic sense and nonsense held in a kind of tension that reveals itself only in limit-situations? When is the grain of speech revealed? In particular ways of singing. In cliches, perhaps – when words are on the edge of meaninglessness. In that passing of words along that receives Heidegger's approbation. Words of which no one really takes possession. Words spoken by no one and by everyone.

In what form does the struggle between sense and nonsense reveal itself? Is it a tragic diremption? A version of the tension between freedom and necessity, the former rising heroically up against the latter, and then falling back? Or is it comic, ludic – does a kind of laughter mark this detour from sense – is it accompanied by pratfalls and horseplay? Do we laugh at it as it passes between idiots who always come in pairs, better to lighten speech and let it play: Bouvard and Pecuchet, Vladimir and Estragon?

Or does it happen negligently, in the carelessness in which Duras began The Lover, in that wandering writing that, she said, no longer belonged to Literature? And what about that careless speech, in that gossip everyone passes on without forethought; in the impersonal wave of rumour which crashes through the everyday?

Survivors

In a strange way we are all survivors of what we say and write. That language asks from us that we animate what in the end remain empty, abstract forms. I speak, I write, by laying claim to the personal pronoun. Does it let me speak in the first person as though stood outside language and used it as a tool? Or does the first person pronoun whose position is presupposed in what I say, allow me to apprehend myself?

It is an open, empty form I animate and bring to life. But it, too, can sometimes stir and be said to awaken. It stirs and wakes up – but as what deanimates speech, what drives it deeper into death. It clouds the surface of speech; it clouds the transparency of what is to be said. Until that said does not let itself speak by way of it, and its sense is sent on a kind of detour.

What is like, the sound of death? How does it let itself be read? By means of language, and by way of it, even though death cries sometimes, and death rumbles. Even though, on the page, it looms upward through the surface of the text. By way of language, of the horizon of sense, operating alongside the fiction, accompanying it and returning, kraken-like to darken its surface.

What does it return as? What returns? Language as it breaks itself from the task of referring. Language that loses itself in itself – but now as it engages what happens in the incidents of the narrative – as it draws them into its own happening. A happening, though, in which nothing happens. In which something dark swims up and darkens the surface – and that's all.

Language as it presents itself in its withdrawal from sense. That is there, but not there. There, but subtracted from itself, language minus sense, language minus the capacity to mean. As it engages the ordinary course of language in the narrative, but exceeds it – or falls below it – and takes a direction into the heart of the page, directly away from the reader. Rising to the surface only to flee, and drawing something of your experience, as reader, with it.

What is that has reached you? What caught you? Not this book, nor these pages bound between covers. But the work as it is more than the book – as it names the narrative at the heart of narrative, the récit in the récit. The work as what laps up to refuse your gaze. That looks at you by turning away.

Then refusal is the contact with the work. It darts back into the darkness like a startled fish. But it is also that darkness; it is what, in the pool is not transparent to meaning. And yet what you want as you read. Yet is also that lack, that excess, that more than meaning that never happens once and for all in the narrative, but returns in it, over and again.

Returns – not as itself, but as something happening slightly away from the narrative events, and from the voice of the narrator. Away, because it cannot give itself all at once, cannot be made complete, or even to begin. Does it even happen? Can it be said to do so? Or is it rather what undoes itself in any narrative event, and undoes those events, streaming, incessant, and never happening in the instant?

In the end, it escapes chronological time. Escapes, and draws within the events that happen in the time of the narrative. Not an event so much as a way things do not happen. That fall back, incomplete, into the darkness. And this is other drama to which the récit also answers. What happens by not happening, and divides the event from what does not round itself off into an event.

Not the voice of the narrator, then, but the narrative voice. And not even the author's voice, if this is still understood according to the measure of the 'I' in charge of language. For the author, too, is engaged by the narrative voice – not understood according to the old cliche, where the characters run away with you and live their own lives, where the plot does not pan out as you planned it, but rather that the telling of the narrative itself, its narrating, seems to veer, seems to be drawn into another, stronger channel. And, following it, engaged by it, this voice speaks of more than the author intended to say.

Such is the narrative voice as it draws what is said like a ship into shipwreck. But nothing is wrecked, not really. The ship sails on; it reaches port, a story is told and a book finished. But then too, at the same time, the boat is wrecked at each moment; as every event of which it tells is seized by what does not close itself into an event: the interminable, the incessant, in its perpetual storm.

And so too is the author wrecked – and this is the only way he can come into contact with the work. It is the way he lives it, or that it is brought close to a life. The story is told; the book was finished, but the author is lost in contact with the work, for loss is this contact, and he will sink by this contact to the bottom of the sea.

That's what it is to tell, really to tell. And to tell today, as older forms of telling have fallen away. Of what is there to narrate? what stories? Only a handful, says Goethe, who charts, for our benefit, all possible plots. A handful – but it is what that is told by way of them that matters now. By way of them, with them, and even as though using them, living from their life like a vampire bat. And isn't there another in the author, too, who is like a vampire? Another engaged by the work as the work – who lives as the companion to the author, in that intermittent becoming by which he is substituted for his living double?

The Other Side of the World

But what is told? What speaks with the narrative voice? The other side of language, I said. Language in its thickness, its heaviness, all of that. The material bearer of language, all that. Blanchot says more. For him language is also the relation human beings have with the world. Scarcely a relation, really, so deeply is language lodged within us. But that is the condition of experience, that does not merely answer to the order and structure of the world, but constitutes it.

Then what the récit shows in Blanchot's hands is not merely an aspect of language: it is also, in some sense the world – or rather, what is not disclosed as the world discloses itself. What does not appear in the light of that appearing – as the phenomena that are first of all linguistically given. That come with their names, that bring them with them. No, the récit narrates what is on the other side of our experience, and of the brightness and visibility of the world. Or, if it can still be called experience, then it reveals what is hidden by that same brightness, just as what is told by the narrative voice is hidden (but only partially hidden) by the voice of the narrator.

There is also a way the world can be said to happen, but beyond chronology. A way that it can also be said to occur, as it is engaged by the interminable, the incessant. The récit is peculiarly suited to speaking of this hither side. It does so by way of the narrative voice, as it breaks into the narrative. But how does it break? Via particular incidents. By deforming, transforming those incidents and the characters who endure them. This is why the events of therécits are as though captured – why the task of walking down a corridor or fetching a glass water becomes impossible. Why it is difficult to tell what happened in any of these narratives.

These incidents are the double of what could happen to us, according to the implicit phenomenology in the récits. They are, in their telling, endlessly strange – but they are not so in the manner of a fantasy. They could happen, and they are recorded to bring the reader into the sense of their happening. Receptivity to therécits will depend upon whether you can make sense of their occuring – whether you can relate it to something that has happened to you or to others. To make sense of it enough to follow them as they wind their way into obscurity.

And it is in this sense, I think that these récits are elective: only some will be engaged by them. And only a few of them who'll read to the end. For they also constitute a kind of research; they adumbrate a phenomenology of our ordinary lives; they depend on it, for the life of the narrative. And it is of this that they tell, however strangely. It is of this they attempt to find an idiom such that they might tell.

The calmness of that telling is, I think, eternally surprising. Not that it is tranquil, or at ease with itself, but rather that it speaks with an everyday speech, with ordinary words. Words, it is true, that quickly become strange. But still, the speech is calm, quite unobtrusive. But then, all of a sudden, it is swept up by an abstract storm. The sentences seem to fall faster; the tempo of the story speeds up … these paragraph flurries happen characteristically towards the end of the récit. I picture them as great banks of cloud swept by great internal winds and flashing lightning.

How to read these passages that take up a large part of the last part of most of the récits? There's narrative momentum, to be sure – the sentences are short, forward moving, urgent. But what is happening? What's going on? An abstract storm, like I said: ordinary words used oddly, their sense strained, buckling, having already been put under pressure earlier in the narrative. Tense becomes uncertain – what's happened/happening/about to happen, and to whom?

We have lost our hold on time – how many hours have passed? Days? And the characters themselves seem to come apart – what are they undergoing? Narrative momentum, certainly, but to what end? Can the récits really be read for themselves, by themselves? Don't they require a theoretical supplement – the literary criticism? In what sense can a récit like The One Who … be enjoyed for itself, by itself? But I will leave these questions open, rather than address them here.

The account of the birth of the ego in Levinas's Totality and Infinity resembles a cosmogony. It is said to originate through a relationship with a series of media or milieus – in the plenitude of a cosmic womb that bears distinct elements within it: the earth and the sea, light and warmth, but also the familiar expanses of the city. The ego, from the first, is immersed in these elements, bathing in light and warmth, and nourishing itself in a movement that sustains and consolidates its existence.

This dependency on the non-self does not belie the independence of the ego, its happiness. Need – Levinas's term for the relation to the other, to the things which nourish the ego or bathe it in light and warmth – is not first of all a lack. 'Enjoyment is made', writes Levinas, 'of the memory of its thirst; it is a quenching'; certainly, enjoyment contains a memory of privation, but this is only as a dissatisfaction that has already been answered. The ego remembers a withdrawal from sustenance such that its plenitude can be experienced; lack appears only in the realisation of its appeasement, and it is inferred rather than experienced.

It is in this act of remembering – this enjoyment of enjoyment, which has always fulfilled a need – that the ego comes to itself in its independence. To live on or from the series of elemental media – to relish the taste of fruit, the coolness of the river, the familiar vistas of the street – 'delineates independence itself, the independence of enjoyment and happiness'. For Levinas, the ego is given in a 'contraction of sensation, the pole of a spiral in which the trajectory of turns and involutions is inscribed in joy' that is itself enjoyed.

With this claim – and his whole account of enjoyment – Levinas seeks to break from what he sees as the intellectualist bias of phenomenology. The ego is given in its ipseity through a contraction of sensation – no ideal self needs to be understood as the basis of this involution. And likewise, Levinas insists, we do not first of all represent what we enjoy to ourselves, ascribing value to something already represented, but conversely; it is upon the non-objectifying acts of breathing, eating and drinking that we live from, and whose value is no way separable from the immediacy in which they are given. Intentional consciousness, understood to constitute its objects, rests upon a prior act of positing – of the achievement of an embodiment that serves as the basis for consciousness.

Just such an autoaffective positing takes place within the sights, sounds and sensations – qualities apparently without support (the ego is not concerned from whence they come, but only that they come) – in which we bathe. For Levinas, the ego emerges from the not-I, the other, but this is not accomplished once and for all. Certainly, the ego is singularised and autonomous before the appearance of consciousness, but this happy self-sufficiency has to be constantly reachieved; it depends on a movement of becoming that is the basis of the life of the ego. It depends upon the movement for which alimentation, says Levinas, expresses the essence: that which passes from the other to the same.

As such, intentional consciousness depends upon a prior, bodily intentionality – upon a series of elements whose form it cannot constitute in advance – the immediacy of light and warmth as they gratify me all at once, as well as the indeterminate milieu from which they emerge. In this way, enjoyment breaks from the subordination of the things we encounter to a 'technical finality' such as, he suggests, we find in Heidegger. 'As material or gear the objects of everyday use are subordinate to enjoyment – the lighter to the cigarette one smokes, the fork to the food, the cup to the lips. Things refer to my enjoyment'. In place of a single finality, then – the for-the-sake-of-which of human existence that gives sense to the things we encounter – we find a series of finalities that are autonomous with respect to one another. Here, Levinas waxes positively Batailliean: to enjoy something is to do so 'without utility, in pure loss, gratuitously, without referring to anything else, in pure expenditure'. Happiness is the suspension of a single finality; it belongs to 'the disinterested joy of play'.

But what happens when food cannot be found, and the sun sinks beneath the horizon? what, when the river has dried up and the fruit on the vine withered? For the most part, the absence of immediate gratification is still to be understood as a mode of enjoyment: our distress and trouble are merely part of that movement of alimentation that provides invigoration, continued life. Sensibility is passive compared to the activity of thought – I am the mercy of the elements that provide me with light, warmth and food, but I am still confident in my ability to consume the other, transmuting it into the same. I still hold myself separate from the world, looking to absorb what I encounter into a higher unity; perhaps we find here a doubling of the constitutive activity of consciousness in the way the ego, in enjoyment, partially and provisionally constitutes the habitat which sustains it.

Pain and trouble, for the most part, belong to the rhythm of enjoyment – the uncertainty of finding nourishment does not belie the confidence that there will something, once more, to eat. In enjoyment, sensibility is given in an egoism – a monadic separation – whose essence is this confidence. Yet enjoyment is precarious; there is the threat that confidence will not be enough, and the element, far from affording sustenance and invigoration, becomes indifferent matter. Water, water everywhere and nor a drop to drink … Coleridge's becalmed mariner knows the element only as what Levinas calls 'an opaque density without origin, the bad infinite, or the indefinite, the aperion'.

Suffering, says Levinas, is not a state more basic than enjoyment; it is, he argues, an inversion of joy – a vulnerability to matter that is no longer an immersed, oblivious participation. One can never take for granted what is expressed by Levinas in the infinitive – to eat, to drink, to sleep, to warm oneself – since each can be prolonged into the indefinite reserve that resists the egoic movement from the other to the same. What, then, does hunger become when it is no longer part of the rhythm through which the other is measured by the same?

Remembering Antelme's The Human Race, which relates its author's experience in the camps, Blanchot writes,

We must meditate (but is it possible?) upon this: in the camp (as Robert Antelme said while enduring it) need sustains everything, maintaining an infinite relation to life even if it be in the most abject manner (but here it is no longer a matter of high or low) – if need consecrates life through an egoism without ego – there is also the point at which need no longer helps one to live, but is an aggression against the entire person: a torment which denudes, an obsession of the whole being whereby the being is utterly destroyed.

Blanchot goes on to evoke that 'egoism without ego' which reveals itself in a need for nourishment that is no longer part of the structure Levinas calls enjoyment. Need, now, has displaced itself from the ipseity of the ego, which thrives on the contents of what it ingests. In lieu of itself, enduring only as an empty craving, the ego absents itself from the autoaffection in which it was born. Or this auto-affection seems to outlive it, need become impulse, ipseity voiding itself in the mechanism of existence.

Enjoyment, now, reaches its limit. If for the most part, we are steeped in an instinctive hedonism by which life is first of all a 'love of life', and whose worth is given in terms of its contents as they are 'more dear than my being', Antelme shows us what happens when need destroys the ipseity it formerly sustained.

We live, says Levinas, from "good soup", air, light, spectacles, work, sleep etc.' – but our dependency brings with it what we cannot possess. If I am grounded by the relation to things as they are given to me in enjoyment, I might also be uprooted by their absence. And if the carnal ego – Levinas's rebuttal to what he sees as the separation of mind and body in phenomenology – is not yet the formal identity from which consciousness constitutes the world, it is vulnerable when the elements become indefinite, bad infinities, and lack all determination.

Sensibility, which seems to grant the life of the separated ego, may also threaten this separation. Hunger is not only a pause, a momentary rest that has the certainty of sustenance before it, but menaces the very ipseity of the I. In enjoyment, the elements withdraw as they allow individual things – this piece of fruit, this cleared patch of woodland – to be absorbed into the same. But enjoyment also vouchsafes that uncertainty Levinas calls the 'concern for the morrow'. It describes, on the one hand, the movement from the other to the same, that maintains the ego in its independence within dependence, but on the other, threatens to let the other become indigestible and thereby undo the ipsiety of what it sustained.

Even as enjoyment is exaltation (the enjoyment of enjoyment, its doubling up in joy and gratification) it is also inhabited by uncertainty. One cannot by certain of having time to enjoy. What else is the experience of pain and suffering, for Levinas, but the absence of the prospect that seems to open to the ego in enjoyment – an immediacy that is given as the return of what detaches the present moment from any kind of future?

Blanchot again:

Dull, extinguished eyes burn suddenly with a savage gleam for a shred of bread 'even if one is perfectly aware that death is a few minutes away' and that there is no longer any point in nourishment.

This gleam, this brilliance does not illuminate anything living. However, with this gaze which is a last gaze, bread is given us bread. This gift, outside all reason, and at the point where all the values have been exterminated – in nihilist desolation and when all objective order has been given up – maintains life's fragile chance by the sanctification of hunger – nothing 'sacred', let us understand, if something which is given without being broken or shared by him who is dying of it ('Great is hungering', Levinas says, recalling a Jewish saying).

But at the same time the fascination of the dying gaze, where the space of life congeals, does not leave intact the need's demand, not even in a primitive form, for it no longer allows hunger (it no longer allows bread) to be related in any way to nourishment.

In this ultimate moment when dying is exchanged for the life of bread, not any longer, in order to satisfy a need and still less in order to make bread desirable, need – in need – also dies as simple need. And it exalts, it glorifies – by making it into something inhuman (withdrawn from all satisfaction) – the need of bread which has become an empty absolute where henceforth we can all only ever lose ourselves.

Beyond the awareness that death is close, there is the impersonal need for bread that has come too late for sustenance. Food is the parody of food. Bread appears as what it is – but only as it is no longer a content that nourishes life. It appears as what it is – but only when enjoyment has collapsed into bare existence, and need has become an empty absolute detached from any particular existence.

Here, we might remember that for Hegel, the absolute names the conceptual system contained by the phenomenal world as it develops, granting itself to human knowledge. For Blanchot, the absolute is lost in the negative absolute, which is in no way to be understood as its dialectisable correlate. The absolute, for Hegel, must be thought in its relation to the world, as well as the knowledge the human being has of this relation, but for Blanchot, hunger withdraws the ego from the relation in question and from the measure of knowledge. Ego and world – the ego and the elements – intermingle in an experience of brute existing that no longer permits of particular existents.

Great is hungering – great indeed, as it turns the ego inside out, revealing it to have been only ever a knot tied in the continuity of being. The experience Antelme describes, and that Blanchot recalls is, to be sure, exceptional. But it also indicates in what the uncertainty that inhabits enjoyment consists: the 'concern for the morrow' is a concern that life will become impersonal, its contents no longer more dear to it than its existing. The body, dependent in its independence, is exposed on all sides to the threat of a sensibility that no longer sustains its separation.

Great is hungering – and all the way up to the 'there is' in terms of which Levinas presents the empty absolute, the collapse of the world into the aperion. If the ego, as Levinas will recount, seeks to make a dwelling in the uncertainty of the element, setting up its home, it is in order to leave behind the threat of a future in which the 'there is' cannot be held at bay. But the home, like the digestive system, cannot maintain a simple dichotomy between inside and outside, as it allows the movement that converts the other into the same.

2. Recalling more than 10 years later the way his friendship with Jean Paulhan was tested when, in May 1958, de Gaulle returned to power, Blanchot makes the following remark:

Communism is this as well: the incommensurable communication where everything that is public – and then everything is public – ties us to the other (others) through what is closest to us.

Communism demands that the private becomes the public. The distant – de Gaulle's unconstitutional return to power – must reach us in the intimacy of our relationship; it must find us there and interrogate us, as, perhaps, Hiroshima did the lovers of Duras’s screenplay. How to become worthy of friendship as communism, communism as friendship? Blanchot’s friendship with Paulhan was tested by their disagreement about the significance of de Gaulle’s return to power on May 13th 1958. But it was also in name of friendship that he allied himself with Dionys Mascolo, Marguerite Duras, Jean Schuster and others over the same issue, contributing articles to the anti-Gaullist Le 14 Juillet.

Invoking the solidarity granted by the refusal to allow the reconciliation of what happened on May 13th by the authority of de Gaulle’s name, Blanchot writes “Men who refuse and who are tied by the force of refusal know that they are not yet together. The time of joint affirmation is precisely that of which they have been deprived”. Then what he calls in the next sentence “the friendship of this certain, unshakable, rigorous No” is a solidarity that belongs to a time out of joint.

A break has occurred. When we refuse, we refuse with a movement that is without contempt, without exaltation, and anonymous, as far as possible, for the power to refuse cannot come from us, nor in our name alone, but from a very poor beginning that belongs first to those who cannot speak.

Friendship, here, is a solidarity with those who are deprived the power of speaking. The aim is not to speak in the place of others – but to preserve, anonymously, that speechlessness in its simplicity, reaffirming it, and allowing it to resound. A kind of silence, then, that suspends the movement of good sense to reconcile everything in the continuity of discourse. Friendship, communism are set back into an incapacity, in much the same way as the literary work, as Blanchot argues in his literary criticism in a similar period, lets speak the impossibility of speech.

But what, then, is the relationship between literature and politics?

3. Speaking of the Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War, whose signatories gave their support to those who refused to bear arms against the Algerians, or who offered them assistance, Blanchot says he signed it “not as a political writer, nor even as a citizen involved in the political struggle, but as an apolitical writer who felt moved to express an opinion about problems that concern him essentially”.

A surprising declaration – because in the same period it is out of the experience of literature that Blanchot will attempt to think the “change of epoch” he feels is underway – the technological uprooting of old mythologies and the media-driven appearance of new ones, the eclipse of other forms of violence by the possibility of nuclear catastrophe, and which calls for a dialogue with Marxism. This the project of the Revue Internationale, which occupied him from 1960 to 1965, emerging directly out of his engagement with Mascolo and others on Le 14 Juillet and his opposition to the Algerian War.

The Revue Internationale was the Italian novelist’s Elio Vittorini’s idea, Blanchot remembers in 1996; he recalls that Italo Calvino, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Günter Grass, Ingeborg Bachmann and Uwe Johnson being associated with the project; Louis-René des Forêts was its secretary, and Maurice Nadeau and Roland Barthes were also involved.

The Revue only appeared once, in April 1964, as a supplement to the Italian review Il Menabò, containing translations of Blanchot’s texts “The Name Berlin” and “The Conquest of Space”, as well as “Archipelagic Speech” and the final page of “Everyday Speech” as it was published later in The Infinite Conversation. In 1990, Michel Surya published the texts associated with the Revue, Blanchot’s “Proposal for the Revue Internationale”, along with letters between the participants, in his magazine Lignes.

What kind of dialogue is Marxism to seek with literature in theRevue? One that will also have to come to terms with the fact that, in Blanchot’s words in the “Proposal”, “Literature represents a distinctive kind of power, a kind of power not predicated upon possibility (and the dialectic has to do only with that which is possible)”: “a power without power” associated with a “literary responsibility” that is irreducibly different from “political responsibility”. Both kinds of responsibility “engage[…] us absolutely”, Blanchot writes to his fellow participants, “as in a sense does the disparity between them”. One of the tasks of the review is precisely to explore the possibility of a solution to the clash of literature and politics.

4. But how is this possible, when Blanchot’s notion of literature seems to be founded on a refusal of any notion of political commitment?

Recall the general account Blanchot offers of language and literature. For the most part, I am able to speak in my own name, using language to the extent that it seems transparent, barely interposing itself between what I say and what I might want to say. Everything seems expressible; language is obedient, docile; speech and writing are part of the economy of what possible for human beings. I refer to the world; I express my feelings: language answers to a faith in human ability, and in the ability to be able, to the power and possibility that is proper to each of us.

But this is not always the case. Remembering his clashes with the examining magistrate who sought to prosecute him in the wake of the publication of the Declaration, Blanchot recalls, “After I had finished giving my statement, the examining magistrate wanted to dictate it to the clerk of the court: 'No, no', I said, 'you will not substitute your words for my own'”. If Blanchot repeats the exact same words he had uttered earlier, it is not because of any difference in the content of what he would say, but because of the place he would reclaim for his utterances within a network of power. To speak in his own name is not to arrogate speech to himself as to an individual as powerful as the magistrate within a given institutional context, but to disclose the operation of this context as it makes of speech something more than mere information. Blanchot expresses a solidarity with those who are unable to reclaim their speech as it is made to speak without them – attesting to speech as non-power, to the “cry of the Other” unable to speak in an institutional context. A speech that can also be reaffirmed as a kind of refusal, and that is the basis of what Blanchot calls communism and friendship.

Literature, too, belongs to this refusal. True, the novel seems continuous with the world in which we live, but there is a practice of writing in which language brackets its capacity to refer, interposing itself in its thickness and opacity in place of that transparency it assumes in ordinary communication. Poetry emphasises the rhythm or the sonority of language, its flesh. Fiction – even the vastest novel – can wear away the world it seems to carefully construct, dramatising the way in which language withdraws from its referential function. To read Kafka’sThe Castle, for example, is to lose oneself into a labyrinth without issue, as language wanders like K., unable to take refuge in the intentions of its author, in his ability to conjure a world from ink and paper.

For Blanchot, a writer is never quite a writer, or never writer enough, since language does not grant itself to the measure of power. But nor does it grant itself to the power of a reader, insofar as it carries what it says beyond the intentions of any particular reading. This is not because it gives itself to be read in any number of ways, but that it lets itself be experienced as the double or the image of language.

For Blanchot, both author and the reader both sense their distance from what does not cease murmuring in the work; for the former, this is why it is necessary to start writing again, to enclose the unfinishable work in a book; for the latter, it draws the reader to read anew. Both, then, have a relation that passes by way of the work as it sets itself back from writing and reading. Both find themselves elected or commanded by what has no power. This, indeed, is what literary responsibility might mean: the attempt to maintain a response to what lays claim to both author and reader, and to answer that response anew.

The passion of this encounter, which means the writer is never quite a writer, can be hidden by the imposingness of the narrative. Even the vastest novel bears, at its heart, a simple récit, if this word is allowed to name not only a literary genre, but the event upon which the creation of literature depends. And likewise, any critical study is engaged by the same event, repeating it in turn, even if it is overwhelmed by the imposingness of criticism, of literary judgement.

This is the responsibility Blanchot lets claim him in his fiction and his criticism. His récits seem to pare themselves away until they are concerned simply with the act of narration in its possibility and its impossibility. Only a minimal realism survives; the most tenuous link with the world. What matters is the narrator’s journey to the “truth” of the narrative – the interminable, incessant return of language as language, of language as it appears in place of itself. A journey which requires that he be sacrificed as he falls from that power, that measure of possibility to which language normally grants itself, all the while keeping up his narrative. Until, at the end of each récit, he returns to the world of the present from the peculiar passion of his narrative.

Blanchot’s fiction is that path of research that drives his encounter with the texts of others, discovering a récit in literary narratives that narrates the return, from writing, from the experience of language, of the double of ordinary language. Before it can be analysed in terms of metaphor and imagery, the poem has always retreated from the world in which it seems to be able to be read, bringing its reader close to the image of language as it retreats from signification, from what it can be made to say.

It is thus that Blanchot seeks to answer literary responsibility, experiencing the work, undergoing it as though it were a kind of fate, and finally, in his fiction and his criticism, welcoming it, affirming what happened as it had done just as Joë Bousquet, Deleuze reminds us, claimed his wound pre-existed him. Blanchot lets himself be haunted and doubled by the “other” language as it seems to dispose of him in order to return to itself through his fiction and his literary criticism, and thereby suspending those relations that bind him to the world.

Who am I, as author, as reader? For Blanchot, I exist only as my double, just as language, too, wanders in itself. A double, now, that is not subordinate to its original, but that indicates the way in which the original is always doubled, that what exists can do so otherwise. I am fated by what I cannot even will, by what returns over and again. And as it returns, engaging me as language, as the non-power of language, the “I” becomes “it” – as, in Klossowski’s reading of Nietzsche, the capacity to say “I”, to speak in one’s own name appears and disappears. I am all the names in history; I am none of those names. Amor fati: the self is not yet itself, and lives as this “not yet”, in the interval where it is turned to language as it resounds ceaselessly in its mute murmuring.

5. What, then, when literary responsibility passes over into political responsibility? Communism names the attempt to answer the cry of the Other and to maintain it, affirming what reaches each of us so as to command solidarity. True, it is possible to fall short of this responsibility, to let it wither, in the same way as a literary writer attempts to escape the call that singularises him and awaits his response. But this escape is also a kind of relation to what does not cease to call. Communism is the attempt to acknowledge what first gives itself as this relation: to language as it escapes power, and calls for us to respond.

It is this response, one presumes, for which he intends the Revueto answer. But an answer, now that must be appropriate to that call. The text of the column is to be dispersed throughout each issue, being interrupted by other texts. The “disrupted continuity” of the column will be an opportunity to experiment with the “short form”, a term Blanchot says he has borrowed from contemporary music, which he characterises in another essay as “a-cultural”.

Each national editorial board, he suggests, will jointly devise a fragmentary column or essay, “The Course of Events” exploring a particular intellectual event, be it philosophical, poetic, or sociological. The production of fragments must be a collective practice, Blanchot notes, each writer transcending the limits of his or her thought, putting their name to fragments for which they feel themselves jointly responsible. “We must not be afraid to roll up our sleeves”, warns Blanchot: the work will be laborious, challenging.

6. “If the idea proves to be utopian, then we should be willing to fail as utopians”, wrote Blanchot of the collective editorial policy of the Revue. It did fail; the documents passed down to us which survive of the attempt to hold this utopia ahead of us not as an unrealisable dream, but as a programme that overturns our conceptions of literature, writing and authorial agency as well as our model of political activism on the other. But what survives?

In his proposal, Blanchot gives a long list of possible topics for discussion in the Revue, one of which, reflecting on the overcoming of the limits of place with Gagarin’s ascent into space, is sketched in detail. Technology, Blanchot claims, promises to dissolve the fascination with nations and peoples. Upon his return, Gagarin is greeted by Khrushchev on behalf of his fatherland, but he was nevertheless able to deliver a new kind of speech: a speech from outside.

Blanchot extends these gnomic reflections in an article he wrote for the Revue; in Gagarin’s rambling speech, he says,

something disturbs us and dismays us in that rambling: it does not stop, it must never stop; the slightest break in the noise would already mean the everlasting void; any gap or interruption introduces something which is much more than death, which is the nothingness outside entered into discourse.

Gagarin becomes “the man from the Outside”, whose speech says “the truth is nomadic”. Tantalising rather than dully developed, Blanchot's fragment is indicative rather than being fully developed, bringing together a surprising constellation of topics. To what does it point? To the challenge of formulating an “adequate response to the enigma of these changing times” – a response that is fragmentary. How should this be understood? The literary fragment, Blanchot writes, “points to a linguistic space in which the purpose and function of each moment is to render all other moments indeterminate”. The fragmentary writing Blanchot calls for in the Revue is linked to the same indeterminacy, reaffirming the murmuring of speech, the image of language as it is sensed by the literary author.

Reflecting on Blanchot’s musings on Gagarin, Hollier and Mehlman suggest the journal “had […] the ambition of becoming a sort of literary station (a communication vessel) launched in literary space”. A satellite that would broadcast in a number of languages, raising questions about translation, Blanchot suggests, “as an original form of literary activity”. The linguistic difference between languages need not be abolished, but deployed – altering the language into which a translation is to be made.

Moving more rapidly, Blanchot also sketches a number of other possible themes: a reflection on the new treatment of text in contemporary music, for example, as found in Boulez’s use of Mallarmé in Pli Selon Pli, and in his lecture on the relationship between music and poetry; an exploration of the meaning of violence in a world where total destruction is possible: what is the revolutionary significance of this violence? what is its relationship with de-Stalinisation? what changes has de-Stalinisation accomplished in political language: how to understand terms like cult of personality, or peaceful coexistence? What questions, Blanchot asks, are raised by Fanon on violence, Levi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind or Pernoud’s book on the bourgeoisie?: a swarm of topics which begins with the particular into order to open into the general – to broach the question of the whole.

Why did the Revue fail? Blanchot suggests in 1996 that it was because its German contributors were overwhelmed by the Berlin War; as they departed, the whole project faded away. But what if they had instead joined Blanchot in reflecting on the fate of that divided city? In another fragment he wrote for the Revue, Blanchot suggests Uwe Johnson’s novels are uniquely able to answer “the singularity of “Berlin”, precisely through the hiatus that it was obliged to leave open, with an obscure and unflagging rigour, between reality and the literary expression of its meaning”. An indirect approach to the problem of Berlin – but one which, if the Revue had indeed gone about its work, might have maintained the literary station in its solitary orbit, continuing to hold its participants in friendship, in communism.

Swimming in the Real

Posts from the archives follow. They were supposed to point the way to a literary critical/ philosophical book, which I never got around to writing.

I've started a new blog, Wittgenstein Jr, for a new novel. Non-consecutive, unplanned, no real idea where it will go, or if it will be any good.

I'm speaking with Laura McLean-Ferris and Paul Pieroni at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the 11th January. 

'The Trouble With Productivity'. Artists, writers and curators today, more than ever, take part in a time-pressured culture of high performance. One is constantly expected to be productive, professional, and to deliver good work. Is this the way we really want to work? How do people working within the arts manage the imbalance between work and life? Can one be productive by being less productive? Are there creative possibilities in exhaustion, failure and laziness? Writer and critic Laura McLean- Ferris, Paul Pieroni, curator of Space, and writer and philosopher Lars Iyer, author of Spurious, discuss the potentials in being less productive. 

What's ragged should be left ragged.

A miracle is, as it were, a gesture which God makes. As a man sits quietly and then makes an impressive gesture, God lets the world run on smoothly and then accompanies the words of a saint by a symbolic occurrence, a gesture of nature. It would be an instance if, when a saint has spoken, the trees around him bowed, as if in reverence. – Now, do I believe that this happens? I don't. […]

People are religious to the extent that they believe themselves to be not so much imperfect, as ill. / Any man who is half-way decent will think himself extremely imperfect, but a religious man thinks himself wretched.

Go on, believe! It does no harm!

No cry of torment can be great than the cry of one man. / Or again, no torment can be greater than what a single human being may suffer. / A man is capable of infinite torment therefore, and so too he can stand in need of infinite help. / The Christian religion is only for the man who needs infinite help, solely, that is, for the man who experiences infinite torment. / The whole planet can suffer no greater torment than a single soul. / The Christian faith – as I see it – is a man's refuge in this ultimate torment. […]

After someone has died we see his life in a conciliatory light. His life appears to us with outlines softened by a haze. There was no softening for him though, his life was jagged and incomplete. For him there was no reconciliation; his life is naked and wretched.

Are all men great? No. – Well then, how can you have any hope of being a great man! Why should something be bestowed on you that's not bestowed on your neighbour? To what purpose?! If it isn't you wish to be rich that makes you think yourself rich, it must be something you observe or experience that reveals it to you! And what do you experience (other than vanity)? Simply that you have a certain talent. And my conceit of being an extraordinary person has been with me much longer than my awareness of my particular talent.

The thought working its way towards the light.

Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. / Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning of think about things in a new way. The change is a decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is hard to establish.

In former times people went into monasteries. Were they stupid or insensitive people? – Well, if people like that found they needed to take such measures in order to be able to go on living, the problem cannot be an easy one!

[…] a man will never be great if he misjudges himself: if he throws dust in his own eyes.

How small a thought it takes to fill someone's whole life! […]

The purely corporeal can by uncanny. Compare the way angels and devils are portrayed. So-called 'miracles' must be connected with this. A miracle must be, as it were, a sacred gesture.

I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)

[…] Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.

Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be. –

I cannot kneel to pray because it's as though my knees were stiff. I am afraid of dissolution (of my own dissolution), should I become soft.

I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. […]

Wisdom is cold and to that extent stupid. (Faith on the other hand is a passion) It might also be said: Wisdom merely conceals life from you. (Wisdom is like cold grey ash, covering up the glowing embers.)

Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

Sometimes a sentence can be understood only if it is read at the right tempo. My sentences are all supposed to be read slowly.

The linings of my heart keep sticking together and to open it I should each time have to tear them apart.

A typical American film, naive and silly, can – for all its silliness and even by means of it – be instructive. A fatuous, self-conscious English film can teach one nothing. I have often learnt a lesson from a silly American film.

Is what I am doing really worth the effort? Yes, but only if a light shines on it from above. And if that happens – why should I concern myself that the fruits of my labours should not be stolen? If what I am writing really has some value, how could anyone steal the value from me? And if the light from above is lacking, I can't in any case be more than clever.

Sometimes you see ideas in the way an astronomer sees stars in the far distance. (Or it seems like that anyway).

The book is full of life – not like a man, but like an ant-heap.

One keeps forgotten to go right down to the foundations. One doesn't put the question marks deep enough down.

'Wisdom is grey'. Life on the other hand and religion are full of colour.

My thoughts probably move in a far narrower circle than I suspect.

Thoughts rise to the surface slowly, like bubbles. (Sometimes it's as though you could see a thought, an idea, as an indistinct point far away on the horizon; and then it often approaches with astonishing swiftness.)

God grant the philosopher insight into what lies in front of everyone's eyes.

Perhaps one day this civilisation will produce a culture. […]

When you are philosophising you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.

[…] the greatness of what a man writes depends on everything else he writes or does.

What I am writing here may be feeble stuff; well, then I am just not capable of bringing the big, important thing to light. But hidden in these feeble remarks are great prospects.

(For the Preface). It is not without reluctance that I deliver this book to the public. It will fall into hands which are not for the most part those in which I like to imagine it. May it soon – this is what I wish for it – be completely forgotten by the philosophical journalists, and so be preserved perhaps for a better sort of reader. […]

I ask countless irrelevant questions. If only I can succeed in hacking my way through this forest!

Bach said that all his achievements were simply the fruit of industry. But industry like that requires humility and an enormous capacity for suffering, hence strength. And someone who, with all this, can also express himself perfectly, simply speaks to us in the language of a great man.

Religious faith and superstition are quite different. One of them results from fear and is a sort of false science. The other is a trusting.

I am too soft, too weak, and so too lazy to achieve anything significant. The industry of great men is, amongst other things, a sign of their strength, quite apart from their inner wealth.

An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.

The problems of life are insoluble on the surface and can only be solved in depth. They are insoluble in surface dimensions.

Even to have expressed a false thought boldly and clearly is already to have gained a great deal.

It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.

A writer far more talented than I would still have only a minor talent.

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

Tradition is not something a man can learn; nor a thread he can pick up when he feels like it; any more than a man can choose his own ancestors. / Someone lacking a tradition who would like to have one is like a man unhappily in love.

Moore stirred up a philosophical wasps' nest with his paradox; and the only reason the wasps did not duly fly out was that they were too listless.

In the sphere of the mind someone's project cannot usually be continued by anyone else, nor should it be. These thoughts will fertilise the soil for a new sowing.

Anything your reader can do for himself leave to him.

Nearly all my writings are private conversations with myself. Things that I say to myself tete-a-tete.

Ambition is the death of thought.

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

This is how philosophers should salute each other: 'Take your time!'

For a philosopher there is more grass growing down in the valleys of silliness than up on the barren heights of cleverness.

If Christianity is truth then all the philosophy that is written about it is false.

I do not believe that Shakespeare can be set alongside any other poet. Was he perhaps a creator of language rather than a poet?

I could only stare in wonder at Shakespeare; never do anything with him.

Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences are what bring this about; but I don't mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us 'the existence of this being', but, e.g., sufferings of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts, – life can force this concept on us. […]

One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way.

God may say to me: 'I am judging you out of your own mouth. Your own actions have made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them'.

Wittgenstein, random remarks from his notebooks, from Culture and Value

Interview with Adam Phillips here.

Will Buckingham's brief review of Spurious.

Sam Jordison in the Guardian on the Not the Booker event hosted by Melville House at The Book Club in Shoreditch last week.

Fleur MacDonald in The Spectator on The White Review and (in passing) the Manifesto of mine that was published there. 

(Apologies for the lack of real content at the blog. This should change soon.)

'Literary Melancholy', a long new interview with me by David Winters is now up at 3:AM. On the Manifesto, the Daniel Davis Wood essay and other things. 

D. Quentin Miller reviews Spurious for the Review of Contemporary Fiction. 

I've written an essay/manifesto available here.

(link corrected)