Author: Lars Iyer

Blanchot and the Récit

Nothing Must be Illustrative

What lets itself be discovered by way of Blanchot's fiction? The setting of his récits is mundane, the prose is calm – but the mundane is allowed to double itself, and the prose becomes thick and strange. Sometimes in his fiction an ordinary action will suddenly detach itself from linear continuity and turn upon itself, as if it had broken time into a separate eddy. Such breaks involve a sudden profusion of moods – affliction gives way to lightness, lightness to anguish, where each time it is the mood that seems to bear the protagonist instead of the other way around.

Sudden shifts in the relationship between characters occur, as though (Blanchot's metaphor) the relative levels of water had been changed, as in a lock. And there are moments when the prose leaps into a strange abstraction: words like fascination, image, return, are used as a telegraphic shorthand, ordinary words that have been made to sound strangely, substituting for an experience which has no name, but that is like the double of any and all words, nonsense rumbling in sense.

'It may be that all these words are a curtain behind which what happened will never stop happening': the narrator of Death Sentence hints that what is important is not what is told, but something else, as if the events of the book come to stand in for another event, as though they sacrificed themselves to a greater demand. In a sense, the events of the narrative are not what matters at all – or rather, what matters does so by way of them.

In his biography of Kafka, Stach notes that his subject 'demanded much more from his texts than formal unity; he sought a seamless linking of all motifs, images and concepts'; with 'The Judgement', Kafka's stories 'leave no narrative residues or blind alleys. Not one detail of Kafka's descriptions, whether the colour of a piece of clothing, a gesture, or simply the time of day, is merely illustrative. Everything carries meaning, refers to something and recurs.'

With Blanchot, what recurs does so by way of the narrative details – 'it is made of events, details, gestures' and nothing else, and as such are 'particularities, worthless moments, dust of words'; but then, too, surpassing these details, but being no more than these details as they are taken together, a kind of 'emptiness' appears, a 'lacunar immensity' or 'infinite distance', such that the subject of the story is the lack of its story; 'it tries to realise in it this lack that always infinitely surpasses it'.

What Cannot Be Told

The Blanchotian récit bears upon this lack, figuring its inadequacy to itself in its own recounting. Let us follow the opening lines of hisrécit, The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me to see how this works.

The récit begins: 'I sought, this time to approach him': as though it were only now the narrator wants to confront the one who allows him to write. Now is the time for the encounter. But how can it be brought about? Can it be forced? The next lines:

I mean I tried to make him understand that, although I was there, still I couldn't go any farther, and that I, in turn, had exhausted my resources. The truth was that for a long time now I had felt I was at the end of my strength.

"But you're not', he pointed out.

At the end of my strength: to have run out of ability, or to have known the ability to be able the ability to be, fail you. But this is bad faith. To seek to approach him already betrays this inability; you are capable of something; you have a plan; clearly you haven't yet exhausted your resources. And isn't the fact that you're writing these lines testament to precisely the surplus of your strength over your exhaustion? But who is the he, the 'il' that answers back? With whom is the narrator conversing throughout this récit?

'I would like to be.' A manner of speaking which he avoidied taking seriously; at least, he didn't take it with the seriousness that I wanted to be put into it. It probably seem to him to deserve more than a wish.

Whoever it is, he seems to have been granted a whole personality, an ability to think, to converse: what mystery! And the whole récitconsists of their exchanges, and the long passages in which the narrator reflects on the situation in which he finds himself.

The other with whom the narrator converses is a personification of the condition of possibility of narrative. He is no one apart from the narrator, being only the one who endures in his place when he is claimed by the fascination with which writing is bound up, for Blanchot.

If he is its condition of possibility, he is also narrative's condition of impossibility – he stands outside what can be narrated, set back from it, soliciting the movement of narration, but at the same time stepping out of its way, until the narrator, in this case, says firmly to himself, 'I sought, this time to approach him.' Him, il: in the case, the condition, the uncondition of narrative, that which gives and withholds the possibility of telling.

In the case of this récit, the 'il' is personified; the refusal of the event to give itself to narration is given a part in the narration. And yet it is made by the narrator, and by Blanchot, to appear in its refusal.

Writing in his diary, Kafka expresses surprise that writing is possible at all.

I have never understood how it is possible for almost anyone who writes to objectify his sufferings in the very midst of suffering them; thus I, for example, in the midst of my unhappiness – my head, say, still on fire with unhappiness – sit down and write to someone: I am unhappy. Yes, I can even go beyond that and with the various flourishes I might have talent for, all of which seem to have nothing to do with my unhappiness, ring simple, or contrapuntal or a whole orchestration of changes on my theme. And it is not a lie, and it does not still my pain, it is simply a merciful surplus of strength at a moment when suffering has raked me to the bottom of my being and plainly exhausted all my strength. But then what kind of strength is it?

What, in the midst of unhappiness, allows one to write ‘I am unhappy’? A peculiar strength – a merciful one, in which I am permitted strength enough to report my unhappiness. But what does it mean to invoke mercy here? Does the capacity to write mean my unhappiness is any less complete? That I am less unhappy than I thought?

A surplus of strength: at least, now I can ring changes on my suffering, at least, using my talent, I can begin to write. But does it alter my basic situation? Does it offer therapy or cure? Writing allows me to take distance from my suffering – but it is the same distance which causes me to lose my suffering anew.

Then there is something left behind as soon as the narrative is begun. Suffering has lifted itself into an ideal suffering; as soon as one writes, or 'I had exhausted my resources', this belies exhaustion, but it is also, by inscribing the word 'I couldn't go any farther' on the page shows how language lifts itself from the condition of its author. Something has been gained: the capacity, the 'merciful strength' to write. But something has been lost by that same writing – that mood, that attunement that allowed the possibility of writing.

Commenting on these lines from Kafka, Blanchot writes:

The more luck I have, that is to say, the more gifted I am in making my unhappiness felt by description, embellishments, and images, the more the bad luck this misfortune reports is respected. It is as if the possibility that my writing represents essentially exists to express its own impossibility – the impossibility of writing that constitutes my sadness. Not only can it not be put in parentheses, or accommodate it without destroying it or being destroyed by it, but it really is possible only because of its impossibility.

Strange that the task of writing loses what makes it possible and which drew a weary man to write, I have exhausted my strength. 'But you haven't', says the fact of writing on the page. The narrator loses the particular concreteness of his exhaustion as he begins to write. He gains literature, which is also to say, the impossibility of ever returning to his suffering in writing. But what has he gained?

Ordinary speech has, at its heart, the ideal of a pure communication, which would transform ‘the heaviness of things’, in Blanchot’s words, to ‘the agility of signs’, the ‘materiality of things’ to ‘the movement of their signification’; they are nothing in themselves: abstract tokens to be used in exchange. The sentence in the story has another function: it does not seek to become the sign of an absent being, but to present that being to us in language. It is a question of allowing language to ‘revive a world of concrete things’. It is not, moreover, a question of revealing the concreteness of this or that thing, but a world of things.

‘In the novel, the act of reading is not changed, but the attitude of the one who reads it makes it different’, Blanchot writes. The value of words is no longer that of labels attached to particular meanings. Let’s say I hear the phrase ‘The head clerk himself called’; I am able to conjure up a world in which this sentence has meaning: I know the head clerk himself, the office in which he or she worked, and so on. The sentence is unobtrusive; I know what it means. When I read the sentence ‘The head clerk himself called’ in a literary work, the situation is different: it no longer belongs to a world with which I am familiar; the only access to the world of the story I am reading is through the words of that story.

Literary works characteristically strive for verisimilitude by elaborately constructing a world. In the case of Blanchot's récits, however, we are left with something more stark: a sheen of words which present themselves as a vehicle of disclosure, of the opening of the world. A drama is happening at the surface of the text even before we are reassured by the creation of a fictional world.

What is the experience of reading this récit - if we do read it, rather than cast it aside in frustration? We no longer have any distance with respect to the text; the reader is no longer a spectator, since there is no secure place with respect to the narrative from which to grasp its unity, but is, so to speak, enfolded in the very unfolding of a narration. But nor do we feel the reassuring presence of an author who is in charge of the narrative.

This is the uncanny experience of reading Blanchot; there is no point of fixity to which one can anchor oneself. The récit opens as a void or hollow. The events the novel narrates stand out against a kind of nothingness. The reader is more distant from Blanchot's narrative than she might be with respect to a more traditional novelist since she is unable to interpose a context for the events as they occur; they seem to come from nowhere. Yet in another sense, she is closer – too close, perhaps – because all she has are the words which attest, in Blanchot's work, to the void against which those words appear.

No escape: the narrator cannot escape from his exhaustion; he writes, and that exhaustion is transformed. And when we read Blanchot's récit, born from exhaustion and the 'merciful strength' which escapes exhaustion? Fascinated by the texts, close to them, far from them, there is no escape for us. Is this exhausting – a counterpart to the exhaustion of the narrator? Rather, one always reads, Blanchot says, in a kind of lightness, which is perhaps the analogue of that surplus of strength which allowed the writer to begin to write.

The Event Itself

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

It may appear Blanchot's narrator seeks to write about his encounter with 'him', but his récit refers to another and more fundamental encounter (or, with respect to our reading of the text, something closer to its surface): one that is the condition of possibility of any narration. The event the narrator would narrate is joined by another narration and another event – that of the interruption of his capacities as an author.

Then the récit bears upon its own possibility, even as it needs to give itself body in terms of a specific narrative, and is nothing apart from what is given to be read. It is as if the récit, as it names the event, pre-existed the narrative events that incarnate it; or that what happens in the narrative is only a way of allegorising or redoubling what has already occurred. Everything – plot, character development, the 'interest' of the narrative – would have been devoured by the black hole of the event. Or the event itself would stand over its characters, measuring out their destinies like Fate.

But the precedence of the event cannot be understood chronologically. When Blanchot allows himself in his critical work speak of the past, of recurrence, this is a way of figuring the way in which the récit leads itself back to the question of its own possibility, but also the impossibility of ever accounting for that event in the present of tasks, projects and intact subjects. Narrative incidents, then, must always be poor but necessary proxies for the event at issue. None of them are any greater significance than the others insofar as any of them is liable to fall into the lack the récit would narrate.

But if, in Blanchot's récits, a fall is always imminent; when an incident is always ready to be substituted by the event, some narratives reveal this lability more directly. The step from Blanchot's novels to the récits uncomplicates and focuses his fictional work – it becomes simpler, the story, such as it is, is presented more sparsely, which lets the lack for which it substitutes, or into which it continually threatens to plunge, that much more present.

Still, this is too simple a notion of the récit. See here for a continuation of these reflections.

Blanchot and the Other

The Truth of Suffering

Would suffering be greater in our time? A vain question. But we must not doubt that suffering weighs more heavily on us to the extent that our estrangement from religious consolations, the disappearance of the other world, and the breaking up of traditional social networks deprive the one who suffers of all distance and more clearly expose him to the truth of suffering – a truth that consists in withdrawing from him the space that suffering requires, the little time that would make his suffering possible.

And a little later, and also from The Infinite Conversation:

There is a suffering that has lost time altogether. It is the horror of a suffering without end, a suffering time can no longer redeem, that has escaped time and for which there is no longer recourse; it is irredeemable.

Suffering without relief, without redemption: in the absence of the old beliefs, suffering reveals itself in its truth. But a truth upon which the sufferer cannot seize, insofar as, without end, escaping time, the sufferer is disjoined from herself, being unable to collect herself into the first person and thereby let suffering be a discreet experience that might slip into the past. Suffering deprives the sufferer of self-presence and of the present; there is not even that 'little time' that would permit its integration into life, into the rhythm of a life.

But how then to think this experience? In the opening récit of The Infinite Conversation, one of the speakers mentions a 'weary truth', 'the truth of weariness', upon which neither speaker is able to seize. Truth, then, is not thought according to the model of adequation or correspondence. Or rather, correspondence is sent on an infinite detour, being forever able to reach its ostensible 'object'.

It is not by chance that this récit is concerned with this experience. Read in terms of my earlier account of the récit, it may seem that the experience of weariness the interlocutors discuss, all the while being unable, as they acknowledge, to reach it, stands in for the experience of the writer of this fiction.

Isn't the writer, for Blanchot fascinated by incapacity, by the erosion of the 'I can' as it is revealed in suffering, weariness and related moods? The Blanchotian writer begins with exactly this kind of mood. He begins, that is, where making a beginning is impossible without that 'merciful surplus of strength' that permits him, in his work, to bear witness to what cannot begin.

Perhaps one might even say that it is to the writer that one must return to indicate the 'truth' of suffering in a form that is adequate to it – not, that is, in the language of the concept, which allows one to grasp the specific in the general, but as the writer's language lets the interminable and the incessant return within it: that murmuring which does not give itself term.

Infinite Inadequation

Then it is exactly the truth of suffering that is revealed in the récit, and can only be revealed there in its infinite inadequation. A truth that cannot be reached directly, but only indicated.

At the outset of Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling, we find the following epigraph from Hamann: 'What Tarquinius Superbus said in the garden by means of the poppies, the son understood but the messenger did not'. Tarquinius, we learn from a translator's note, did not trust the messenger sent to him by his son. So he sends a cryptic message back: slicing off the heads of the tallest flowers in his garden with his cane. By this, the son understands he must kill the leading men in the city. Then the son understands the significance of Tarquinius's gesture because he understands the context that makes sense of it in the way the messenger does not.

Can we know, in an analogous way, what is being indicated by way of Blanchot's récit? A first response would be to say we can't be in the know with respect to the experience of weariness in question, since it would reveal its truth only in those circumstances Blanchot describes. To stand at one remove from the text as readers of this story is to stand too far away; only the weary know weariness, and even then to the extent that its truth escapes them.

A second, more sophisticated response would be to say weariness only stands in for the experience of writing with which the récit is obsessed. An experience that then doubles itself in the experience of reading as it likewise demands that we can never reach the 'object' that is being recounted in what we are reading. We might remember here Blanchot's claim to the effect that the récit does not simply represent an event that may have happened, but is the happening of the event itself. To read is to let this event happen again, as it happened, in a different but analogous way, for its author (this is the account I gave here).

(Open parentheses. Sinthome writes, reflecting on Deleuze's The Logic of Sense, 'the literary critic might wish to hold that sense is already there in the text waiting to be unlocked. However, if sense is only in being made, then sense is only in engendering itself. The sense of a text is something that is only produced in reading the text, where both the reader and text are engendered as products of that interaction, or after-effects.'

And again, with great lucidity, moving to psychoanalysis: 'we always want to treat the object of analysis as independent of our analysis of it and ourselves as independent of the object we engage with, not seeing the manner in which our engagement with that object produces it while it produces us.' Then critical commentary produces the commentator as well as what is commented upon; reading makes us, and I suppose unmakes us, and we are ourselves at stake whenever we read or think about reading. Close parentheses.) 

But I wonder whether this second reading (which should be developed rather than gestured at) does not move too quickly, that the account of weariness is more than just a substitute for the real concern of the récit. Or rather, that this récit, and Blanchot'srécits more generally, are concerned not only with their own happening, but with other, similar events – that they are a way of exploring a range of moods and experiences in a form appropriate to them. The Blanchotian récit would also open a path of research, a way of thinking that is at one with a practice of writing that bears upon a truth specific to our time.

One might also remember that in his discussion of the work of Jean Paulhan, Blanchot allows that a récit need not be fictional in form – isn't everything Paulhan has written a récit in its own way?, he asks. A question that we can then turn on Blanchot, wondering whether his oeuvre as a whole is not comprised of a series of récits, each of which, in a different way, gives onto an experience of infinite inadequation.

Perhaps, in this case, there is a kind of thinking exhibited in the composition of fiction, critical commentary, and even a certain kind of philosophy which takes the form of a practice of writing. Isn't this what reveals itself in Blanchot's fragmentary works, which let scraps of fiction lie alongside philosophical crumbs and other meditations?

Then a book like The Writing of the Disaster is also a kind of récit, or, perhaps, an assemblage of récits, each resonating with one another, turning in themselves but also all together like the parts of a mobile. And then the thirty-six volumes that might, one day, collect Blanchot's oeuvre would be just such an assemblage, where matters is also that désoeuvrement, that worklessness that is another name for the experience of truth in its evasion.

Relation Without Relation

Casually, unrigorously, I want now to reflect upon one of the experiences upon which Blanchot focuses not really for any other reason than to lead myself to what deserves further reflection. Here, my focus is on those passages in The Writing of the Disasterwhere Blanchot reflects upon Levinas's Otherwise Than Being. Speaking of his close friend in an interview, Levinas notes Blanchot's ability to open 'unexpected vistas' upon philosophical ideas. I think one can do little with the twenty-five pages written in the margins of Otherwise Than Being unless Blanchot's comments are understood in relation to other parts of his oeuvre.

If Blanchot, like Levinas, was always concerned with the question of the ontological or extra-ontological of the relation to the Other, it manifests itself mostly in his fictional work, that is, until the publication of Totality and Infinity and later, Otherwise Than Being provides Blanchot with the occasion to translate his own researches into a more philosophical idiom.

What, then, is the unexpected vista Blanchot opens on Otherwise Than Being in The Writing of the Disaster?

The unrelated (in the sense that the one {I} and the other cannot be as one, or come together at one and at the same time – cannot be contemporaries) is initially the other for me. Then it is I as other from myself. It is that in me which does not coincide with me – my eternal absence, that which no consciousness can grasp, which has neither effect nor efficacy and is passive time. It is the dying which, though unsharable, I have in common with all.

What is Blanchot describing? Not simply a relation, or an ordinary kind of relation, since that would imply some kind of homogeneity of terms, that would allow them to be related to one another. The I and the Other do not occupy the same order of time, writes Blanchot; and we know from elsewhere that the Other is always 'higher' than me, that whatever relates us to one another (if we can even speak of a relation) does so unilaterally, so that before we can consider relations of reciprocity, there is first of all a nonreciprocal opening to the Other.

But who is it who opens thus? Who is opened, exposed, such that a kind of responsibility is assumed for the Other that precedes and escapes that responsibility I have for myself? The 'I' is altered by this opening; the relation to the Other absolves its terms of any of the qualities by which we might assume we could pick them out. Who is the Other? Anyone at all; but also, as Other, no one – neither masculine nor feminine; neither tall not short.

(Another thought: what if it is rather by one particular quality – a laugh, a tone of voice, a melancholy downturn of the lips that the Other is revealed as Other? What if it is by a quality, determinate, there, that the indeterminacy of the Other is revealed? Could this be one way of understanding what Levinas calls the face?)

And who am I? Likewise anonymised; likewise evacuated from any quality that distinguishes from others. If I am assigned a responsibility in the relation in question, this happens upstream of any simple self-awareness I might have; it belongs to a past that is severed from the course of time – the past as a name for what returns by way of interruption. The relation in question transforms its terms. It reaches across an interruption in time and via a 'height' that alters space. To call it a 'relation without relation' with Blanchot and Levinas is to attempt to mark the way it suspends my ordinary relation to the world.

Significantly, both thinkers understand this relation as happening through language. For both, it is language that allows me to relate to myself and to the world; my self-relation is such that it is always meditating; my relation to the world is unthinkable without language as it contextualises and orders my experiences. Yet Levinas, as Blanchot picks up in The Writing of the Disaster, claims the Other is given to me immediately. An immediacy, as Blanchot comments, which must somehow be understood in the past tense (or rather in that peculiar, impossible tense that marks the temporality of what he calls the disaster): that slips back from the course of time.

The immediacy of the Other is not simply extra-linguistic, belonging to another order. Rather, it is way of expressing the interruption by which it occurs – even its impossibility, if this is understood not simply as the opposite of the power of the 'I can' and the field of possibility opened to it thereby, but as the way power and possibility and the 'I can' of the self collapse as they are reached by the Other. In this interruption, I am other from myself; I cannot coincide with that 'eternal absence' without efficacy or effect that delivers me into what Blanchot (and not Levinas) calls 'dying'. A dying to the self I was – a becoming in which passivity, taking the place of the self, wanders eternally without return.

For Levinas, this experience is very ordinary, being the condition of our experience of the order and structure of the world. The relation (without relation) to the Other assigns us a responsibility, individuates me, making me irreplaceable with respect to the Other, just as an analogous relation has individuated all other normal human beings. This is what Blanchot refers to when he calls the I 'other from myself', 'eternal absence' is common to all; this experience is not sharable, since each time it occurs, it assigns to me a special, nonreplaceable responsibility to this Other at thistime, but it is nevertheless common; it is an experience each of us has undergone.

(Tangent. But what proof can be offered that this experience happened? Why should we accept, at such an enormous theoretical cost, that it occurred at all? For Levinas will also say that the structure of our ordinary, mundane experience depends upon responsibility: that it is the encounter with the Other, singular, non-repeatable, that grants our world order and light. Without the Other, there is the perpetual danger of collapse – that the self is not strong enough, that it will succumb to the horrors of what Levinas calls participation in which subject and object merge into one another.

As such, the relation to the Other (experience par excellence, Levinas calls it in Totality and Infinity) is the very root of our experience. The structure of our experience in general, the a priori, can be understood only if we engage philosophically with thea posteriori encounter in its singularity. The relation to the Other, then, is always upstream of the order of proof. It can only be deduced (although this is not Levinas's word) from its effects.)

(Second tangent. No intention to bring this account of Levinas, or Blanchot's reading of Levinas to life here. To do so, I think, means much more than simply explicating his thought in its own terms. Sinthome writes with great candour of his frustration (here I am understanding it in my own way) of those who are theoretically committed to x or y without living that same commitment, without their lives being risked by their 'work'.

This is what being a psychoanalyst means for Sinthome. Work without quotation marks: a suffering person to be diagnosed and, if not 'cured', then led to that point at which life is once again possible. Then what is the equivalent with respect to my brief and cursory reading? Certainly not to rest with a reading of some passages from The Writing of the Disaster. Isn't it a question, instead, of reaching through the recits, searching for the way in which Blanchot brought himself into proximity with Levinas's reflections? A different kind of work, it is true. To read, but without risk. But I think it is necessary to go further still. To write outside a book or a paper. To write such that writing sets itself back into the question of its own production.

In my foolishness, I sometimes wonder whether Theory also embodies something like this risk in a way that philosophy resists since its ostensible 'object' – that which the theoretical insights of X and Y are supposed to shed light – is, or should be the measure of those insights. But then it is more complex than this, because X and Y might constitute that 'object' differently, it being produced by the theoretical approach that might illuminate it.

Then perhaps it falls to philosophy to lay out the notion of 'production' that is at issue here, taking up a place at the head of all theoretical waters. But perhaps theory might respond that this position is itself productive, all too productive, and philosophy must plunge into those waters themselves, spreading out into a million different rivers. Must philosophy risk losing its name to keep the name philosophy?)

For Blanchot, the similarity of the relation to the Other with that of the writer to writing and to those who are afflicted, or suffer should be clear. Levinas writes of the trauma of the relation to the Other – I am exposed all the way to my viscera. My selfhood, Blanchot says is 'gangrened and eaten away, altogether alienated'. The approach of the Other is 'death itself'; it turns the self over to dying, to the anonymity of the body. Here, we find another kind of disaster. Alongside the suffering passivity (beyond passivity) of literary creation and of suffering, there is the passivity of the self with respect to the relation to the Other.

(And now remember again what Sinthome notes. We are produced, authored, by the problematic field of the encounter. Produced as, perhaps, Marx would describe. Only for Blanchot production, here, is thought of as worklessness rather than work. A worklessness that engages us and turns us aside to the infinite becoming of dying in the encounter with the Other.

A question that points beyond Blanchot, perhaps indicating his limit: doesn't the field of production encompass all things? Isn't the world – the field of encounters – already in worklessness? Then what is named by the disaster is everywhere, and at every level, from subatomic particles to the movement of planets.)

The Truth of the Event

Tired conclusion. Blanchot lays fragment alongside fragment inThe Writing of the Disaster, insinuating the belonging together of several experiences, rather than attempts to bring them together into a theoretical synthesis. And each time it is a matter of writing with the aim of conveying a certain truth – even if it is one we can never reach. Each time, with each term – thinking, writing, the relation to the Other – the order of experience (and experience is another of these words) is set apart from its interruption. Each time, it is a matter of preserving the play of 'neither one nor the other' – the ne uter of the neuter as it names the relation between them (and relation is yet another of these words).

This is why paradoxical formulations such as relation without relation are necessary – the 'without' here is a way of naming what is extraordinary about the relation in question; of course, it is the same with other words I have glanced upon in discussion. Friendship without friendship, egotism without egotism, thinking without thinking … Likewise, this is why Blanchot will use phrases that he seems almost immediately to withdraw: disclosure (that does not disclose), the impossible community or occasionally capitalise words ('the Opening of community). And it is why he can appear inconsistent, denying that friendship is linked to the gift on one page, and then placing Bataille alongside Levinas and Heidegger as a thinker of the 'gift of interiority'.

How to name the event? But even the word event cannot name what it supposed to name. For doesn't it carry with it a suggestion of the punctual, the delimitable …? Then there can only a play of substitutes, of non-synonymous proxies which begin to blur into one another, bearing a meaning – fixed, delimitable – only to let this meaning be swept away in the 'experience' to which Blanchot would attend.

It is in these terms, I think, that one must respond to the question, what is being indicated by way of Blanchot's récit?

Thanatography

The Experience of Writing

A child's questions, says Freud, give ultimately unto the marvel that anything exists at all. Perhaps it is the same with the question we want to pose a writer: how he came to write this imposing work or that, whom he admires among his contemporaries or his forebears, what books he keeps close to him – it is first of all the fact of the work that is marvellous. In the end, the gift that separates him from us is that he has written those pages, and everything else in his life that seems significant to us is so only because of his gift.

In the case of Blanchot, something more is at issue, for his activity as a writer is as it were doubled upon itself, taking as its concern the possibility and impossibility of writing itself, and endlessly let its own wellspring return – and that of all literature – in his literary criticism. He explores the relationship between the writer and inspiration, the work and the book; he explores the 'light, innocent task of reading', and he links the fate of the writing with the end of civilisation of the Book. But these are questions he also asks with his life, and it is for this reason his biography is not merely the incidental supplement to a dazzling oeuvre.

How was Blanchot able to pursue these questions, to live them? For some time, I've wanted to write a short biographical essay on Blanchot: a simple task, but one I have found very difficult. Surely it would require the summarising of the main points of Bident's excellent biography, supplementing it with a few marginal reflections of my own?

But then there is the question of remembering the experience Blanchot insists are particular to the writer. Didn't Blanchot say in his correspondence that his fictions usually preceded his theoretical reflections, as if they were a kind of laboratory in which he formed his hypotheses?

Experiment, experience – but I don't think there can be an absolute division of genre in Blanchot's oeuvre, whatever he might suggest. The fictions, like his more theoretical essays, are magnified by the same event, the same experience passing through its field. What does it mean to write? In what does the experience of writing consist? Let us follow the course of Blanchot's own meditations on writing and upon in his own authorship.

The Spiritual Animal Kingdom

Prior to the work, the work of art, the work of writing, the work of words, there is no artist – neither a writer nor a speaking subject – since it is the production that produces the producer, bringing to life or making him appear in the act of substantiating him (which, in a simplified manner, is the teaching of Hegel and even the Talmud: doing takes precedence over being, which does not create itself except in creating – what? Perhaps anything: how this anything is judged depends on time, on what happens, on what does not happen: what we call historical factors, history, without however looking to history for the last judgement). But if the written work produces and substantiates the writer, once created it bears witness only to his dissolution, his disappearance, his defection and, to express it more brutally, his death, which itself can never be definitively verified: for it is a death that can never produce any verification.

That from the opening of 'After the Fact', written to accompany the publication of two early stories. Blanchot sends us to Hegel – I think to that section of Phenomenology of Spirit called 'The Spiritual Animal Kingdom and Deceit, or the "Matter in Hand" Itself', the first part of which gave Blanchot the title of the essay eventually collected as 'Literature and the Right to Death.'

It is a certain kind of work which produces the individual, according to Hegel. It is conditional on the appearance of a class of skilled labourers, whose work is in an important sense an expression of their individuality. A class whose work is valued for exactly that reason.

Yet the world of such specialised creatures ('animals', Hegel calls them, finding them deficient in what would make them whole human beings) is not yet a world. Each is separate; each paces separately around their own cage taking himself for an individual real in and for himself even as each is only a fragment. A fragment, though, busily occupied with the 'task at hand': that labour in which she disinterestedly relinquishes selfish gain from her task. Her accomplishments are now measurable by public approval; his talents and skills are recognised by others and by society at large.

Hegel reserves the merchant class for special ire because they have busily translated all value to a monetary measure. 'Currency must be honoured, but family, welfare, life etc., may all perish'. The problem, for Hegel, lies in the fact that merchants do not embody a universal class; they seek to serve only themselves. The true universal class would work for the Good of society as a whole; compare the civil servant who would aim at Justice in general, or the scholar who aims at Truth.

What happens when the bourgeois animal fails to receive this recognition? When the conceit of one's self-worth is mismatched in the work produced? When the book you have written seems to fall short of the talents and skills you are sure you harbor? Begin again; start over again – write more books. Here is a strange cousin of hedonism where what compels you is not the sense of success but of failure. 'Next time I'll get it right'.

Inadequacy

Consciousness, for Hegel, is the act of relating to oneself; it is for-itself. The world appears to stand apart from this self-relating as what is in-itself. But the in-itself and the for-itself interpenetrate; the talents, strengths and abilities of the individual unfold through her actions.

In the spiritual animal kingdom, being is no longer the obdurate in-itself to which you have to accommodate yourself, but is what is given to you in your labours. Once again, there is the chance of passing from the darkness of possibility to the light of presence, from the abstract in-itself, inert being to the transformation of the world in view of the completion of a goal.

Here, your existence is a projection into the future, actualising what you will and expressing what you are. As such, the reality of the in-itself can no longer be opposed to the individual. The ability to act is all; the world only unfolds what exists in potential. Action has no beginning; it is the ever-changing response to situations; the individual seeks the means to unfold its potential, to translate what is interior to what is exterior; to act. It is not that you have a blueprint which would tell you what to do in any given situation; rather, you learn what you are through your works, that is, your deeds. To act is also to learn what one is.

So does individuality discovers itself in the world; its work is ultimately the expression of the individual. What we are reveals itself outside of us. The in-itself is always mediated; action is to be understood as negativity, as what has already overcome the given. Such overcoming, the ongoing transformation of the world, is the joy of consciousness. To test your strength! To know your powers! To receive, through engagement with the world, the confirmation of what you are – this is the marvel! The transition from potential and possibility to work is experienced as joy; the individual spreads her wings and contemplates her glory in her work.

But what happens when the work is finished and the work of negation done? True, the self moves on; it will find itself in a new situation requiring the mobilisation of different means in order to achieve its goal. But this movement means there is a kind of lapse in the work of self-expression. Action itself is always in lieu of a complete and final self-expression. Of course, there can be no masterwork in the face of which the individual can lay down its arms.

Consciousness is to be distinguished from its works; it can be said to transcend them. So does a diremption open between what consciousness takes itself to be and what it does. Being and action no longer coincide. Then what I have made falls short of what I am; my deeds do not express my individuality. Work, which appeared to say so much, is only a limitation of what I am; it appears merely particular and contingent.

Once again, as before the reconciliation effected by the spiritual animal kingdom in the Phenomenology of Spirit, there is the mismatch between the individual and the world; once again does reality appear as abstract Other, as the inert and impenetrable in-itself.

The work lies before others; it is there for others to see and to experience. I do not recognise myself in what I have done; the work is the thing that lies beyond me, alien and obscure. What can I achieve? What can I do that would express what I am? Of course, for Hegel, there is a way of overcoming the diremption to which the spiritual animal kingdom leads – an attempt to work for the common good, rather than your own. But the movement of the dialectic is stalled for Blanchot's writer, who is able to express himself by means of the work once a particular book is finished. The work itself seems to loom ahead of the book; the writer can never seize upon that which would give him substance. This is the writer's sadness.

(Sadness? But why not joy, since the adventure of writing, perpetual inadequacy, is still open?)

Rejection

Why is Hegel's account of spiritual animal kingdom so appropriate to the situation of the writer? After all, it seems to describe a situation familiar to anyone who attempts to create something without a blueprint.

Sinthome tells us how he recoils in horror when he is asked what is philosophy, or what his research is about. 'To ask what someone's research or philosophy is, is to ask them to simultaneously formulate a proposition and state the sense of that proposition. Yet I can say what I mean or mean what I say, but I cannot say what I mean and mean what I say.'

Wonderfully put: I only know what I'm working on once I've finished work; the preface to a book, making sense of the project as a whole, comes after the book is complete. I can only know the pro-ject as a re-ject, as Sinthome says; which means that it is forever impossible to know on what it is one is working.

This might remind us of Hegel, and the adventure of reading The Phenomenology of Spirit: the course of the dialectic is not given in advance; its onroll, totalising as it may appear does not emerge into clarity except as its particular phases come to an end. Can Hegel ever say the sense of what he says? Zizek's Hegel (For They Know Not What They Do) perhaps cannot; to say the sense of what he says means the dialectic is kept perpetually open. This is what means to say with Sinthome that all philosophies are lived – that thinking is experiential and experimental, a projection into a future whose course is unknown.

Then philosophy, like writing (understood as writing obsessed with writing itself, its own 'act') discovers what it is as it proceeds. Philosophy, like writing – but how can the two be kept entirely apart? Perhaps because the former is obsessed with the condition of its possibility, the fact the work exceeds the book. But isn't this the obsession, too, of the philosopher, who discovers the sense of her work only in retrospect?

For the Blanchotian writer it is language itself that is of concern. Language itself – the fact of communication, rather than what is communicated. A fact from which we cannot stand apart, since it grants the very possibility of communication. But for this reason, it can also become invisible, necessitating a kind of doubling up – an experience of communication as communication, such that it can be thought at all.

Perhaps the philosopher can only plunge into this experience by becoming a writer, or by allowing the question of writing to return in and as her work. That is, the exploration of communicativity must begin in a performative use of language. Use – or being used, for to engage with language is also to be engage by a natural language in its peculiarities and idioms.

But perhaps this engagement reaches more deeply still. For is it not also what might be called the materiality of language which fascinates the writer – its rhythms and sonorities, its grain? Perhaps every writer has something in him of the poet, for whom every word must also sound. But further still is not what sets itself back into this materiality – a kind of heaviness or density of language that is the writer's concern? As though language were so emburdened it can say nothing at all. As though the writer were crushed, from the first, by what he can never say.

Until the words the writer is able to write point beyond themselves; they are symbolic, as Hegel said of the Sphinx and the Pyramids, and as such, riddles. Like the statues of Giacometti with their massive plinths, words are attached to something much heavier than they are. It is that they're drawn perpetually across the event horizon that paralyses the movement of sense, idling every word, and joining every work to worklessness.

This is the burden of the writer who, like an astronaut close to a black hole, ages more slowly than the rest of us, or rather, is close to that first step out of infancy when a child struggles to speak a first word. But the writer, falling back to earth, emburdened with making sense of what flees from sense, is also older, having known, almost at once, every kind of defeat.

Admittedly, this failure seems forgotten as soon as the finished book is brought into the light. There is the temptation to revel in attention, to take pride in your own name as author. But isn't the writer, as writer, always in relation to some kind of lack, some absence? The writer as writer has always been dismissed, if not the author he also is – that man who might believe that he is his own best reader, the source of the meanings of his books, which is only his expression. But the writer as writer grieves not in silence, but by reaching out to begin all over again, in the perpetual innocence of beginning.

Then the writer cannot discover what he has achieved even as what Sinthome call a re-ject, since he cannot present what he has done thetically, that is, as a theoretical position or argument. For the writer's own work is like Hegel's Sphinx which symbolises without meaning, even to those who assembled this and other obscure monuments in the desert. It is the riddle he cannot solve, but to which his life as writer is also bound.

Who is he? This question, too, is unanswerable, for he will never learn what he has achieved: never, that is understand the project that has unfolded through his life. Is it even his project? Did he initiate the course of writing? In the end, it is as though he were the completed circuit through which the current of writing could pass, seeking only to relate to itself, to be translated into a work that trembles with what it cannot say.

Author, Actor

It is in this way, I think, that we can understand the opening of 'After the Fact', which I reproduce again here:

Prior to the work, the work of art, the work of writing, the work of words, there is no artist – neither a writer nor a speaking subject – since it is the production that produces the producer, bringing to life or making him appear in the act of substantiating him […] But if the written work produces and substantiates the writer, once created it bears witness only to his dissolution, his disappearance, his defection and, to express it more brutally, his death, which itself can never be definitively verified: for it is a death that can never produce any verification.

Dissolution, disappearance and defection name the rejection of rejection in the relation of the author to his oeuvre. Death is another name for the failure of the finished book to correspond to the work that would communicate communication as he dreams. But one must go further, for dying is a name for the experience of this perpetual feeling of inadequacy.

Why does Blanchot introduce the idea of verifying and verification? Why this epistemological register? Perhaps because truth has been understood traditionally as a correspondence, an adequation between a statement and a state of affairs. In attempting to realise the incompletable work, indeed, being dependent on this work for his very self-understanding as a writer, the author is given to a kind of error, to the infinite movement of errancy.

Let us follow Blanchot's argument a little further:

Thus, before the work, the writer does not yet exist; after the work, he is no longer there: which means that his existence is open to question – and we call him an 'author'! It would be more correct to call him an 'actor', the ephemeral character who is born and dies each evening in order to make himself extravagantly seen, killed by the performance that makes him visible – that is, without anything of his own or hiding anything in some secret place.

The conclusion of this phase of Blanchot's argument should now be clear: the author is never author enough; the writer has not attained the work, dying before he can lay claim to what he has completed.

Then the questions we might want to ask the writer belie the fact that the imposing books we admire fall short of the work he would attain. The gift that, we assume, separates him from us, is also a burden (but why not a joy? The infinite task of writing – one book after another, falling short, happily short, of realising the work). The talent, strengths and abilities it took to realise the books are only partially his; for all his ability to act, he is dependent upon a passivity in which he is voided of what allows him to write in his own name.

To be is to do, to exist is to act – but what does it mean when you can do nothing; when your work falls into worklessness? You have fallen out of being – but who is it that has fallen? This from an excellent collection edited by Leslie Hill:

Invited in 1975 to lend his support, in the form of unpublished or other material, to a special issue of the journal Gramma to be devoted to his work, Blanchot declined, courteously but firmly, explaining his reluctance to be seen to authorise that project, and thus limit its freedom and independence, with the following words: 'My absence [i.e. from the issue],' he wrote, '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 my name is impossible. 

Blanchot's absence from the review parallels the absence he was so scrupulous to maintain, refusing to meet scholars, to attend the celebration of his work and avoiding being photographed or, except on one occasion, being interviewed.

Was it because he sought to save his work from being bound too closely to a man, an author, and not the writer as writer? Was it to allow the name 'Blanchot' as much blankness as possible, erasing the particularities of his life from the public record? Then the attempt to narrate Blanchot's life must also pass through an account of that dying upon which his work depends. A biography, a thanatography – but what kind of account can be given?

Writing’s Remove

Let us Enter this Relation

Blanchot once gave the name the song of the Sirens to what we can hear in the fiction and the criticism, remember the fatal allure of that singing that saw Ulysses, in his retelling of the story, drowned on the ocean floor. Another Ulysses, it is true, was able to become Homer and complete the Odyssey, but he carries with him the ghost of one who heard what is normally dissimulated in ordinary language. And so each of us bears a relation to that double who listens for the double of language; so we are each bound by a relation that suspends the lucid, sober self who has faith that language might be used to transmit ideas and ultimately in the 'I can', the power of the thinking (comprehending) subject.

'Let us enter this relation', writes Blanchot at the outset of The Step Not Beyond. But what is it we are entering? We must begin with words, in the midst of words, since it is language which grants the very possibility of relating to anything. But for this same reason, language can also become invisible, a pure medium in which we thoughtlessly take up the most hackneyed conventions. Blanchot's work disrupts this transparency, doubling language up and letting us experience language as language.

He leads to the point at which language becomes opaque, depthless, and the things it would name are likewise thickened and turned mysterious. Language and the world are now joined at the point where the usual notion of relation, as it is measured by the self who speaks and writes, is suspended. Language now resembles the mute things it would lift into speech, and those things now rumble and roll as though they were carried like wrack on the storm; it is the world that has come apart, the order and stucture that held things in their place. And who is the writer but the one who would become with the world and with language there where this relation is opened and exposed (and it is even, as Blanchot says, without itself).

Neither One Nor the Other

Let us enter this relation. Draw writing (and reading) towards a practice of thinking that seeks not comprehension – the attempt to set everything in its place, to affirm the cosmic order – but to remember what is impossible to endure without being lost. Now the whole is broken from the whole, relation from relation. What remains is an open wound, an exposition that is also thought.

When Blanchot places increasing emphasis on the notion of the neuter in his work, it is in order to understand the way in which the events upon which he focuses involves a kind of bending back of time which perpetually folds and unfolds the writing self. Etymologically, the word neuter refers to that which is neither one nor the other – a neither nor that is another name for the way in which the self and the pre-personal milieu of which it is a fold belongs to the order of power and possibility and to the experience that can only be named by letting words slide from the binary opposite that seems to grant them their meaning (possible/impossible, activity/passivity, etc.).

To write of powerlessness and impossibility – or to write, with Blanchot, of writing, of reading, of thinking, of the relation without relation, is to attempt to find expressions, words, adequate to witness what rushes away in perpetual inadequacy. How can it be named, as it demands the capitulation of what we ordinarily call thought? And how can it be thought in turn, brought to words when it is from the stability of meaning that it flees?

A Primal Scene?

Without being able to answer these questions I would like to turn to the most beautiful passage in all of Blanchot. Let me quote at length from The Writing of the Disaster:

(A primal scene?) You who live later, close to a heart that beats no more, suppose, suppose this: the child – is he seven years old, or eight perhaps? – standing by his window, drawing the curtain and, through the pane, looking. What he sees: the garden, the wintry trees, the wall of a house. Though he sees, no doubt in a child's way, his play space, he grows weary and slowly looks up toward the ordinary sky, with clouds, grey light – pallid daylight without depth.

What happens then: the sky, the same sky, suddenly open, absolutely black and absolutely empty, revealing (as though the pane had broken) such an absence that all has since always and forevermore been lost therein – so lost that therein is affirmed and dissolved the vertiginous knowledge that nothing is what there is, and first of all nothing beyond. The unexpected aspect of this scene (its interminable feature) is the feeling of happiness that straightaway submerges the child, the ravaging joy to which he can bear witness only by tears, an endless flood of tears. He is thought to suffer a childish sorrow; attempts are made to console him. He says nothing. He will live henceforth in the secret. He will weep no more.

('There should be silence around this text, white borders, not writing.' – 'True, true, but with what does Blanchot himself surround it?' – 'Why do refuse to meet Blanchot's writing at its own level, at the level of literature?' – 'Because it is not only that, literature; because it meditates on the act of writing as it divides itself and becomes more and less than an act. Meditates, and knows it must do so through a practice of commentary that verges on philosophy.

'Neuter: another meaning of this term, for Blanchot, is that his work will come to cross generic divides because fiction and philosophy are not two kinds of discourse with respect to the demand of writing, not ultimately. Nor is it that they are the same, or can be collapsed into one another. A philosopher, too, might write and think about writing. But only to the extent that her thought responds to the impossible: that it is risked in its tone, its style; that it is made flesh like the avatar of a god, who has forgotten who she was.

'Each time, in Blanchot's essays, it is interruption and the impossible that matter, and "the thought of the impossible, proper to it", as one scholar has commented. Blanchot himself writes of "a kind of reserve in thought itself, a thought not allowing itself to be thought in the mode of appropriative comprehension". But it is also this thought that Blanchot attempts to welcome in his fiction. Perhaps one might say, as Blanchot said of Paulhan, that all his works, fictional or not, are récits insofar as they are attuned to the same kind of event.')

Of course, the term 'primal scene' is familiar from Freud, who uses it to refer to the witnessing of a traumatising event. A 'scene' which, in Freud's later work, need not have a real point of anchorage. Such traumas, according to Freud are constitutive of human existence, even if the way in which they occur remains ultimately contingent. But the child of Freud's From the History of an Infantile Neurosis, the famous 'Wolfman' case study where the idea of the primal scene is first introduced, is only eighteen months old; Blanchot's is seven or eight – much older.

Blanchot makes a few scattered remarks on childhood in his work; it 'is itself fascinated', he writes in The Space of Literature: the child experiences the world without separating itsef from it as a subject. Too, the child is fascinated by its mother; it is not yet fully individuated. But this, presumably, is the experience of a youngchild; Blanchot's child already seems to inhabit the purpose filled world of the day in which the window, the curtain, his play space have a place.

What is it, then, that the child witnesses? Perhaps something of that fascinating dimension by which he was once entirely enclosed: that plenum marked by a wholly absorbed fascination which did not permit yet of a divide between the subject and the object of experience. He experiences an impossible return to an infancy for which he is already too old.

Perhaps one might say something similar for the writer, who is likewise close to the impersonal life of childhood, if there is such a thing. Of a life, as Deleuze would write – the preindividuated life of a very small child. Then the fissuring Blanchot recalls, as the 'primal scene' of his experience of writing, is only a way of figuring the movement of personal life into another current. Writing involves a Nachtraglichkeit of this first encounter with the indeterminable and the incessant, the perpetual reopening of a sky without stars.

Tone

But it is not only this. Literary authorship, explains Blanchot in his critical work, involves a moment in which the writer must silence an empty murmuring, making a firm and decided decision to make something of the experience over to which, a moment before, he was delivered. The active side of writing begins with a breaking away from fascination, from that sliding that sweep away the temporal order in which tasks can be accomplished. Searching for silence, for a firm beginning is the author's way of assuming his authorship, drawing it from the fascination in which it seems hopelessly mired.

The search for silence is an attempt to escape another kind of silence – the active, arrhythmical murmuring that resounds in theimpersonal life Blanchot calls dying. The 'primal scene' that Blanchot presents in visual terms (albeit as he leads vision to its blindspot), may also be presented acoustically as a rumbling …  This is what is 'heard' (is this the word?) by the discerning reader in the book; it is that tone which indicates the joining of life to impersonal life, of time to its absence. A trembling tone, because this joining is also a disjoining – a relation without relation, Blanchot will call it – insofar as it no longer depends upon the form of the unity of the self.

It is this tone that calls forward another reader in the reader. The reader has to be lead by the work into a familiar experience of reading before she is turned from that experience by the tone of the work as it reverberates. The narrative that would speak of the vicissitudes of a character enfolded by a plot, now let speaks only of the indeterminable – of that event that does not happen in a story, but haunts the events that are recounted therein. The character is only a placeholder, enduring as a space in which fascination has caught a gaze or an ear. The character's predicament is that of the author; he becomes the author's proxy as he undergoes the experience of writing. 'Virgil, that's Broch', he writes in The Book to Come of The Death of Virgil.   

'It – the Sea'

We can witness this experience in the way Blanchot rewrites the opening sentence of Thomas the Obscure in The Step Not Beyond.

From where does it come, this power of uprooting, of destruction or change, in the first words written facing the sky, in the solitude of the sky, words by themselves without prospect or pretense: "it – the sea"?

The novel (and the récit on which it is based) actually begins 'Thomas sat down and looked at the sea.' It becomes clear that for Blanchot, writing so many years later, Thomas is a name for the delimitation of the 'il', the 'subject' of writing, the traumatic opening of the relation without relation, the attempt to give it form. Indeed, this is also the case for the whole book, which responds to the event of writing and brings it to speech.

An event, however, that is without terminus and without beginning – scarcely an event, but a kind of return, a repetition that makes of author and reader the 'il' without contour. The narrative is only a way of determining this repetition, of giving it shape. But a shape that, with Blanchot's prose, is also liable to become undone. 'Do not hope, if there lies your hope – and one must suspect it – to unify your existence, to introduce into it, in the past, some coherence, by way of the writing that disunifies'.

Who speaks in Blanchot's fiction? Rather, what speaks, or what is given to speech, reverberating in the tone that the form imposed upon the incessant by the author allows, murmuring along the corridors of sentences and paragraphs as they seem to give onto an interior labyrinth, the 'itself' of an event without term. If there is a kind of progress in Blanchot's work, in his récits and his essays on writing, it lies in the attempt to allow this tone to resound as the juncture of what we are made to understand as reading, relation, thinking etc. and their double.

The tone, the way a text trembles, murmurs and roars in silence is an experience of the neuter that requires that the meaning of ordinary words need to be set apart from themselves if they are to keep memory of the primal scene Blanchot would witness. Now readers are to listen without understanding, to think without comprehending, knowing that writing and reading are the cousins of other experiences in which the event seems to break the ordinary course of time.

Who writes in Blanchot's critical writing, in his philosophical researches and his fragmentary work? The writer perpetually drawn to the limits of experience, whose oeuvre is an attempt to live at the border of writing. Can a way of living likewise be understood to reverberate with the night, 'absolutely black and absolute empty', with the void? Does a life also have a kind of tone as it allows impersonal life to roll like thunder across it?

The Space of Writing

'Maurice Blanchot, novelist and critic was born in 1907. His life is entirely devoted to literature and to the silence unique to it'. But what does devotion entail? What might it mean to be a friend of Blanchot? A lover? In one sense, one might think, nothing at all; writing – as this names the coming together of activity and passivity – need not occupy all of your life. But in another sense, writing is what fascinates the writer and marks him out; he belongs to its space whether or not he is engaged in its activity. Writing is a demand, an exigence, as well as being an activity, and the writer knows its rumbling call even when he has left his study and put all literary ambition behind him.

Bident's admirable biography lets us reconstruct the events and relationships of Blanchot's life – the sister to whom Blanchot showed his writings, his largely episolatory affair with Denise Rollin, his poor health … But writing is not one task among others for Blanchot. 'Entirely devoted' – perhaps this phrase suggests something more – that, the experience writing alters relationships, drawing the author towards particular commitments, which might be called ethical and political.

What effort did it cost him not to see his visiting scholars, or to accede to the demands of the great machines of publicity? Perhaps very little; perhaps a great deal. But what effort did it cost him not to see his friends? Lydia Davis evokes 'the central biographical connundrum of M. Blanchot's existence – his bodily absence, his unwilingness to present himself to others except in letters and phone calls, his unwillingness to be depicted visually'.

Mme. Levinas remembers how Blanchot let her stay in his apartment during the war, while he lived with his brother. 'I didn't stay there for long, only a fortnight or so. I didn't want to put him in jeopardy', she tells Malka. 'You know, he didn't want to be seen!' Edmund Jabes tells an interviewer he never met Blanchot, whom he regarded as a friend since the 1960s; he wanted to, but his suggestion was declined; their entire communication took the form of the exchange of letters.

Levinas in an interview: 'Blanchot is not an ordinary man, a man whom you can meet on the street.' May 2nd 1998, and Derrida recounts a dream to a correspondent. '"we" (?) are received by Blanchot. He makes us wait, something secret is going on in his apartment. I find him looking well and, a little irritated by the wait he has imposed, I eagerly inspect the premises'. Even Derrida, who often spoke to Blanchot at least once a year by phone, is curious about the everyday life of the friend he does not see.

How should we understand Blanchot's withdrawal? We must remember he is a man in poor health. In the early 1970s, we learn from Bident, Blanchot writes to his friend announcing his withdrawal from society; he moves in with his brother and sister-in-law, whom he outlives and remains until his death in 2003. Admirers write to ask to meet Blanchot and receive the same answer. 'Though I might wish it otherwise, the conditions of my work make it impossible for us to meet …' In the same period, as Blanchot writes to a correspondent in 1989, 'I no longer see even my closest friends'. Is this such a surprise for a man in extremely poor health in his early 80s? Paul de Man recalls being rushed to complete his contribution to a collection of writings on Blanchot published in 1966, since Blanchot was said to be dying.

But still there are publications through the 70s and 80s- the great fragmentary works; the political testimonies The Unavowable Community and Intellectuals Under Scrutiny as well as shorter works. And even where there are not, Blanchot still feels himself, I think, close to the experience of writing. Responding to the question, 'why write?' in 1984, he writes 'In the space of writing – writing, not writing – here I sit bent over, I cannot do otherwise …' In writing's space, its remove – Blanchot's seclusion from the cultural and scholarly industry is also what writing demands. Writing or not, he remains in the remove in which writing enfolds him. And this is so right up to the end, although the publications become fewer; until The Instant of My Death, published in 1994 (still nearly a decade before Blanchot's death) comes towards us from the sunset.

What is the significance of Blanchot's retreat? Let us not confuse it with the effects of illness. I think the greatest biographical enigma of Blanchot's life lies in the way he sought to bear witness to writing. What lets itself be seen in the hollow of this absence? Writing's demand, writing's exigence.

That There is Writing

Two Thoughts at Once

Bacchylides, Blanchot remembers, says that because human beings are finite they must harbour two thoughts at once. Two thoughts, ways of thinking, as they presumably accord with what Blanchot calls the possible and the impossible. Blanchot attempts to sustain a difference which will not close up into a unity – a vacillating movement which does not come to rest. As such, one cannot speak simply of two orders of thought, or of two different ways of thinking; nor can the possible be simply counterposed to the impossible.

There is thought as comprehension, the attempt to understand the world, and then the experience where thought is exposed to what thought and the thinker cannot enclose. There is the thinker who throws thought like a falcon up from his arm – who hunts by thought in obscure forests, and the subject of a thinking that seizes him in its talons. But both experiences of thought must be thought together: the hunter is hunted in turn; the forest crowds up and fills his vision and he is torn apart by a thought too great for him to bear.

We must begin with words, for Blanchot, in the midst of words, since it is language which grants the possibility of thought, of thinking. But this possibility is doubled by what is named by the impossible: the corridors of prose risk turns and detours; byways of thought become overgrown, and the forest path leads not to Heidegger's clearing but to a labyrinth of branches that cover the sky. The thinker is lost because he is lost from himself. Who is that wanders in his place, lost before he has composed a line?

The Tone of Writing

There is an experience of language that reveals itself in a certain tone, says Blanchot; the work trembles, and something is indicated rather than said. What speaks? Language thickened and congealed; the clot of language as it blocks the arteries of what is ordinarily understood as sense. Now the heart of meaning beats no more; there is no commerce between language and what it names. Language is impassable; every word has been put out of use.

But now, in its impossibility, language is pressed upon itself, thickened, until it resembles the things of which it would speak. Words lie idled like the tanks in Stalker's Zone; sentences place great parentheses around themselves. Language refers, it means – and yet by way of meaning, it indicates what is impossible to say: the fact that it is more than a medium, that it does more than convey.

Wittgenstein: 'the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world is not any proposition in language, it is the existence of language itself' (via). The existence of language, that it is and that there is communication, which is more than the content of what is said – isn't this a way of understanding what is meant by impossibility? Only if the existence of language is understood to be parenthesised with the existence of its user; if it is known that no one speaks in the place of the one who would make language do his bidding.

No one speaks – but how is this marked in prose? How is it marked even after the writer has recovered strength after its lapse? By itstone. It is tone in which the difference between the possible and the impossible are maintained; by tone the prose work brings to birth its secret récit.

And now I imagine the work of prose unfurling the secret of its inception, a bloom opening by darkness. Unless it is the night that blooms from the heart of the day of meaning and the sky is flooded black. That there is language. That language might speak of its own address. What sort of speech act theory could lay bare this event? One risked as it is writing, which performs what it cannot say directly. Not a theory, then, but a kind of practice: both at once and neither one nor the other.

Then I can write as a theorist of experiencing language, but I must experience it, too. Am I a practitioner, then, and that first of all? But in practice I am also commenting, doubling up what happens as language becomes language. My practice is already a repetition; to write is always to rewrite; to work by beginning over. And then it is also a kind of theory – an elaboration, that while bent upon its own occurence must unbend like an inchworm who moves forward on the branch.

To move thus is also to theorise; theory and practice are folded each into the other. But this means the theorist is also a practitioner; and writing must always re-echo with the saying that precedes it, the fact that, as language, it is more than a tool which gives itself to our disposal. Then all writing is practice and theory both; or writing is exclusively neither one nor the other. Any word, any sentence might open the difference between language and itself, that is, between the possible and the impossible as language, across language: the neuter.

What is fiction? What is poetry? That Zone in which words lie abandoned and new rules apply. Who is the poet, the writer of fiction? The Stalker who's lost his way in the Zone and is unable to lead others there. What has he made? He does not know. And how to find his way there? That, too, he has forgotten, being exiled from his work.

Let's say I write of the damp in my flat, of the yard that spreads before me; I write – and that damp, that yard are sea- or water-changed like the items over which Tarkovsky's camera pans in the film. The items of Stalker's nightstand are there in the water, ancient. And so with every detail, with every 'occasional' circumstance my writing sets itself back into the past, into the Zone which is only a name for that past that writing endlessly recalls and repels behind it.

Dream of the philosopher who, beginning a paper, loses herself in her occasional remarks, or in the examples she uses to illuminate a point. But dream, too, of the writer who becomes a philosopher by writing; who abandons the simple romanticism that lets him think that critics are only failed writers.

Arrogance of the practitioner: to think, after ready out his poem, his prose, not to expect questions as exacting as those faced by the philosophy. But then imagine the philosopher who can give no account, who has journeyed like Kurtz to the heart of darkness and has gone mad there. Then is that what the philosopher is to become, a mutterer in darkness like Marlon Brando's Kurtz? Only if the practitioner, passing him on the way up the river, becomes a speaker in the full light of the day, accountable for every word he says.

Between Parentheses

Very simply: Blanchot both allows language to double itself, to become its own image, as he would put it, and comments on this doubling; he is a practitioner and a theorist of writing, whose intertwining of fiction and theory in his fragmentary works continues a process that began when he started Thomas the Obscure in 1930.

I will try in vain to represent him to myself, he who I was not and who, without wanting to, began to write, writing (and knowing it then) in such a way that the pure product of doing nothing was introduced into the world and into his world. That happened 'at night'. During the day there were the daytime acts, the day to day words, the day to day writing, affirmations, values, habits, nothing that counted and yet something that one had confusedly to call life. The certainty that in writing he was putting between parentheses precisely this certainty, including the certainty of himself as the subject of writing, led him slowly, though right away, into an empty space whose void (the barred zero, heraldic) in no way prevented the turns and detours of a very long process.

These lines close to opening of The Step Not Beyond. But 'Doing nothing' – how is it that writing can be understood according to this phrase? To write is to act – to produce words on the page. An act, Hegel says, that depends upon a kind of negation; that of which I want to write is transformed so as to reach the page. Negativity is recuperated; the positivity of words is the result of a labour that involved a plunge into the night of negativity. But this night abides in another kind of writing, that seeks to suspend the work of negation, understood as what allows the death of its 'object' to give way to its resurrection on the page.

(And one should remember that the 'object' is co-constituted by what the process that allows one to evoke it: isn't this Nietzsche's lament, who would attempt to make language sing, to make incarnate, insofar as it can, what he discovered in musical dissonance? Tragedy and language, time and the return, body and the will: all are thought, by Nietzsche, close to the experience of music and of language as it tries and fails to give body to the musical.

Dionysian music, for Nietzsche, as is emphasised in Schmidt's interesting study, does not seek what Nietzsche called revenge against time; it lets joy and mourning coincide, and loss and fullness to be present at once. Nietzsche's problem is to lead language to the 'site of dissonance', as Schmidt calls it, 'to the very site of the pain and contradiction of life that get plastered over by the so-called truths of religion and philosophy'.

For Blanchot, of course, there could be no site of dissonance except in language; the musical must be thought of first of all through language, and not as its alternative. But perhaps the musical names, too, the doubling of language upon itself – its withdrawal to wander in its own corridors without reference to the world. Writing lost in its own forest, its own labyrinth, and without that clearing in which truth would bring the world to light.

Pain should have sung, not spoken, writes Nietzsche in the preface to The Birth of Tragedy. Sung – but as the Sirens sing in every word, for Blanchot, and any word can detach itself from the order of what is usually called sense. But can it be called song, that errancy, that wandering in which another experience of truth reveals itself? To write in lieu of truth, but not mourning its absence. In lieu – and wandering in truth's long shadow, the dark path that stretches for as long as the absence of time to which writing belongs.)

This 'other' writing aims to incarnate the thing itself in words – to make language itself into a thing, heavy and obdurate, so that language is no longer the medium that would permit of the transparency of communication. And in this process, the ordinary existence of the one who writes the word 'I' is likewise suspended so that it is no longer certain what it means to consider the writer as a writing subject.

There is a kind of bracketing instead, of 'the daytime acts, the day to day words, the day to day writing, affirmations, values, habits, nothing that counted and yet something that one had confusedly to call life'. Ordinary life is placed between parentheses; the author is given to dying in some important way, or seeks to remain in death, on the side of the object not yet transformed into words, into the ideality of meaning.

In this way, 'the pure product of doing nothing was introduced into the world and into his world'; but this is not the result of a deliberate effort: '… he who I was not and who, without wanting to, began to write': to write is to suspend what depends on the work of negation, letting the 'I' gives way to the 'il', to the 'he', or 'it'. Personal life gives way to dying; time to the return of the incessant.

Blanchot allows the word writing, like the word récit a double meaning – it refers to a determinate activity, or a body of work, but it can also name the event that gives itself as the prior hollowing of the writer's self. It names a 'doing nothing', a worklessness on the hither side of the time of projects and accomplishments.

To write as a question of writing, question that bears the writing that bears the question, no longer allows you this relation to the being- understood in the first place as tradition, order, certainty, truth, any form of taking root – that you received one day from the past of the world, domain you had been called upon to govern in order to strengthen your 'Self' although this was as if fissured, since the day when the sky opened upon its void.

This passage, from the same fragment in The Step Not Beyondmeditates on the composition of Blanchot's first novel. How should we read them? As an account of how the young Blanchot, the political journalist, concerned precisely with tradition, order and certainty – with the root of France, with the Monarchy, with Catholicism was turned from these certainites?

This is at least part of it. By writing, Blanchot unlearnt his radicalism – how could his life be fixed to a root?, or, more broadly, to any system of values, order and certainty, all truth and enrootedness. The self was not to be unified; writing confirmed the fissure by which the self was set back into what it could not accomplish or overcome. Gradually, 'by turns and detours', Blanchot will draw the consequences of the demand of writing, and attempt to live and think as a response to this event.

The Test of Writing

The Merciful Surplus of Strength

Like so many words in his theoretical lexicon (or at least that lexicon he takes over from ordinary words), Blanchot doubles up the word writing, letting it name a state in which the self finds itself unable to gather its forces together as well as the activity of putting words on the page. Is this why he writes so often of exhaustion and affliction – of those states which likewise set the self back into its incapacity, bringing it face to face with what it cannot do? There are also, it is true, more positive moods ('we should know the disaster by joyful names') – joys, lightnesses – which are also the topic of the récits and the criticism, but these likewise are never simply undergone in the first person.

Each time, the act of writing depends upon what Kafka has called 'a merciful surplus of strength' that returns the writer to the 'I can' that opens the world according to what is possible for a human being. Each time, strength lifts the writer from the quagmire, from those swamplike moods in which the self is not yet gathered together. Moods which, if not uncommon – the everyday itself, says Blanchot, can also be doubled up, giving itself to be experienced as a drifting and vacancy, as that boredom which suspends the relation of the self to itself – are too quickly forgotten, like the night mists that vanish with morning.

These moods, one might think, are also forgotten by the writer who attempts to commit them to narrative; if to write is to draw on the 'merciful surplus of strength' that returns to the writer the capacity to write, then that same ability to be able separates itself from the mood in which nothing is possible, not even memory. Unless that same experience – understood, now, as a test or a trial (but who is tested? who is on trial?) – leaves its mark within memory, one upon which the writer might draw so as to take it up in narration.

Here, of course, the writer will not be aware of what he is doing. The act of writing banishes the exhaustion that relents for a moment to allow him to write – but there is still a way that it might carry with it a cloud of non-action, that it fails in an important way to achieve itself, and marks this non-achievement in the finished work of prose. For a time, for the writer, writing seems activity itself – it is only activity; Kafka writes 'The Judgement' all in one go, in one night, his legs sore from being cramped up beneath his desk; but there is then a falling away; the burst of writing soon ends, leaving the writer as before, waiting for the 'merciful surplus of strength' to catch him on its rising wave.

Then the drama of writing has little to do with personal initiative. Unless initiative – the freedom to write, to create a finished book – is given, not taken; unless it is understood to depend upon a kind of passivity with respect to the task at hand.

The Test of Inspiration

It is in this sense that writing always implies something like a trial or a test. That is, the attunement Blanchot seems to feel is important to the author is already a trial, breaking the writer from the linearity of time. Writing is always set back into this trial, drawing deep upon it even as it seems to leap forward as activity. Certainly, inspiration is that gathering of strength before a creative act; but isn't it also that wandering exile, the banishment from the time of production – of time as a medium of production, and from the self-relation that would allow the self to assume its agency? 

It is in this way that Blanchot recasts the experience of inspiration, which has always involved, in its traditional formulations, elements of passivity and activity. Unique in Blanchot, however, is the way in which the relation between those elements is understood. No one, I think, has set them apart so radically, and no one attempted to think what has been separated thus as part of the unitary movement of writing.

The experience of inspiration has always been concealed by the figure of the Muse, of the god; it was understood as a gift from afar, by which the Poet was called. With Blanchot, it is just such a gift, but one, now, deprived of the assurances of its origin. The modern writer (but this is not Blanchot's term) is not sure what to write, or how; he is not sure that what he has begun is a true beginning, and must entrust himself, instead, to the bare act of writing – an act which also involves non-action as it emerges from the test of inspiration.

Martrydom, Witnessing

In a sense, nothing other is at issue when Homer invokes the Muses than in the passage Kafka writes on the 'merciful surplus of strength'.

What did Homer suppose himself to be doing when he wrote (when he sang)? According to an interesting book by Finkelkraut, which I paraphrase here, he takes himself to be reporting the truth. No, Homer did not see what happened – he was not present at Troy, and many even say he was blind, but the Muses saw everything; they were eyewitnesses to the events. Even though Homer knows what occurred in broad outline, he calls upon the Muses to help him when his expertise fails. There is a point when he sings:

Tell me now, you Muses who have your homes on Olympus -you are gods, and attend all things and know all things, but we hear only the report and have no knowledge -tell me who were the leaders of the Danaans and their rulers.

True enough, the Muses supply him with details he had no means of knowing.

With Kafka, it is no longer a matter of calling on otherworldly assistance. Inspiration, now, draws upon the hidden, unexpected assistance of writing – the way in which suffering can be doubled up as it is experienced, then written. Only to write is also a relief from suffering – it is the merciful surplus that propels writing, that gives it strength, until there is the risk of writing in bad faith, where the figure of the Author usurps the more humble figure of the writer, part of whom is always lost before the act of writing can begin.

This loss gives nothing that the writer can know. If, as is certainly the case, the trial of writing is also a kind of witnessing, a vigilance – what is seen, what is experienced, never belongs to the order of knowledge and not simply because the trial is only undergone by a single individual, affording only a single, limited experience of what happened. Rather, the witness is in lieu of himself; vigilance happens in the absence of self-relation, as an exposure that has not closed itself into an experience. It happens in an event which is without determinacy, without limit, that happens, if it can be said to happen, in the suspension of time understood as a medium of production.

Nothing then is known – at least not directly. There is no Muse to reveal what the writer cannot see. Then the writer, like Homer, is blind; he must be. Blind and without the prospect of seeing what lies ahead of him. Then writing, the act of writing, is a leap in the dark. A leap of a kind of faith, and which keeps memory of that solitary passion, that martyrdom of witnessing that happens upstream of action.

Darkness and Forgetting

Helen in the Iliad and Alcinous in the Odyssey both say the same thing: it was the desire of the gods to grant material for a song that led to the terror of the Trojan wars. Helen first of all (she is speaking of Paris, also, knowing that they were the cause of the war to come): 'On us two Zeus has set a doom of misery, so that in time to come we can be themes of song for men of future generations.' Alcinous claims the gods destroyed Troy and the Acheans 'that there might be a song in the ears of men yet unborn'.

The gods set the Trojan wars in motion to await the poet who would call upon the Muses to retell the events. But why did the gods, who saw everything, want to hear them told again? And what of the Muses, gods among the gods – why, if they were the ones who would give the poet the gift of song would they want to bring about the wars? Divine caprice? Or was it to hear the changes wrought by the poet, to experience the surprise of the events happening anew in the song?

Whatever the answer, we also find the equivalent in Blanchot's fictions. Claudia says in When The Time Comes, 'No one here wants to belong to a récit [a narrative]'; this phrase is repeated inWaiting for Oblivion. The conclusion (is it a conclusion?) of The Madness of the Day: 'No more récits, never again.' Helen and Alcinous suspect that what has befell them did so for the benefit of the singers in the greater halls – for Homer himself. Blanchot's characters want only to disentangle themselves from linear narration, letting the word récit, like the word writing, double itself up, naming at once a literary genre, and narration in general, and the non-narratable: the event that does not belong to the order of knowable, recountable experience.

No more récits - but why? Because there are no more gods. The Muses were said to be daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. Some asked how, if this were the case, the poet could call upon the Muses as eyewitnesses of what happened before the birth of Zeus. Inventive poets gave another genealogy for the Muses, claiming they were born from Uranos and Gaia, gods from an earlier stage in the theogony. The Muses would have to come first of all, else how could a singer like Hesiod compose his epic? But then the theogony can only reach back to the Muses, recounting their birth and their progeny. Before them, darkness, the forgotten.

When there are no gods, it is this darkness that rolls forward in the writer, which bears him. It is the forgotten that, retreating from knowledge, from the measure of knowledge, knows itself in the words of the writer whom it has chosen. Why, once again, did the gods want to give material to Homer's epics?

I think it was this: the gods, all-powerful, receive something over which they can exert no power. They learn once again of the wars of Troy and, with Hesiod's Theogony, of their own birth. What else do they learn? That there is something in the song which escapes and threatens to destroy the gods themselves. In one sense, Homer and Hesiod give way to a generation of philosophers who agree that the epic poets have already made the gods all too human. But in another – although this is an experience that will become increasingly closed to philosophy – it is darkness, the forgotten that returns in place of the many gods of Hesiod and the Olympus of Homer. 

Crises of History

Swimming in the Real

'As he swam, he pursued a sort of reverie in which he confused himself with the sea. The intoxication of leaving himself, of slipping into the void, of dispersing himself in the thought of water, made him forget every discomfort …' What kind of sea is this, and what kind of swimmer? Blanchot's Thomas swims in an ideal sea – a sea that he can pass through because of his capacity to think. Is he really swimming? Is he really risking himself? He reminds me of Scholasticus, who was said to have learnt to swim from books, on dry land, and when he swam drowned at once. But Thomas's ideal sea quickly becomes real; he nearly drowns … What, then, of Blanchot's account of narrative, and its risks for writers, for readers, as they attempt to tell by way of a récit of that becoming impersonal that is also implied by our relation to language? I would like to consider this question alongside a recent post of Sinthome's.

For Blanchot, we relate to the world symbolically, through language. But this is scarcely a relation, for it is set so deeply enough within us it no longer we no longer constitute a subject that would stand over and above an object (the referent, the state of affairs) – what then? It is the condition of relation; the medium that allows us to open our eyes and see. As theorised and practiced by Blanchot (the two, in this case, are not so different), the récit(tale, narrative) pertains to that telling in which this condition breaks down – in which relation, by way of the text (the récit as a literary genre, relating a particular event in the past) is broken from its object and from its subject too. No relation between them, no condition of relation, except for what he calls the 'relation without relation' as it points to the 'there is' of language as it is broken from teller and what is to be told. Unless what is to be told is only that breaking – only language as it attains itself, its own being, its thickness, its density. But note this 'there is' is reached by way of language. That it depends upon a certain experience of meaning and happens by way of it.

Some writers are unafraid to let the narrative voice speak in place of a narrator's voice, where this names now language telling of itself. Writers who, by way of the events they report, by way of them, also tell of this other telling, this non-pulsed return of the itself of language. In Blanchot's récits, a kind of fascination seizes you (if it does) and carries you through the pages. Until it is what is told by way of the story that fascinates – by way, for example, of the insect of Kafka's story as it hovers, as Steve says, between the symbolic and the non-symbolic (between language and the fact that there is language). Perhaps it is a cockroach. But it is also more than an insect, for it speaks of a belonging to the same 'there is', to language as it flees in the opposite direction to the reader and seems to lead her into the page. Reading becomes a risk.

After the Fact

The French après coup can be translated as 'after the fact'; after – a little too late; regretfully. Something has happened over which we are helpless. Hyphenate après coup and you have the French translation of Nachträglichkeit, that deferred action that presents what was not evident the first time. It is thus that for Freud a primal scene reveals itself – after the fact, not at once; it can be discerned and deduced from its effects: it is the task of psychoanalysis to uncover that primordial event.

The author who adds a preface to his récit risks defusing what happened in it by linking it too strongly to his name. The narrative voice risks being confused with the narrating voice, and that with the author's own, who has forgotten the risk he took in writing therécit that made him no longer a subject and the referent no longer that object he could communicate through prose.

He has usurped the no one who wrote in his place – that absence of self considered in relation to the experience of language, to that writing without power, that writing without being able to (sans pouvoir). A paradoxical expression – for isn't there precisely a text, a written text that produces a writer, an author?

Certainly, but there is another experience that belongs to writing, and it is this the notion of the récit captures – that beside any telling, any roman (novel) there is also a récit, that secret tale of how language became opaque, how it withdrew into itself, how a relation unravelled itself from its terms and unravelled them, its terms, subject and object.

A récit within the roman, accompanying it, that the reader senses, and the critic – Blanchot – would expose. A secret story, a secret telling wherein language is concerned only with itself, and this by way of the surface of the text, its meaning. As the details of the telling – the glass of water the narrator would fetch, the snowflakes that brush against the window – are part of something massively dense, something unreal. As they point beyond themselves as to the plinth upon which the artwork rests. A plinth that is greater than the work and dwarfs it, as it sometimes does with Giacometti. The material support of an artwork that exceeds it, engulfs it and thickens itself into infinity.

The Idyllic Law

What is the significance of the reference to events on the historical stage in Blanchot's récits - to the Munich accords in DeathSentence, for example, or the bombed synagogue on the rue de la Victoire mentioned in passing in When the Time Comes? Here is Leslie Hill:

Blanchot's récits do not recount historical events, even when those events correspond to crucial turning points in modern history, like the ill-fated signature of the Munich accords that forms the political backdrop toDeath Sentence, or the bombing of the synagogue in the rue de la Victorie in Paris in October 1941, recalled almost exactly half-way through When the Time Comes. Such events are nevertheless present in the margins of Blanchot's texts, but not as episodes in a completed narrative sequence. Events like these are not just crises in history, Blanchot suggests; they are crises of history, and they challenge the possibility of narrative itself.

Crises of history: is this a name for what happens in the récits? Is crisis the word, with its etymological links to the idea of division, of a cut? A break in history, in the order of history – is this the equivalent of what happens in the récit to narration? Is a crisis, a division, already marked in the récit with respect to that narration that is the possibility of history?

Questions Blanchot seems to address himself in his short essay 'After the Fact' when he reflects on his early story 'The Idyll' that seems so strangely to anticipate what was to come. Eerie scenes of work without purpose, where prisoners take stones dug out of a mountain in the heat of the day, and rebury them from where they have been dug. Executions assured by a sense of absolute justice, with kindness, even, but with a sense that it must be done.

'The Idyll', Blanchot says, cannot be read as an augur of the terrible events to come. The story of the stranger, the exile, cannot be read allegorically; the story, to this extent, remains 'astranger to itself'; it must not be reduced to its ostensible contents, 'to anything that can be expressed in any other way'. It remains obdurately itself; happy in itself without reference to historical events. '[I]t itself is the idyll', Blanchot writes, and a little further on, recalls the arguments from The Infinite Conversation that come together to constitute his theory of the récit.

… before all distinctions between form and content, between signifier and signified, even before the division between utterance and the uttered, there is the unqualifiable Saying, the glory of a 'narrative voice' that speaks clearly, without ever being obscured by the opacity or the enigma or the terrible horror of what it communicates.

A dense passage. Saying, the to-say, is Levinas's expression for the relation to the Other that is marked and remembered in all speech in writing, in the order of what is said. Marked so that it sets itself back from what is communication, from the contents of the said, but also from what can be said, insofar as this capacity rests upon the capacity of the 'I' to speak and write in its own name, to pull together past, present and future, synthesising them in the present of enunciation.

It is to this extent saying breaks with the economy of signs, with the distinction between signifier and signified, marking not to whatcan be said, but that it is said by the very fact that is addressed to another. This 'that' is saying as it accompanies and bears the said, even as the said seems analysable into signifier and signified. But of course, to remember Levinas, it is also what attests to the Other, the addressee, who escapes the order of being, insofar as the order is predicated on the form of the 'I', its subjectivity.

It is the Other who gives speech a direction and orientation – who calls speech from 'I' such that it reveals the play of the Other in the Same, the prior investment of the 'I' by the Other. As such, speech may be said to be responsible, and from the first – or, as Levinas says, from before the first; responsibility is pre-originary, to the extent that it precedes the interiority of the subject. Saying is that 'passivity beyond passivity' in which subjectivity is subjected to the Other.

The narrative voice is Blanchot's own expression, and to be contrasted to the voice of a particular narrator in literary fiction. It belongs, rather, to language itself – to that experience of language which, in the récit, doubles what is said, accompanying it with a narrative that bears upon the materiality of language itself, its heaviness or density as the words of which it is comprised are understood not as they lend themselves to the construction of a fictional world, but as they reveal their own stolid indifference to reference, their own withdrawal from sense (from a certain account of the measure of sense).

Language becomes imaginary, to use another Blanchotian word – that is, it pertains to the material substrate of language, to the impersonal grammatical forms and the heavy particularity of words in a natural language as they give themselves to be animated by speakers and writers, but also resist that animation, being themselves dead. Or rather, remembering Hegel's use of the word death as a synonym for that act of negation by which, through language the 'real' world is taken up into the 'ideal' world of language, those words remain in a dying that exceed death, and cannot be captured by negation.

Dying exceeds the measure of death, of negation. The imaginary exceeds the reality of the world that language, on Hegel's conception, makes possible: it is of this the narrative voice speaks, figuring dying and the imaginary in the episodes of the récit. Characters no longer quite coincide with themselves; events do not happen punctually; strange moods drift like fog through the events; what remain of dialogue seems to fall away from verisimilitude: the strangeness of the récits is due to that narrative voice that would allow its episodes to indicate a certain experience of language.

This is the law of the récit, as Blanchot identifies it. Its idyll, even as what is narrated is the idyllic law of the house reinforced by punishment, by absurd labour and beatings, administered with a smile, for this is what is supposed by its inhabitants to maintain its comfort and happiness.

Then the idyllic law of the récit - or perhaps what is usually called a récit – answers to a faith in the comfort, the luxury, the happiness of telling. That telling is possible, that hope will follow despair, and, as with the end of Kafka's story, after Gregor Samsa's death, his sister will leap up and stretch her young body in the sun.

Crises of History

In his essay on the récit in 'The Sirens' Song' (an essay that is also a récit, as perhaps all Blanchot's are), he will separate récit androman, allowing the latter to name the bright book of life that bears the confidence of telling, that has confidence in its ability to speak of all, of everything. And the récit? It names, now the impossibility of telling, of narration, and of the sense of what is usually meant by récit. It names, that is, what bears fidelity to what cannot be told.

The roman, then, answers to the order of the possible, of the voice of a narrator, of the said, the récit to the impossible, to the narrative voice, to saying … as does, of course, Blanchot's by turns creative, literary critical and philosophical oeuvre, all of which can be read, as he commented on the oeuvre of Paulhan, as a récit, as a series of récits. Then we must distinguish what is usually called therécit, a literary genre, and Blanchot's theoretical practice, which attempts to tell what it cannot. To run up against the impossible, and more than that – to indicate and remember it.

'[T]here can be no fiction story about Auschwitz', Blanchot writes; what happened there can be recounted only 'by the impossible witnesses, witnesses of the impossible' who can speak of what happened only singularly, 'in the singularity of each individual'. And Kofman, commenting on Blanchot: 'About Auschwitz and after Auschwitz no story is possible, if by a story one means: to tell a story of events which makes sense.'

Antelme only wrote one book, The Human Race, that tells unforgettably of his experiences in Ganderscheim and Dachau. If he had written another, he wrote to a friend, it would have been like a récit of Blanchot. One of those récits that spoke of the impossible in its own way. The récit, then, not only concerns an experience of language. Or it concerns that experience insofar as it is also bound up with what happened in the camps, in those crises of history that tore history in two. And it is peculiarly able to do so because of the way in which it works, because of its form.

In what sense can a récit witness an event? Think of the moods from which the recits' characters seem to emerge (and into which they often return), in the repeated actions that seem to break into a weird kind of eternity (Louise combing Claudia's hair in Whenthe Time Comes); and think, alongside them, of the bombed Synagogue on the rue de la Victoire, the Munich peace accords. The récit is obsessed with what returns as the indeterminable, the incessant – with what cannot be integrated by the order of narration that characterises the roman (even if every roman, as Blanchot shows, harbours a secret récit). Roman versus récit, the possible versus the impossible, death versus dying, saying versus the said … how is the relationship between these coupled terms, these crises of history to be thought?

Saying Sense

Sinthome quotes from Blanchot's Thomas. 'As he swam, he pursued a sort of reverie in which he confused himself with the sea. The intoxication of leaving himself, of slipping into the void, of dispersing himself in the thought of water, made him forget every discomfort …' Thomas enters an ideal sea, which quickly becomes real. He nearly drowns, but this does not disturb him as it should.

Sinthome comments that Thomas becomes impersonal, 'as he and the sea become the same. The sea within which he swims shifts from being the "ideal sea" to the "real sea". He fades as a distinct subject, carried along as he is by the tide'. This as part of Sinthome's discussion of receptivity where, he emphasises, world and the agent who acts must be thought together.

'[W]orld and agent are both precipitated out of this process like by-products, introducing a bit of order into the infinitely complex bramble of chaos'. This is Sinthome's 'slice within chaos' that marks 'the space of an engagement', which happens 'in between'. The relation, here, alters its terms; it is a question neither of agent nor world by themselves, but their interaction; information, understood as noun and a verb, marks the emergence of information from chaos. Information that is, as Sinthome says, 'always in-form-ation; or more simply, it is in formation. It is something perpetually coming-to-be'. And this, I think is how we can see the first term in the apparently binarisms I have drawn from Blanchot's oeuvre.

Sinthome goes further, showing how information, as verb, as noun, is that site in which we cannot distinguish the active from the passive as, for example, Kant does in the distinction between the spontaneity of the understanding and the passive receptivity of the aesthetic of intuition. This passivity beyond passivity, to borrow Blanchot's phrase involves both an aesthesis, understood etymologically as a sensing and that production of form that might be thought in terms of an aesthetic making. Sinthome gives us the example of the artist who gives form to the medium which in turn gives form to the artist, joining both aesthesis and what we know as aesthetics. The artist who in-forms and is herself in formation; a slice within chaos where each term – artist, medium is altered.

What does Blanchot's récit accomplish? The narration of this encounter, this slice within chaos. Of that passivity beyond passivity that recalls the originary production that is always at work in our receptivity. A production, however, that has to be understood differently from what Hegel calls work, since it is conceived on the basis of negation, which is insufficiently nuanced to understand the process of emergence that the récit narrates.

Mourning and Melancholy

In her beautiful book Mourning Becomes Law, which The Young Hegelian (his blog has gone!) inspired me to reread, Gillian Rose claims we need an activity beyond activity rather than Blanchot's passivity beyond passivity. Blanchot refuses, says Rose, the work of mourning – the labour of entering into that learning process through which one accepts one's complicity in structure of power, in tyranny without turning entirely away from them, remaking thereby my sense of myself, 'the bonding and boundaries between me and me, subject and subjectivity, singular and individual, non-conscious and conscious'. It is not that all wounds will be healed and the dead rise again, but that others can learn of their complicity in what happened, so that they can mourn and reintegrate what occurred – not all at once, but over time, and with difficulty. A necessary labour.

Then it is the integrity of the subject that must be kept – its subjectivity, its personhood, will and resoluteness; its capacity for reflective and involuntary action – its positing, its self-positing: this is what must be reachieved by that work that does not dissever the impossible from the possible, but thinks them together. The singular must become the particular, an instance; the nonsensical must be brought into the light of meaning so that melancholy is not infinite.

And here we might remember the Hegel Zizek presents in For They Know Not What They Do – not the strawman for whom the onroll of the dialectic sweeps up the totality, but the figure for whom history is about what is learned painfully and through terrible trials, who describes that Bildungsroman through which substance becomes subject, through which ever more complex self-positings succeed one another until … until what? Zizek's Hegel never finds rest in Absolute Knowledge. History asNachträglichkeit, a learning what was already there. TheBildungsroman that speaks of the whole of the past?

The Re-ject

A necessary labour, work? A long time ago, Sinthome wrote with great candour of his frustration (here I am understanding it in my own way) of those who are theoretically committed to x or y without living that same commitment, without their lives being risked by their 'work'. This is what being a psychoanalyst means for Sinthome. Risky work, work without quotation marks: a suffering person to be diagnosed and, if not 'cured', then led to that point at which life is once again possible. Work, however, that implicates those who are part of analysis, changing them in a manner very similar to what Sinthome describes as a 'space of an engagement', or the 'in between': '[W]e always want to treat the object of analysis as independent of our analysis of it and ourselves as independent of the object we engage with, not seeing the manner in which our engagement with that object produces it while it produces us.'

What kind of work does Blanchot's récit permit? It is not aBildungsroman, to be sure. In another post, Sinthome tells us how he recoils in horror when he is asked what is philosophy, or what his research is about. 'To ask what someone's research or philosophy is, is to ask them to simultaneously formulate a proposition and state the sense of that proposition. Yet I can say what I mean or mean what I say, but I cannot say what I meanand mean what I say.' Then I only know what I'm working on once I've finished work; the preface to a book, making sense of the project as a whole, comes after the fact, after the book is complete. I can only know the pro-ject as a re-ject, as Sinthome says; which means Nachträglichkeit is the law of the work.

This might remind us of Hegel, and the adventure of reading The Phenomenology of Spirit: the course of the dialectic is not given in advance; its onroll, totalising as it may appear does not emerge into clarity except as its particular phases come to an end. Can Hegel ever say the sense of what he says (language and that there is language)? Zizek's Hegel can; to say the sense of what he says means the dialectic is kept perpetually open. This is what means to say with Sinthome that all philosophies are lived – that thinking is experiential and experimental, a projection into a future whose course is unknown.

Philosophy discovers what it is as it proceeds. In this sense, is it so different from the Blanchotian récit? For the Blanchotian writer it is language itself that is of concern. It is the image of language which fascinates the writer – its material presence, its rhythms and sonorities, its grain, and perhaps every writer has something in her of the poet, for whom every word must also sound.

'As he swam, he pursued a sort of reverie in which he confused himself with the sea. The intoxication of leaving himself, of slipping into the void, of dispersing himself in the thought of water, made him forget every discomfort …' This passage from Blanchot is also an account of the experience of writing, of experience the reality of words, as it is indistinguishable from what he calls the imaginary. Words' reality, words become imaginary paralysing the movement of sense, idling every word, and joining every work to worklessness.

What can Blanchot offer in the face of Rose's argument? What risk? Language broken, the world in fragments, worklessness … a woeful vocabulary, that speaks only of failure. But perhaps, each time, these are way of naming another kind of work, one which, like philosophy (Hegelian philosophy) is ruled by Nachträglichkeit, and discovers itself only after the fact; one that is experiential and experimental. And one that speaks negatively of what Sinthome affirms as a 'space of engagement', the 'in between' or that 'slice of chaos' which, in the récit - naming a practice of fiction, but also, perhaps, a kind of theorising which keeps memory of the real conditions of production (of information as verb) – achieves a marriage of aesthesis and aesthetics. But what, then, is the relation of this kind of work to Hegelian work, or to what Rose, after Freud, calls the work of mourning? Do the récits, remembering the crises of history, accomplish their own kind of work?

A Slice of Chaos

Hypermnesis

The French literary genre called the récit typically bears upon an event that happened in the past, meditating upon its significance, aroman [novel] as events unfold in the present, the perpetual present of the novel. For the récit, in a sense, the event in question has not quite happened, not yet unfolded (like the wings, Ellisnotices, via Nabokov, on Samsa's back); the act of interpretation that belongs to its narration actualises different aspects of it, considering it first from this and then from that perspective. The narrator has not had done with the event; it has not yet been worked through; the récit is a search for that narrative form that is adequate to it, which witnesses what happened without betraying it.

The roman, on this schematic account, is at home with events and their unfolding; if something is worked through, it is according to the measure of cultivation, Bildung. The roman is aBildungsroman, and captures what is told from the perspective of a wise middle age. The follies of youth, the struggles of young man- and womanhood, and then achievement, security and comfort in the world: these are told by one who is older still, looking back. But perhaps we should say that that same author is never assured; looking back over her life, Gillian Rose still affirms the necessity of love's work – a labour that will not be completed even now, as she endures the death sentence of terminal cancer. Love's work – that's what's reaffirmed, and against those who would suppose that events cannot be worked through, can alter the same reflecting subject who would turn her gaze back over what happened.

In Blanchot's hands, the récit narrates something else; it keeps memory of what seems to defeat the measure of memory – of that hypermnesis that returns even when one thinks one has had done with it. The telling of a récit is a struggle with this revenant, a way of finding and failing to find a form adequate to its recurrence, since it happens so as to render every form inadequate, or rather to disclose form as part of what Sinthome has called in-formation, that process by which it is broken and remade in a labour very different to the mourning which, with Rose, becomes law. Who is quite sure, reading Blanchot's récits, what is happening? Who, upon finishing them, can say what has happened? Something does not come to completion, that withdraws itself from that struggle which is part of sense (of one account of sense).

The interminable, the incessant – a kind of dying, Blanchot calls it, in contrast it to that negation, that death which, for Hegel, drives the dialectic. A dying – or the perpetual rebirth of what will forces form open, and more, the very form of form, if it is still to be understood on the basis of a subject who endures what befalls it. The form of form – for it is in the third person that the self – the narrator, other 'characters' – endures what happens in a Blanchotian récit. 'No one here wants to be linked to a récit', says one of those characters; 'no more recits ever again' says the narrator of another. No more récits, but this said in a récit, by way of it. A telling, then, that remembers what cannot be told, since it is not endured in the first person. A telling of that dying that cannot be made to die, of the haunting of a narrative with what cannot be told directly, and that alters it constantly, sending it off course. Until the récit, even as it rounds itself off, completes itself, is also the story of that wandering without form, or that is only that chaos from which form is only ever a slice.

Aesthesis and Aesthetics

With great elegance, Sinthome speaks of an aesthesis that is very openness to affect – that receptivity passive beyond our usual conception of passivity. Aesthesis as a sensing and as what doubles itself up into a production of form – an aesthetic process that emerges out of what, for Kant, is the aesthetic of intuition.Aesthesis is joined to the aesthetic before the production of any particular artwork. It is there already, at the level of a passivity beyond passivity, in that openness which does not dictate in advance the certainty of its measure. No dictare here, remembering its etymological link to repetition, and to the speech of the insistent dictator, Hitler on the radio. No dictare, but only that murmuring, that chaos which doubles itself up into an experienced form. And that lets that experience be experience (experiment, openness to the new) insofar as form is only ever in-formed, emergent, born as a slice of chaos.

The new, the perpetual return of the interminable, the incessant: isn't there a contradiction here? How can the new be the old? How can it return, the old – the older than older – such that there can be novelity? Because the old has not yielded up its sense. Because there burns at its edges that nonsense that is sense's genesis, from which it emerges and that means it is always more than it is. The old – since it has never happened – can give birth to the new as this non-happening, as that eventfulness with which we cannot have done. And so the récit, as it names not only a particular literary genre, but that mode of recounting that can attend to what does not happen and bring it about. For this, indeed, is what Blanchot claims of the récit: it is what brings about what it reports, no longer representing it from a distance. Brings it about, allows it to happen, selecting and making salient that slice of chaos to which it gives consistency. And this is why Blanchot will suggest the récitencompasses a kind of theorising, that theory is itself, in some important way, a kind of fiction (perhaps that's what Deleuze'sLogic of Sense is: a fiction).

What is the récit? A slice of chaos wherein each term – artist, medium, thinker, what is to be thought, is altered. Where the excessive unity of the self is called into question. That engages what can only feebly be called old or new, since it refers to that hubbub of events that cannot be determined. But with what is therécit engaged? With another order of time (the absence of time, Blanchot calls it): where what happens does so without subjects or substantives. It would be easy to present Blanchot (or the early Levinas to whom he is close; or Bataille) as a proto-Deleuzian, who speaks negatively of what the later thinking will be able to speak postively, affirmatively. Too easy, for this would be to pass over the necessity of Hegel for Blanchot, who names (with Heidegger) a thought that must be struggled against in its own terms. That prevents a leap outside that vocabulary, that theoretical lexicon.

The Scramble Suit

But let me wonder out loud about the insistence, in Blanchot's work on the importance of the interhuman relation, of community. For isn't his theoretical, practical endeavour also a way of affirming the relation to the Other as it is also a slice of chaos? An experience of Eurydice not as the figure for what he calls the work, but as the Other whom we cannot face directly lest she disappear. Or the Other as that Lazarus who does not rise from death, but as dying – the undead one who comes towards us as a rotting corpse in his winding sheet. The relation to the Other is with a kind of dying, with the interminable, the incessant, that cannot find its form. And that exceeds, thereby the plastic form the Other takes, and is more than the qualities the Other presents.

The Other, now, is the one I do not know. The words friendship and community, for Blanchot, are ways of naming this experience non-knowing, this in-formation the Other presents. The latter, especially, is a name for that doubly dissymmetrial relation wherein each becomes Other for the other person in turn, and is perhaps figured in Blanchot's remarks about his friendship with Bataille where it was always the unknown that is at issue, always the Other as a presentation of that in between, that slice of chaos that alters thought and the measure of thinking.

When Blanchot thinks responsibility – be it literary or, if I can use this word, 'ethical' – it is in terms of this alteration. It is a way of naming that aesthesis, that affect that is formed aesthetically (in Sinthome's sense of the word) into an experience. But that is perpetually in-forming, altering its sensible presentation, so that the Other becomes any Other at all, in the manner of the scramble suit in Dick's A Scanner Darkly. It is a responsibility that must be presented in terms of a passivity beyond passivity.

I Will Not Believe It

Here, we must remember Gillian Rose's reading of Blanchot, and in so doing, proceed to the darkest passages of The Writing of the Disaster. I quote at length:

Concentration camps, annihliation camps, figures where the invisible is forever made visible. All the features of a civilisation laid bare … The meaning of work [travail] is the destruction of work in and through work/ work ceasing to be [the] manner of living and becoming [the] manner of dying. Knowledge which goes so far as to accept the horrible in order to know it reveals the horror of knowledge, the squalor of coming to know, the discrete complicity which maintains it in a relation with what is unsupportable in power.

I think of this young prisoner of Auschwitz (he suffered the worst, led his family to the crematorium, hanged himself; saved – how can one say: saved? – at the last moment – he was exempted from contact with dead bodies, but when the SS shot someone, he was obliged to hold the head of the victim so that the bullet could be more easily lodged in the neck). When asked how he had been able to bear it, he is said to have answered that he 'had observed the bearing of men before death'. I will not believe it. As Lewenthal wrote to us whose notes were found buried near a crematorium: 'The truth was always more atrocious, more tragic than what will be said about it'. saved at the last instant that young man of whom I speak was every time forced to live and relive, each time frustrated of his own death exchanging it for the death of everyone. His response ('I observed the bearing of men …') was not a response; he could not respond.

What remains is that, constrained by an impossible question, he could find no other alibi than the search for knowledge, the claimed dignity of knowledge: that ultimate propriety which we believe will be accorded us by knowledge. And how, in effect, can one accept not to know? We read books on Auschwitz. The wish of all in the camps, the last wish: know what has happened, do not forget, and at the same time, never will you know.

And now Rose:

I will not believe it[….] knowledge is said to have been offered in the place of response, in place of responsibility. The dignity of knowledge is thereby shown to be obscene. Firstly, Blanchot blames the victim: […] Secondly, the statement, 'I observed the bearing of men before death', can be heard as the pathos of an unbearable witness. 'Observing' is the pure passivity which is pure activity; 'the bearing' is the one moment of possible dignity witnessed beforethat dying: how the men held themselves, mind and body and soul, in the fact of certain destruction. Thirdly, the last wish of the victims, 'know what has happened, do not forget, and at the same time, never will you know,' does not command a contradiction, but it requires a work, a working through, that combination of self-knowledge and action which will not blanch before its complicities in power - activity beyond activity, not passivity beyond passivity. For power is not necessarily tyranny, but that can only be discovered by taking the risk of coming to learn it – by acting, reflecting on the outcome, and then initiating further action.

No more récits, ever again. What Blanchot seeks is the impossiblerécit, the récit that tells of the impossible as it names, now, not a literary genre, but a practice of theorising, a theorising practice – a mode of narration adequate to a perpetual inadequacy. There can be no fiction about Auschwitz, he says; the happiness of speaking has been extinguished.

No more récits - except for that récit that narrates the impossible. But isn't this to avoid that work, that activity beyond activity that allows for what seems to be impossible to be integrated into the possible. What seems to be impossible, for in the end it is all too possible, and it is only by understanding how it belongs to the economy of the possible that we might understand our complicity with tyranny and then act to change the world. Power cannot be simply contrasted with non-power, work with worklessness; responsibility must be linked to that reforming activity that remakes our institutions. Friendship and community must be exposed, as in Hegel's Spiritual Animal Kingdom, to the Good of the whole, to the Truth of ethical life; it is the Absolute which matters, not its negative double. What does it mean to affirm a communism without work? What is friendship about, or love, but the attempt to work together, to strive and struggle to remake your boundaries?

But without speech, without narration – what? How to learn from what happened, resisting the attempt of the oppressors to wipe out all memory of what had been done? How to resist the revisionists? How to stop making a myth of what happened? Aren't study centres necessary? Mustn't the worst be studied in schools and universities, and be the subject of films and novels?

The Burden of Hope

Blanchot's answer seems thin:

Humanity as a whole had to die through the trial of some of its members, (those who incarnate life itself, almost an entire people, a people that has been promised an eternal presence). This death still endures. And from this comes the obligaion never again to die only once, without however allowing repetition to inure us to the always essential ending.

Never to die only once. Never, that is to work, to negate without remembering worklessness, the 'other' death. A memory that can be kept only by way of an impossible narration, which draws the worst close to what happens in the Blanchotian récit. No surprise, then, that The Writing of the Disaster is concerned with the most terrible of afflictions as well as the peculiar joy of writing; that disaster, for Blanchot, names the stars torn out, the black, blank sky as it seems to give itself in a kind of nihilism – there is nothing – and the hope that, black in black, presents itself at that moment nihilism seems to complete itself.

For the first third of that book, a negotiation of the work of Levinas to present a kind of ethics of the disaster – an account of that relation to the Other that not merely survives the disaster, but reveals itself at that moment. No redemption, and no theodicy, but hope still, 'the burden of hope'. The Other 'close to death, to the night' to whom I address words borne by a kind of testimony [le dire], a saying [le dire]. Words, as they belong to the said, that testify to my singularising exposure to the Other: to saying as it subjects me, as I undergo what Blanchot calls le subissement [fromsubir, to undergo] ('which is simply a variation of subitement[suddenly], or the same word crushed'), as it is names a passivity beyond pasivity, as that dispossession in which the self is wrested from itself – 'the fall (neither chosen nor accepted) outside the self'.

This is how to read those remarks in Deleuze and Guattari where they speak of Blanchot in connection to a friendship after the catastrophe – of a changed notion of friendship as burns darkly alongside the horrors of the last century, and the horrors of this one. Never again to die only once – a dying, then, that is borne in common. The relation to the Other, that Blanchot insistently pushes towards a thought of amity – not peace, but a kind of vigilance, sleep disturbed, repose troubled by vast and frightening dreams.

Never to die only once – and perhaps this involves a kind of work, in a sense Sinthome, following Deleuze allows us to understand. That what matters is to think the opposed terms work and worklessness, death and dying, possibility and impossibility (the possibility of impossibility and the impossibility of possibility)together. Politics that depends upon what Blanchot calls community, ethics upon friendship, all works, all positive forms upon remembering the play of worklessness. Remembering it, attesting to it, letting work be interrupted by what fails work. Letting even that great attempt to think the proletariat as the truth of our time be drawn back to the abject, the verminous, the cockroaches who fall beneath the level of work (as Marx never forgot them).

Note, then, that what is named by the neuter for Blanchot is not a neither nor, a relation between two constituted terms, but a name (as good as any, which is to say, as good as none) for the given as it permits of emergence (of the subject, of substantives as emergent). The neuter that is the relation between these terms insofar as it absolves itself of its status as a relation, being measured by neither term in the relation in question.

And this is the way I would like to name Sinthome's 'slice of chaos', to speak of relation instead, but only insofar as it becomes (as it does in The Logic of Sense) a relation without constituted terms, a perpetual double alteration. A relation without relation, as it has been called (by Levinas, Blanchot, Deleuze, Derrida, and how carefully we must think the role of relation for each of these thinkers …).

The Thought From Outside

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 …

Common Presence: Blanchot at 100

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?

The Last Récit

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'.

The Fact of Language

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.

Sense and Nonsense

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.

Great is Hungering

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.

A Literary Satellite

1. “If the idea proves to be utopian, then we should be willing to fail as utopians”: what utopia opens to us in the pages associated with the failed project of the Revue Internationale? What arrow has landed at our feet, and how might it be shot through the fog of our political present?

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.

Crises of History

Swimming in the Real

'As he swam, he pursued a sort of reverie in which he confused himself with the sea. The intoxication of leaving himself, of slipping into the void, of dispersing himself in the thought of water, made him forget every discomfort …' What kind of sea is this, and what kind of swimmer? Blanchot's Thomas swims in an ideal sea – a sea that he can pass through because of his capacity to think. Is he really swimming? Is he really risking himself? He reminds me of Scholasticus, who was said to have learnt to swim from books, on dry land, and when he swam drowned at once. But Thomas's ideal sea quickly becomes real; he nearly drowns … What, then, of Blanchot's account of narrative, and its risks for writers, for readers, as they attempt to tell by way of a récit of that becoming impersonal that is also implied by our relation to language? I would like to consider this question alongside a recent post of Sinthome's.

For Blanchot, we relate to the world symbolically, through language. But this is scarcely a relation, for it is set so deeply enough within us it no longer we no longer constitute a subject that would stand over and above an object (the referent, the state of affairs) – what then? It is the condition of relation; the medium that allows us to open our eyes and see. As theorised and practiced by Blanchot (the two, in this case, are not so different), the récit(tale, narrative) pertains to that telling in which this condition breaks down – in which relation, by way of the text (the récit as a literary genre, relating a particular event in the past) is broken from its object and from its subject too. No relation between them, no condition of relation, except for what he calls the 'relation without relation' as it points to the 'there is' of language as it is broken from teller and what is to be told. Unless what is to be told is only that breaking – only language as it attains itself, its own being, its thickness, its density. But note this 'there is' is reached by way of language. That it depends upon a certain experience of meaning and happens by way of it.

Some writers are unafraid to let the narrative voice speak in place of a narrator's voice, where this names now language telling of itself. Writers who, by way of the events they report, by way of them, also tell of this other telling, this non-pulsed return of the itself of language. In Blanchot's récits, a kind of fascination seizes you (if it does) and carries you through the pages. Until it is what is told by way of the story that fascinates – by way, for example, of the insect of Kafka's story as it hovers, as Steve says, between the symbolic and the non-symbolic (between language and the fact that there is language). Perhaps it is a cockroach. But it is also more than an insect, for it speaks of a belonging to the same 'there is', to language as it flees in the opposite direction to the reader and seems to lead her into the page. Reading becomes a risk.

After the Fact

The French après coup can be translated as 'after the fact'; after – a little too late; regretfully. Something has happened over which we are helpless. Hyphenate après coup and you have the French translation of Nachträglichkeit, that deferred action that presents what was not evident the first time. It is thus that for Freud a primal scene reveals itself – after the fact, not at once; it can be discerned and deduced from its effects: it is the task of psychoanalysis to uncover that primordial event.

The author who adds a preface to his récit risks defusing what happened in it by linking it too strongly to his name. The narrative voice risks being confused with the narrating voice, and that with the author's own, who has forgotten the risk he took in writing therécit that made him no longer a subject and the referent no longer that object he could communicate through prose.

He has usurped the no one who wrote in his place – that absence of self considered in relation to the experience of language, to that writing without power, that writing without being able to (sans pouvoir). A paradoxical expression – for isn't there precisely a text, a written text that produces a writer, an author?

Certainly, but there is another experience that belongs to writing, and it is this the notion of the récit captures – that beside any telling, any roman (novel) there is also a récit, that secret tale of how language became opaque, how it withdrew into itself, how a relation unravelled itself from its terms and unravelled them, its terms, subject and object.

A récit within the roman, accompanying it, that the reader senses, and the critic – Blanchot – would expose. A secret story, a secret telling wherein language is concerned only with itself, and this by way of the surface of the text, its meaning. As the details of the telling – the glass of water the narrator would fetch, the snowflakes that brush against the window – are part of something massively dense, something unreal. As they point beyond themselves as to the plinth upon which the artwork rests. A plinth that is greater than the work and dwarfs it, as it sometimes does with Giacometti. The material support of an artwork that exceeds it, engulfs it and thickens itself into infinity.

The Idyllic Law

What is the significance of the reference to events on the historical stage in Blanchot's récits - to the Munich accords in DeathSentence, for example, or the bombed synagogue on the rue de la Victoire mentioned in passing in When the Time Comes? Here is Leslie Hill:

Blanchot's récits do not recount historical events, even when those events correspond to crucial turning points in modern history, like the ill-fated signature of the Munich accords that forms the political backdrop toDeath Sentence, or the bombing of the synagogue in the rue de la Victorie in Paris in October 1941, recalled almost exactly half-way through When the Time Comes. Such events are nevertheless present in the margins of Blanchot's texts, but not as episodes in a completed narrative sequence. Events like these are not just crises in history, Blanchot suggests; they are crises of history, and they challenge the possibility of narrative itself.

Crises of history: is this a name for what happens in the récits? Is crisis the word, with its etymological links to the idea of division, of a cut? A break in history, in the order of history – is this the equivalent of what happens in the récit to narration? Is a crisis, a division, already marked in the récit with respect to that narration that is the possibility of history?

Questions Blanchot seems to address himself in his short essay 'After the Fact' when he reflects on his early story 'The Idyll' that seems so strangely to anticipate what was to come. Eerie scenes of work without purpose, where prisoners take stones dug out of a mountain in the heat of the day, and rebury them from where they have been dug. Executions assured by a sense of absolute justice, with kindness, even, but with a sense that it must be done.

'The Idyll', Blanchot says, cannot be read as an augur of the terrible events to come. The story of the stranger, the exile, cannot be read allegorically; the story, to this extent, remains 'astranger to itself'; it must not be reduced to its ostensible contents, 'to anything that can be expressed in any other way'. It remains obdurately itself; happy in itself without reference to historical events. '[I]t itself is the idyll', Blanchot writes, and a little further on, recalls the arguments from The Infinite Conversation that come together to constitute his theory of the récit.

… before all distinctions between form and content, between signifier and signified, even before the division between utterance and the uttered, there is the unqualifiable Saying, the glory of a 'narrative voice' that speaks clearly, without ever being obscured by the opacity or the enigma or the terrible horror of what it communicates.

A dense passage. Saying, the to-say, is Levinas's expression for the relation to the Other that is marked and remembered in all speech in writing, in the order of what is said. Marked so that it sets itself back from what is communication, from the contents of the said, but also from what can be said, insofar as this capacity rests upon the capacity of the 'I' to speak and write in its own name, to pull together past, present and future, synthesising them in the present of enunciation.

It is to this extent saying breaks with the economy of signs, with the distinction between signifier and signified, marking not to whatcan be said, but that it is said by the very fact that is addressed to another. This 'that' is saying as it accompanies and bears the said, even as the said seems analysable into signifier and signified. But of course, to remember Levinas, it is also what attests to the Other, the addressee, who escapes the order of being, insofar as the order is predicated on the form of the 'I', its subjectivity.

It is the Other who gives speech a direction and orientation – who calls speech from 'I' such that it reveals the play of the Other in the Same, the prior investment of the 'I' by the Other. As such, speech may be said to be responsible, and from the first – or, as Levinas says, from before the first; responsibility is pre-originary, to the extent that it precedes the interiority of the subject. Saying is that 'passivity beyond passivity' in which subjectivity is subjected to the Other.

The narrative voice is Blanchot's own expression, and to be contrasted to the voice of a particular narrator in literary fiction. It belongs, rather, to language itself – to that experience of language which, in the récit, doubles what is said, accompanying it with a narrative that bears upon the materiality of language itself, its heaviness or density as the words of which it is comprised are understood not as they lend themselves to the construction of a fictional world, but as they reveal their own stolid indifference to reference, their own withdrawal from sense (from a certain account of the measure of sense).

Language becomes imaginary, to use another Blanchotian word – that is, it pertains to the material substrate of language, to the impersonal grammatical forms and the heavy particularity of words in a natural language as they give themselves to be animated by speakers and writers, but also resist that animation, being themselves dead. Or rather, remembering Hegel's use of the word death as a synonym for that act of negation by which, through language the 'real' world is taken up into the 'ideal' world of language, those words remain in a dying that exceed death, and cannot be captured by negation.

Dying exceeds the measure of death, of negation. The imaginary exceeds the reality of the world that language, on Hegel's conception, makes possible: it is of this the narrative voice speaks, figuring dying and the imaginary in the episodes of the récit. Characters no longer quite coincide with themselves; events do not happen punctually; strange moods drift like fog through the events; what remain of dialogue seems to fall away from verisimilitude: the strangeness of the récits is due to that narrative voice that would allow its episodes to indicate a certain experience of language.

This is the law of the récit, as Blanchot identifies it. Its idyll, even as what is narrated is the idyllic law of the house reinforced by punishment, by absurd labour and beatings, administered with a smile, for this is what is supposed by its inhabitants to maintain its comfort and happiness.

Then the idyllic law of the récit - or perhaps what is usually called a récit – answers to a faith in the comfort, the luxury, the happiness of telling. That telling is possible, that hope will follow despair, and, as with the end of Kafka's story, after Gregor Samsa's death, his sister will leap up and stretch her young body in the sun.

Crises of History

In his essay on the récit in 'The Sirens' Song' (an essay that is also a récit, as perhaps all Blanchot's are), he will separate récit androman, allowing the latter to name the bright book of life that bears the confidence of telling, that has confidence in its ability to speak of all, of everything. And the récit? It names, now the impossibility of telling, of narration, and of the sense of what is usually meant by récit. It names, that is, what bears fidelity to what cannot be told.

The roman, then, answers to the order of the possible, of the voice of a narrator, of the said, the récit to the impossible, to the narrative voice, to saying … as does, of course, Blanchot's by turns creative, literary critical and philosophical oeuvre, all of which can be read, as he commented on the oeuvre of Paulhan, as a récit, as a series of récits. Then we must distinguish what is usually called therécit, a literary genre, and Blanchot's theoretical practice, which attempts to tell what it cannot. To run up against the impossible, and more than that – to indicate and remember it.

'[T]here can be no fiction story about Auschwitz', Blanchot writes; what happened there can be recounted only 'by the impossible witnesses, witnesses of the impossible' who can speak of what happened only singularly, 'in the singularity of each individual'. And Kofman, commenting on Blanchot: 'About Auschwitz and after Auschwitz no story is possible, if by a story one means: to tell a story of events which makes sense.'

Antelme only wrote one book, The Human Race, that tells unforgettably of his experiences in Ganderscheim and Dachau. If he had written another, he wrote to a friend, it would have been like a récit of Blanchot. One of those récits that spoke of the impossible in its own way. The récit, then, not only concerns an experience of language. Or it concerns that experience insofar as it is also bound up with what happened in the camps, in those crises of history that tore history in two. And it is peculiarly able to do so because of the way in which it works, because of its form.

In what sense can a récit witness an event? Think of the moods from which the recits' characters seem to emerge (and into which they often return), in the repeated actions that seem to break into a weird kind of eternity (Louise combing Claudia's hair in Whenthe Time Comes); and think, alongside them, of the bombed Synagogue on the rue de la Victoire, the Munich peace accords. The récit is obsessed with what returns as the indeterminable, the incessant – with what cannot be integrated by the order of narration that characterises the roman (even if every roman, as Blanchot shows, harbours a secret récit). Roman versus récit, the possible versus the impossible, death versus dying, saying versus the said … how is the relationship between these coupled terms, these crises of history to be thought?

Saying Sense

Sinthome quotes from Blanchot's Thomas. 'As he swam, he pursued a sort of reverie in which he confused himself with the sea. The intoxication of leaving himself, of slipping into the void, of dispersing himself in the thought of water, made him forget every discomfort …' Thomas enters an ideal sea, which quickly becomes real. He nearly drowns, but this does not disturb him as it should.

Sinthome comments that Thomas becomes impersonal, 'as he and the sea become the same. The sea within which he swims shifts from being the "ideal sea" to the "real sea". He fades as a distinct subject, carried along as he is by the tide'. This as part of Sinthome's discussion of receptivity where, he emphasises, world and the agent who acts must be thought together.

'[W]orld and agent are both precipitated out of this process like by-products, introducing a bit of order into the infinitely complex bramble of chaos'. This is Sinthome's 'slice within chaos' that marks 'the space of an engagement', which happens 'in between'. The relation, here, alters its terms; it is a question neither of agent nor world by themselves, but their interaction; information, understood as noun and a verb, marks the emergence of information from chaos. Information that is, as Sinthome says, 'always in-form-ation; or more simply, it is in formation. It is something perpetually coming-to-be'. And this, I think is how we can see the first term in the apparently binarisms I have drawn from Blanchot's oeuvre.

Sinthome goes further, showing how information, as verb, as noun, is that site in which we cannot distinguish the active from the passive as, for example, Kant does in the distinction between the spontaneity of the understanding and the passive receptivity of the aesthetic of intuition. This passivity beyond passivity, to borrow Blanchot's phrase involves both an aesthesis, understood etymologically as a sensing and that production of form that might be thought in terms of an aesthetic making. Sinthome gives us the example of the artist who gives form to the medium which in turn gives form to the artist, joining both aesthesis and what we know as aesthetics. The artist who in-forms and is herself in formation; a slice within chaos where each term – artist, medium is altered.

What does Blanchot's récit accomplish? The narration of this encounter, this slice within chaos. Of that passivity beyond passivity that recalls the originary production that is always at work in our receptivity. A production, however, that has to be understood differently from what Hegel calls work, since it is conceived on the basis of negation, which is insufficiently nuanced to understand the process of emergence that the récit narrates.

Mourning and Melancholy

In her beautiful book Mourning Becomes Law, which The Young Hegelian (his blog has gone!) inspired me to reread, Gillian Rose claims we need an activity beyond activity rather than Blanchot's passivity beyond passivity. Blanchot refuses, says Rose, the work of mourning – the labour of entering into that learning process through which one accepts one's complicity in structure of power, in tyranny without turning entirely away from them, remaking thereby my sense of myself, 'the bonding and boundaries between me and me, subject and subjectivity, singular and individual, non-conscious and conscious'. It is not that all wounds will be healed and the dead rise again, but that others can learn of their complicity in what happened, so that they can mourn and reintegrate what occurred – not all at once, but over time, and with difficulty. A necessary labour.

Then it is the integrity of the subject that must be kept – its subjectivity, its personhood, will and resoluteness; its capacity for reflective and involuntary action – its positing, its self-positing: this is what must be reachieved by that work that does not dissever the impossible from the possible, but thinks them together. The singular must become the particular, an instance; the nonsensical must be brought into the light of meaning so that melancholy is not infinite.

And here we might remember the Hegel Zizek presents in For They Know Not What They Do – not the strawman for whom the onroll of the dialectic sweeps up the totality, but the figure for whom history is about what is learned painfully and through terrible trials, who describes that Bildungsroman through which substance becomes subject, through which ever more complex self-positings succeed one another until … until what? Zizek's Hegel never finds rest in Absolute Knowledge. History asNachträglichkeit, a learning what was already there. TheBildungsroman that speaks of the whole of the past?

The Re-ject

A necessary labour, work? A long time ago, Sinthome wrote with great candour of his frustration (here I am understanding it in my own way) of those who are theoretically committed to x or y without living that same commitment, without their lives being risked by their 'work'. This is what being a psychoanalyst means for Sinthome. Risky work, work without quotation marks: a suffering person to be diagnosed and, if not 'cured', then led to that point at which life is once again possible. Work, however, that implicates those who are part of analysis, changing them in a manner very similar to what Sinthome describes as a 'space of an engagement', or the 'in between': '[W]e always want to treat the object of analysis as independent of our analysis of it and ourselves as independent of the object we engage with, not seeing the manner in which our engagement with that object produces it while it produces us.'

What kind of work does Blanchot's récit permit? It is not aBildungsroman, to be sure. In another post, Sinthome tells us how he recoils in horror when he is asked what is philosophy, or what his research is about. 'To ask what someone's research or philosophy is, is to ask them to simultaneously formulate a proposition and state the sense of that proposition. Yet I can say what I mean or mean what I say, but I cannot say what I meanand mean what I say.' Then I only know what I'm working on once I've finished work; the preface to a book, making sense of the project as a whole, comes after the fact, after the book is complete. I can only know the pro-ject as a re-ject, as Sinthome says; which means Nachträglichkeit is the law of the work.

This might remind us of Hegel, and the adventure of reading The Phenomenology of Spirit: the course of the dialectic is not given in advance; its onroll, totalising as it may appear does not emerge into clarity except as its particular phases come to an end. Can Hegel ever say the sense of what he says (language and that there is language)? Zizek's Hegel can; to say the sense of what he says means the dialectic is kept perpetually open. This is what means to say with Sinthome that all philosophies are lived – that thinking is experiential and experimental, a projection into a future whose course is unknown.

Philosophy discovers what it is as it proceeds. In this sense, is it so different from the Blanchotian récit? For the Blanchotian writer it is language itself that is of concern. It is the image of language which fascinates the writer – its material presence, its rhythms and sonorities, its grain, and perhaps every writer has something in her of the poet, for whom every word must also sound.

'As he swam, he pursued a sort of reverie in which he confused himself with the sea. The intoxication of leaving himself, of slipping into the void, of dispersing himself in the thought of water, made him forget every discomfort …' This passage from Blanchot is also an account of the experience of writing, of experience the reality of words, as it is indistinguishable from what he calls the imaginary. Words' reality, words become imaginary paralysing the movement of sense, idling every word, and joining every work to worklessness.

What can Blanchot offer in the face of Rose's argument? What risk? Language broken, the world in fragments, worklessness … a woeful vocabulary, that speaks only of failure. But perhaps, each time, these are way of naming another kind of work, one which, like philosophy (Hegelian philosophy) is ruled by Nachträglichkeit, and discovers itself only after the fact; one that is experiential and experimental. And one that speaks negatively of what Sinthome affirms as a 'space of engagement', the 'in between' or that 'slice of chaos' which, in the récit - naming a practice of fiction, but also, perhaps, a kind of theorising which keeps memory of the real conditions of production (of information as verb) – achieves a marriage of aesthesis and aesthetics. But what, then, is the relation of this kind of work to Hegelian work, or to what Rose, after Freud, calls the work of mourning? Do the récits, remembering the crises of history, accomplish their own kind of work?

Words of Disorder

Things and Their Words

Are we being duped by language, by the circulation it permits of words and things? Perhaps words and things might be other than they are, and we might dream not, perhaps of a new logos, of a way of naming everything anew all at once, but (followingSinthome) of logoi of different levels and different conjunctions with which language (different languages, different idioms) might intersect.

Think, as an example, of the narrator of Handke's Repetition, rereading the study books of his disappeared brother. The brother had grown up speaking German, but learned to write in Slovenian at agricultural school. Until he came across his brother's notebooks, the narrator had been repelled by Slovenian, since it sounded to him menacing and associated with authority, sounding like an ungainly hybrid, full of borrowed words.

But the words in the Slovenian-German dictionary the narrator consults tell the narrator of a tender and peaceable people who still have names for the humblest of things – for the space under the windowsill, or the shiny trace of a braked wagon wheel on a stone flagstone. A people who had names for the intimate and small, for places of hiding and places of safety. And the narrator finds himself weeping for 'things and their words' – for can be named in Slovenian and seem to call in him to look towards a similar kind of naming, a new circulation of words and things in his German.

He finds the word Kindschaft, literally childscape, but which also has the meaning of filiation of adoption. For what is the narrator looking? To rediscover a relation with a people through the notebooks left by his brother, to be sure. But also – since the novel is narrated twenty years after the narrator started reading those notebooks, and has begun his only journey into Slovenia and into Slovenian – to rediscover his relation to German, his filiation.

It is by placing one sentence after another the narrator says at one point that he discovers his forebears (he is named after a Slovenian hero). One German sentence after another, as Slovenian – his brother's Slovenian – awakens in him a new logoiwithin language, not simply an idiom, but a way of drawing things into that new baptism he discovers in the wind blowing over the Karst region on his remembered journey.

A New Circulation

But how might a new circulation occur for us? Not simply through the agency of particular individuals, by individual agency. In another post, Sinthome argues that the individual must be thought in the context of more complex networks, through whom local connections harden themselves into what is taken for granted in the social world through those feedback loops that reinforce and replicate particular forms of social relation. Does this mean what the individual agent does does not matter? Rather that to think the individual without the structure is to forget the interdependency, the relation of inter-determination between these terms; the same, of course, if one privileges structure, treating it as invariable and eternal, forgetting thereby the fluid dynamism of social relations.

Neither structure nor individual exist in their own right; in the case of language, it cannot be thought either in terms of the exclusivity of the structure – of language in itself, considered at the level of a linguistic structure, that is, as a set of differential oppositions that define phonemic relations, as opposed to speech, in which a particular subset of relations are selected from the system. This means language is never entirely in possession of the individual; it is not 'in' the agent at all. We might say the agent is in language, and that language is a trans-subjective phenomenon.

For Deleuze and Guattari, to whom Sinthome directs us when thinking of structures and individuals, language is not representational, whether this is understood literally, that is, in terms of its exactitude or truth, or figuratively, that is, indirectly (and without the hierarchy between the literal and the figural) … Language, rather, is in the world acting within it and mixing with it; as such, it does not simply facilitate communication by means of referring to the shared world of a given society, but is itself a structuring process that constructs that world.

Yes, language lends itself to the production of a stable plane of meaning and subjects who communicate that meaning that gives rise to the account of the representational theory of language, but there is also the chance that it introduces an instability into that plane, distributing the relationship between word and world anew. For this relationship is one of circulation rather than representation, according to Lecercle's formulation; words do not signify things, but are themselves things. But how is this circulation to be thought?

Deleuze and Guattari do not take interlocution as it involves a sender, who uses language to convey what is to be said, and a receiver, who listens and might therefore understand as the paradigm case of language. Meaning is not only what is meant; speaker and listener are part of an unstable relation of forces that means the relation between the represented and what would be represented is never simply given.

Language does not represent, but enacts – this is familiar from speech-act theory. But Deleuze and Guattari are reaching beyond the individualism with which, traditionally, this theory has been associated, focusing on the formation of order words or slogans [mots d'ordre] as part of what they call 'a collective assemblage of enunciation' – 'that mixture of bodies, instruments, institutions and utterances, which speaks the speaker'.

As such, their concern is not with meaning, intention or interpretation but with those relations of power [rapports de force] that are ascribed and inscribed by utterances. The origin of language is neither author nor speaker; it is not 'je parle' that matters, but'on parle', or 'il y a du langage'. It is from the anonymous position of the 'on' that language must be thought.

Indirect Style

This is what they mean by claiming that all language is spoken first of all in an indirect style, which brings us to the section of A Thousand Plateaus quoted by Sinthome:

If language always seems to presuppose itself, if we cannot assign it a nonlinguistic point of departure, it is because language does not operate between something seen (or felt) and something said, but always goes from saying to saying.

The point of departure is not the individual who attempts to represent the world, but other narrative, as it forms part of a more complex assemblage. The utterance [énonce], for Deleuze and Guattari the basic unit of their analysis is a social act; it is not first of all declarative, an assertion about a state of affairs, but an order word as it is produced in that mixture that speaks the speaker.

We believe that narrative consists not in communicating what one has seen but in transmitting what one has heard, what someone else said to you. Hearsay[….] The 'first' language, or rather the first determination of language, is not the trope or metaphor but indirect discourse[….] Language is not content to go from a first party to a second part, from one who has seen to one who has not, but necessarily goes from a second party to a third party, neither of whom has seen.

On this model, communication is not the transmission of sign as information about the world, but the 'transmission of the word as order-word'; 'language is a map, not a tracing'. A map – then at issue is a philosophy of language that does without the grammatical subject [sujet de l'énoncé] or even the utterer [sujet de l'énonciation]; it is outside the subject that we find the utterance as it circulates in an assemblage. And likewise, Deleuze and Guattari think the psyche not as enclosed domain, an interiority, but as an exteriority; likewise, the unconscious is not to be found inside but outside us.

Then language is not simply that system of signs that would facilitate communication through reference to a shared world, but is itself a structuring process that constructs a world. A process that can be frozen into the representative conception of language, as it depends upon a stable plane of speaker and spoken, word and world, but that can also take an axe to break up the frozen sea inside us, as Kafka said.

Kindschaft

For what kind of utterance is the narrator of Handke's novel searching? For a people, perhaps – a people in whose rough-hewn features he might discover kinship and beauty. 'Each man of us the next man's hero', he dreams; each alive 'in an immanent word obedient to the laws of weather, of sowing, repeating, and animal diseases, a world apart from, before or alongside history'. For a people – no: for another distribution of words and things in his own language.

And as it occurs, I think, in the story he narrates, even as he speaks of the things and words that call out from him in Slovenian from the heart of his childhood. And this is what makes the narrator (and Handke, too) more than a nostalgist, and the people (the Slovenes) more than those who might be celebrated in a simpleminded nationalism. The people of the Karst through which the narrator travelled became insurrectionaries (the Tolmin uprising); but in the brother's time, they dispersed (taking the brother with them). And in their withdrawal the narrative, the act of narrating (Repetitionitself) opens his German to another kind of Kindschaft.

'My purpose had not been to find my brother but to tell a story about him'. To repeat the journey of his brother, retracing it, does not necessitate a literal reduplication. For it is the journey into a language that is being repeated, and the Bildungsroman of his brother's treatise on husbandry. Living this repetition as an encounter with things and their language, letting them dance in that roundplay in which the world us held back for a moment before being baptised anew.

The narrator calls his brother his forebear. It is this forebear who still watches in kindness over him, and over his own starting-out into Slovenia to strengthen his peace and the peace of writing. 'The only effective forebear, this much I know, is the sentence preceding the one I am writing now'.

Who speaks in Handke's novel? What speaks? A Slovenia to come, followers of the one who said 'that the Emperor was a mere servant and that people had better take matters into their own hands'? A Slovenian, giving words to things anew? Or this language as a gap within the narrator's German, between language as it represents and as it acts, and as the novel Repetition is an act, letting words mix with the world? And finally, perhaps, it is writing that speaks as it lets resound the outside of language as it belongs to no one. Who speaks? It speaks; on, one.

I think that this is how the assemblage of which Deleuze and Guattari write quivers into being. Writing is the path that follows itself, and that does so through the books of the world, of which Handke's novel is one. And that writes of itself and sings of itself by way of what is told, and springs up above them like a rainbow. As Mark comments, 'all writing is writing about writing even if it doesn't refer to itself as such' … About writing, which is to say, itself, its own act, as words become things, as language ranges out into the world, acts …

And now I imagine writing as the river that has cut itself a valley through that mixture of bodies, instruments, institutions and utterances that form, for Deleuze and Guattari, the collective assemblage of enunciation. Or, better, it is writing that turns each component of this mixture into a line, a river in each and a river as whole. One speaks; language speaks: so speaks the unconscious, outside. So it speaks as writing.

The Writing on the Walls

Can an order word become a word of disorder? Perhaps that is what flashed up on the walls during the Events of May 1968. We might remember the handbills and pamphlets distributed in those weeks from the Committee of Writers which were subsequently published as 'mots de désordre' and identified as the work of Blanchot. As his work – but Blanchot was not alone – there were the other members of the Committee, who worked together to formulate ideas to which they could all sign their names, and of course the participants of the Events themselves.

Tracts, posters, bulletins; street words, infinite words; it is not some concern for effectiveness that makes them necessary. Whether effective or not, they belong to the decision of the moment. They appear, they disappear. They do not say everything, on the contrary they ruin everything, they are outside everything.

There will still be books, and worse still, fine books. But the writing on the walls, a mode that is neither inscriptional not elocutionary, the tracts hastily distributed in the street that are a manifestation of the haste of the street, the posters that do not need to be read but are there as a challenge to all law, the disorderly words, the words, free of discourse, that accompany the rhythm of our steps, the political shouts – and bulletins by the dozen like this bulletin, everything that unsettles, appeals, threatens and finally questions without waiting for a reply, without coming to rest in certainty, will never be confined by us in a book, for a book, even when open, tends towards closure, which is a refined form of repression.

A complex assemblage: the man Blanchot, 'pale but real' as Hollier remembers, the writer part of the Committee (with Duras and others); the stop [arrêt] put to the book, of the liberal-capitalist world with which the Events were a break; what Blanchot calls Communism, intolerable, intractable, as it is excluded from any already constituted community – that foreign party [le parti de l'étranger] that points the way outside – 'out from religion, the family and the State', as Marx said when he called for the end of alienation (of what constitutes the human being as interiority, comments the author of these lines ('Blanchot', an effect of this fragmentary discourse, of language outside …). 

And isn't this what Deleuze and Guattari seek with their philosophy of language: not only to show that language is already outside, but to point a way that we might live in accordance with what falls outside us?

A community is not a people, says Blanchot. Communism leads us outside all interiorities. Is it possible to read the narrator's Slovenia (and perhaps Handke's) as more than a nationalism, as a celebration of a people (this is something Steve has beendiscussing for a long time)? And Repetition as being more than a book (what Blanchot names as a book)?

Leaning Into the Wind

One Speaks

'In the beginning was the Word'. The Word, Logos. But what if there were no beginning, and no Logos, only logoi in the plural? Speech, says Sinthome, does not simply instantiate the transcendental structure of language, as though language as such and in general exists before and after its speakers. The structure itself is in the individuals who speak, even as it cannot be reduced to any one individual speaker. As an emergent pattern, it has a kind of agency of its own, depending upon the relations of feedback that give it a ever-provisional substance, letting it quiver above a particular community of speakers like a rainbow over a waterfall.

That is what a language is, or an idiom, and as it quivers, it changes, too; its life does not depend upon an act of History [Geschichte], as it does for Heidegger. True, a language can come close to death, to routine, to ruts well worn; but language can also be reborn, it gives itself to other uses as it is nothing other than this giving, abandoning itself to those uses that flicker between speakers. Between them, and not in them – language is not an interior affair, but belongs to our interrelation. Between us, and floating among the assemblage of which we are a part – the network of practices, of institutions that mean our utterances are collective and never simply individual, that we must be thought together with others, as part of a whole that we speak when we speak.

Not 'I speak', the linguistic cogito then, but 'we speak'. But not that, either, for it is not that a collective subject replaces the individual one. An assemblage is not a 'we', a collection of individuals; when I speak it is to enage the 'one speaks' of language – to engage, speaking in the first person, but also to be engaged, so that it is language that speaks of itself. Of itself: but as that structure that cannot be reduced to the individuals that speak it, which has a consistency, a patterning confirmed and deepened by those movements of feedback between us.

One speaks - the collective, the quivering rainbow, rooted in nothing and spanning through nothing. Language like a swarm of midges over a river. Or like the flashing light on the river's surface. But in Deleuze's ontology, there is no river, or there is only flashing, only clouds and clouds of midges. Language nothing yet, nothing in itself, but that floats through an assemblage and cannot be thought in its absence. Nothing in itself, but still more than the individuals who speak it. Nothing – and much less than the enunciation of the Word, the Logos that stands at the beginning of everything.

Trust

No logos, as Sinthome says, but only local and emergent logoi. Logoi at different levels of scale and temporality, converging and diverging in different waves. And language as only one way in which these logoi can be thought.

The early Heidegger allows logos to translate Rede, discourse, using these words to indicate the common, shared world of which we are part and that lends itself to particular articulations. Rede is to be rigorously distinguished from Gerede, chatter; we will lose the things themselves by our idle talk. But if talk is never idle, if the logos is constituted by what we say such that language is not understood merely to articulate but to act? If the shared world is also what is made by particular uses of language (particular logoi in which language is engaged and engages us)?

Then perhaps there is a way of reclaiming for ourselves the efficacy of language, of speaking in a new way, not in a new language, but letting the old one resound differently. To disarticulate language, to discover the breaks at the level of syntax, to discover (to let there be discovered) a new style (a language within language, a rainbow that leaps up from the streaming of language) …

Acts of reading and writing, says Sinthome, are not the acts of a disembodied spirit who would judge, select, reject, dismiss … If the mind is the brain, reading leaves a physical trace; texts enter and interpenetrate me; I cannot have done with them even when I think I've had done with them. And so we've all been all the names in history; discourses by a million writers have coursed through us.

So too with writers, who have so many other writers in them, part of them. For a long time, I suppose a writer felt part of the tradition of these predecessors; the aim was to renew existing idioms, to give life to existing forms. With modernity, the burden on the artist changes: is it sufficient to trust the judgement of others with respect to his work? his own instinct? The latter seems more authorative than the former – and yet a modern artist like Kafka, as Josipovici has said, 'seem to have been able to develop and grow through an innate trust in the act of writing itself, in their willingness to embrace confusion and uncertainty and to find a new voice in the process'.

A new voice: the young Miles Davis tells his father he's dropping out of Julliard to play in jazz clubs. That's okay so long as you find your own style, says his father, or at least this is what's recounted in the autobiography. Your own style, your voice: then is style to be conceived in terms of individuality, as the mark of an original artist? Is it the result of deliberate effort, to be worked at or improved?

For Deleuze, style is to be thought as a way an idiom (language, music, painting …) might be inhabited, and not in terms of the activity of a particular person. As Lecercle puts it in his account of Deleuze's thought, 'the subject is not the origin, but the effect of her style: the author does not have style, it is style that has an author, that is inscribed, and in a way embodied, in an author's name'. The subject can be understood as an individual, to be sure – as this author, this musician – but it is also a collective, an assemblage that speaks through her. 'If there is a subject, it is a subject without identity', Deleuze writes.

Then what, in this context, does it mean to place one's trust in writing, as opposed to the authoritative judgements of others? What of the significance of being found by style (of letting a new voice float through an assemblage), and affirming it in turn? In the beginning was the Word, the Logos - but what of the logoi that are born with style?

Leaning Against the Wind

An example. The 8 year old Thomas Bernhard is cycling, and cycling as far and as fast as he can. His bicycle belongs to his guardian, but he has reclaimed it as his own, painting it silver and cycling around the countryside. Today he has resolved to visit his Aunt in Salzburg, 22 miles away. It's a long trip; how can a child cycle this far, and on his own? But as little Bernhard does so, it is with the dream of joining the cycling elite, even though he's too small to reach the pedals while he is sitting on the saddle.

The 8 year old knows his trip is forbidden, that he might be punished, but he thinks his audacity will be so admired it will annul his offence. One of his stockings is torn and covered with oil; he grows weary, and the road seems to become ever longer. Then – disaster – his bicycle chain breaks, and he tumbles into a ditch. It's dark, and there are 7 or 8 miles to go, his bike is ruined and his clothes are torn …

Reading, rereading Gathering Evidence, I imagine the mature Bernhard as an action painter, spilling great loops of paint on a canvas laid flat. Great iterative loops, again and again, but each time growing wilder, more hyperbolic, stretching the sentence. Bernhard has his eye like Pollock on the whole of the composition, but if there is structural cohesion, exemplary control, it is cohesion in collapse, and into which every detail is caught up. The book turns like a whirlwind, gathering in its massive sentences all and everything such that there is never a distinct compositional focus, and no detail matters more than any other; there's only the whole, the all-at-once that is reaffirmed on the canvas of each of his books.

So with Bernhard's narration of his cycling trip. The trip is the prose; to cycle like Kafka's Red Indian, leaning into the wind is also to write against the good sense of writing. The effort of the 8 year old to climb upon on his silver-painted bike is the same as the 50 year old who writes the last volume of his memoirs …

The maelstrom of the prose is the maelstrom of language; Bernhard writes against the wind, against style in the effort of the prose, its forward movement as it gathers everything up in its momentum. How did he arrive at it, his style? By working at it, improving it – by mastering a literary skill? But its controlled madness, held together at the brink of falling apart, the great loops of the sentences rolling spastically forward is not the result of a deliberate organisation of language. Discord, disequilibrium: style strains language all the way to the point of breaking (but it does not break).

Standard language stammers, trembles and cries … but Bernhard's inimitable style cannot be reduced to the brutality of his experiences. The events his autobiography reports are co-constituted by the manner of their telling; one feeds the other; his life is what his style permits, as it no longer represents the world, but enacts the forces that comprise it. Bernhard who writes as Van Gogh paints stars buried in the wells of night, or Pollock paints looping spirals – it is affect and intensity that dictates the content of his work, even his autobiography. Affect, intensity, as they lead Bernhard to select those events that enact what occurs when he begins to write.

Pitted Against Everything

In An Indication of the Cause, the second part of the English edition of the autobiography (though the first one Bernhard wrote), the 13 year old Bernhard takes up a scholarship in a school in Salzburg, even as the city is bring bombed from the air. Misery sweeps over him; he tries to hang himself. Bernhard's prose is delirious with horror. In the third part, The Cellar, the 15 year old Bernhard drops out of school and takes up a position as a grocer's apprentice in a grim housing project where he would contract tuberculosis.

'I was pitting myself against everything', he writes. Against the school and its teachers, against Salzburg, even against the dreams his beloved grandfather held for his protégé. Yes, against everything and leaning against the wind. The fourth volume, A Breath, does not tell of the first story Bernhard published in 1950, nor of his encounter with hislifeperson, with whom he travelled and as he later recalls, received terse encouragement for his writing.

By the time he published Frost, Bernhard discovers his style, or it finds him, such that as author, as writer, he is pitted against everything- against Salzburg, against Austria, against the Nazi past, against Austrian Catholicism: everything, and these selected, these drawn into the maelstrom of his narratives because of the style that found him and to the level of which he raised himself to be able to write. Ah, that style, that streaming that survives Bernhard and reaches us even in English translation.

In the Cold, the fifth volume, relates Bernhard's mother's painful death from cancer, and his own return from the sanatorium. His grandfather dies too, and he finds the death of his forebear, who laid claim to the tradition of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, liberates his own early attempts to write. Bernhard reads his own poems to his dying mother, and it begins, that leap that takes him past the tradition of his grandfather, past philosophy and the whole of literature. A leap that braces him against the whole of what has become his past. He is the last of his line, he's been picked out. There'll be no other; his style is inimitable, but he is only a vortex in the whorl of his writing. Bernhard is a name for us of a plughole around which all of culture seems to swirl. But how did he pull out the plug?

The Hatred of Writing

It is not that Bernhard confirms, by his writing, the bygone world of which he was once a part and his own place within it. It is that this world is also born from his style: that a kind of hatred arises from the activity of writing. And this more than the hatred for Austria, the Nazis or the Catholic church. Or that swept up that hatred as part of its movement, its perpetual agitation.

Rereading, reflecting, I wonder if it is a surprise that the object of hatred was more fitting for an Austrian postwar writer than for others. The total compromise of authority, of state and church, and perhaps of the German language … And I think that with Bernhard the hatred that is part of style (the hatred of authority, of cultural models, or of an inherited model of literary style) met with what legitimately called forth hatred in an infinite spiral, rising up into a whirlwind of loathing, and that this was the motor of the storm of his work, that let it swirl into the stormclouds of European modernity.

How did Bernhard come to trust in his style (the style that lent itself to him, and from which as a writer he was born)? Was it through his lifeperson, who supported and encouraged his writing (but discouraged it, too, when necessary – causing him to throw whole manuscripts in the fire)? Was it the memory of his grandfather, who wrote, he said, for the unborn? Or was it as he found the correlate of its perfect storm in the horror that was perpetually reborn in Bernhard's Austria, that fed back into the vast and looping sentences, and looping repetition of his books? But those same sentences were in search of the hatred that could justify them, and how could Bernhard, born of his style live but as he was pitted against everything?

In the beginning was the Word – is that it? Or is it that literature (modern literature, our eternally new modernity) writes against the Word as the good sense of language? In the end (modern literature always belongs to the end, to the last gasp) was the Word and the tearing down of the Word. And at the end, where writing was impossible (for modern literature begins with the impossibility of writing) is also the beginning, thelogoi, the thousand styles of those writers who are born from the style they discovered and that discovered them.

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.