Author: Lars Iyer

<Draft of chapter one of Lars Iyer's Blanchot's Vigilance (Macmillan, 2005) . 25,000 words. >

Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering. Kafka to Janouch[i]

Poor Kafka has to work; he cannot find enough time for writing. He lacks time, he is never solitary enough, there is always too much noise, he is always too weary. Then, becoming ill, he realises that there will never be enough time, that time is not time enough and writing requires something else from him. But what is this demand? Blanchot compares his predicament to Kierkegaard’s.[ii]

Abraham, according to Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Silentio, must sacrifice not only Isaac, but God – his faith in God. For Isaac is the bearer of God’s future on earth. Isaac is the promise, the future, and it is the future of God’s chosen people that Abraham must sacrifice. Abraham must act without guarantee; he does not sacrifice Isaac in the faith that all will be returned to him in the afterlife. Isaac himself is hope; it is the future – God’s future, the future of the chosen – which must be destroyed. But Abraham, we know, will receive the future through his willingness to obey God’s command. This is not a simple resignation to a higher power. Kierkegaard distinguishes between the knight of resignation, who, seeing no alternative, obeys God, and the knight of faith – Abraham – who can maintain his faith in what appears to the unbeliever to be simply absurd. What faith does Abraham maintain? That Isaac is the future. That God requires him to sacrifice the future, then, in order to receive the future.

Some say Isaac is a version of Regine, the fiancée whom Kierkegaard renounced in order to write. He had to sacrifice her – but to receive what? Another future; one no longer lived in the ethical sphere of existence, but in the religious one. But what of Kafka? If he sacrifices his engagement, what then? He will not enter the religious sphere; he will not receive the future by placing it at stake. And if he gives up work in order to write, if he does nothing else but write? Kafka links the demand of writing to his own salvation. He is a bachelor; he will have no attachments because his attachment to writing is greater than anything. Writing, for Kafka, is a way of being.

Kafka does not choose to sacrifice everything to writing; he has no choice. But for what is his life sacrificed? What does he sacrifice by writing? Read his notebooks. Kafka begins story fragments again and again; he does not complete or trouble to rewrite them. They begin and break off. It appears that it is not completion he wants, but something else – that what he writes will never be of any worth and his hope lies in an impossible writing that demands he complete none of his stories. They are sacrificed to a still greater demand. He seeks to unwrite writing as he writes it. It is the attempt to realise worklessness, to put it to work to which his life will be sacrificed.

‘I cannot write’ – ‘you must write’ – ‘I cannot finish a story’ – ‘it is by this incompletion that you will be sacrificed to writing’. Comparing Kafka to Abraham on Mount Moriah, Blanchot notes, ‘For Kafka the ordeal is all the graver because of everything that makes it weigh lightly upon him’; then writes, ‘What would the testing of Abraham be if, having no son, he were nevertheless required to sacrifice this son? He couldn't be taken seriously; he could only be laughed at. That laughter is the form of Kafka's pain’.[iii] It is the laughter, one imagines, of Kafka’s family, his colleagues: ‘you have produced nothing. You are wasting your life’: incredulous laughter. Worse: there is the pain of the fiancée he deserts and the disappointment of those around him.

Compared to writing, everything for Kafka disappoints. He falls short of his vocation and this is why, in what he writes to his friends and lovers and in his diary, it seems he is always in lieu of his own existence. But one should not be too quick to understand the privation to which he seems bound by his desire to write, nor indeed to interpret his Diary or even his literary writings as being marked by despair. His life is lived in the shadow of writing; he remains in writing’s space, in literature’s remove even when he does not write. This is already a great deal.

Kafka sets himself an impossible task: to pursue a story across days and nights, to maintain that prolific energy which allowed him to complete a story in a single creative gesture. Of course this energy failed him; his stories were botched, he thought, and could not find their way to a conclusion. And if he had time, all the time in the world, would he be able to write? If he needed no sleep and just wrote, one day after another, would he create a work which would allow him to answer his vocation? Kafka is like that man from the country who asked the doorkeeper for access to the Law. The doorkeeper says he can’t let him in now. ‘Later then?’, asks the man. ‘It’s possible’, says the doorkeeper, ‘but not at this moment’.[iv] The man waits for days and years, until, in the last moments of his life, he realises that no one else has ever asked for admittance to the Law. Why?, he asks the doorkeeper. 'No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended for you. I am now going to shut it'.[v]

It is, perhaps, something analogous to the entry to the law that Kafka seeks as he pursues the story night after night. Does he realise that its essential characteristic is to be interminable and that to write lines on a page is already to betray the peculiar absence of time which marks the work? That the work he seeks to realise would not be commensurable with those tasks he accomplishes in the world?

Kafka suffers from what Blanchot calls the day: the opening of the world as a field of tasks and projects as it is measured by what is possible for the human being. Kafka wins an important legal case, but this, for him, is only the interruption which compromised the composition of his ‘Metamorphosis’. He brings documents home to work on cases for worker’s compensation, but this only prevents him clearing his desk and writing, as he does every night, from eleven o’clock until three in the morning.

‘Were it not for those terrible nights of insomnia I would not write’. Kafka suffers from the day, his job, his family; he writes to discover that peculiar absence which unbinds time from itself, that disarticulation which breaks him from the chance of even beginning to write words on the page. Writing is a pseudo-task, the simulacrum of a project: you can’t complete what does not even allow you to begin and you can’t begin a task which seems to require that you relinquish the very possibility of setting out.

How to understand the strange drama of writing, this demand which sends you on a great detour before you ever write a line? Kafka’s letters, notebooks and diaries allow him to mark time with respect to the absence of time, to find himself just as he begins to lose himself; they save him, but what can we expect from them but despair? As soon as he writes, he is lost. And when he writes about losing loss, when he writes about writing, his loss is redoubled.

Doubly lost, and commenting on the great refusal to which writing is linked, Kafka comes closest of all to the condition of writing. For isn’t literary writing a lament for what it is not? Isn’t it an experience of a detour without issue, pointlessness itself? Whence the temptation to ally writing to a great political cause, or to give up writing altogether: one to which Kafka often resorts in his diaries and letters, setting out his plans to emigrate to Palestine or telling Janouch of his new habit of undertaking two hours of manual labour each afternoon. But he does not yield to this temptation; writing saves him. From what does it save him? From a life lived outside writing. But isn’t writing precisely the door which will not admit him? Isn’t the way barred by the great doorkeeper with his Tartar beard? 

Kafka waits. He is eminently patient. And whilst he waits, he writes with a writing which is not yet the writing he seeks. With one exception (‘The Judgement’), it disappoints him – but that story disappoints him because it raises the bar too high. Still, at least the vocation of writing allows him to keep before him what his book is not: the absence of the book it designates in vain.

*

What does Kafka want? What is at issue in this knot of patience and impatience? There is a clue in the following disingenuous remark:

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 [Überschuß der Kräfte] 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?[vi]

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? Does the capacity to write mean my unhappiness is any less complete? That I am any less unhappy than I thought?

A surplus of strength: at least 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? If it allows me to take distance from my suffering, it is the same distance which causes me to lose my suffering anew. Does the fact that I can add flourishes to my writing – that I can orchestrate it, transforming it, perhaps, into a fiction – transmute that suffering? One cannot protest that such flourishes are lies whatever their beauty. For Valéry, Pascal's despair was too well-wrought to be believable. But what Valéry has misunderstood is the surplus of strength which gives birth to writing: the way writing solicits a writer as soon as she writes ‘I am suffering’. For that ‘I’ is not the ‘I’ who suffers; to write is to discover the strength of creativity – of the power to generate sentence after sentence. A merciful strength makes writing possible even as suffering seems to make everything impossible.

The merciful surplus in question does not merely bracket Kafka’s suffering as if he had entered, with literature, into a space which had no relationship with his ‘empirical’ self. Suffering is transmuted – but what has it become? The merciful surplus of strength has generated another self: the agent who rings changes on the suffering it reports; the poetic self who is creative, articulate and generative. Who is this other self? Not simply the negation of the first, suffering self who took up his pen to write of his suffering. The literary self is still bound to suffering, but in the manner of a surplus; now it is possible to ring changes upon suffering.[vii] Literature is born.

Suffering becomes literature. Yet literature, too, is suffering. Kafka to Janouch: ‘Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering’. But why this new suffering? Is it because the changes one must ring upon suffering cannot be sustained from now until eternity – because, soon, the writer will fall from the surplus of strength and become once more incapable of writing, mired in the suffering with which he began? It is the gaps of non-writing within writing that are frightening. What appears to be the second suffering, the suffering of art, arises from the sense that the literary work must be endless if it is to prevent the return of the suffering from which the writer began.

Write to escape suffering. Suffer because you can never write enough. This aporia, if it sums up the relationship between Kafka and writing, is dependent on the fact that neither the empirical self nor the poetic self is ever satisfied with what has been written. Writing itself does not alleviate suffering; this is clear enough from the pages of Kafka's diaries where one finds over and again remarks like ‘wrote nothing today’.

Contrast this with the 'surplus of strength' of which Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo to describe the state of mind he was in when he wrote The Birth of Tragedy. It becomes, this surplus, the strength to comprehend the affirmation of life. It is the 'ultimate, most joyous, wantonly extravagant Yes to life', the 'highest' and the 'deepest' insight. But Kafka's fictions do not change his dissatisfaction. He once wrote to a correspondent that he was made of literature. And it is true, when borne on the draft of a merciful surplus of strength, that writing is his, or that he is sacrificed all at once to writing – 'The Judgement', after all, was written in the course of a single night. But when he is not? When that strength fails him? Kafka suffers because he can never hold onto literature.

*

Blanchot meditates on the paragraph I quoted:

I am unhappy, so I sit down at my table and write, ‘I am unhappy’. How is this possible? This possibility is strange and scandalous to a degree. My state of unhappiness signifies an exhaustion of my forces; the expression of my unhappiness, an increase in my forces. From the side of sadness, there is the impossibility of everything – living, existing, thinking; from the side of writing, the possibility of everything – harmonious words, accurate exposition, felicitous images. Moreover, by expressing my sadness, I assert a negation and yet, by asserting it, I do not transform it. I communicate by the greatest luck the most complete disgrace, and the disgrace is not made lighter.[viii]

My unhappiness is such that nothing is possible and yet I write, finding appropriate images and embellishments. A merciful surplus! If I suffer, now, it is not because this surplus cannot be sustained, but because it will never allow me to have done with its demand. One sentence is not enough – the description is incomplete; a second is still not nuanced enough; a third is necessary lest the first two appear too definitive, and so on. Measured against my suffering, writing is infinitely inadequate. Measured against literature, it is a success.

Writing begins; sentence follows sentence; this is how books are made – but this is how books are unmade, too. The possibility of writing has its price. I suffer, I want to write, but I write words, and the whole medium of language is, as Hegel argues at the outset of the Phenomenology of Spirit, universal; by writing, I negate the situation I want to present. As Hegel argues, the ‘this’ of self-certainty ‘cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness; that is, to that which is inherently universal’. Concrete experience has been lost in its particularity.

There is a second loss: as soon as I write I address the virtual presence of an audience; what I write is public and hence addressed to others. The author may claim her aim is merely to express herself: to write, for example, ‘I am lonely’ and to let her loneliness resound. But as soon as she writes, she is no longer alone; her loneliness is destroyed. Does this mean her loneliness is thereby sublated, as Hegel would have it: that the universality of language lifts what she would write about the singularity of her loneliness? But it is this singularity that is sacrificed by writing. The condition of possibility of writing about loneliness is the sacrifice of what is experienced as loneliness. Yet at the same time, the writer remains alone; her loneliness cannot be expressed even as it is expressed. Writing fails her; what she writes of her loneliness mocks that loneliness; she has said nothing of her loneliness even as she evokes it. But what would exist of that loneliness had she not evoked it? Is it that she first experiences what she comes to call loneliness and then attempts to express it? Or that what she experiences as loneliness is given first of all in terms of an idea she could attribute to a source no other than that of language?

Perhaps there is another way of understanding the suffering to which literary writing is linked. She feels an estrangement with respect to the feeling she knows as loneliness – one which makes the word insufficient with respect to what she would name. She writes to render this word less bare, less inexact, to set it into motion, to compose flourishes on her loneliness. But she must fail since she only has words at her disposal. She is estranged. She suffers not only from the infinite inadequation between what she feels and what she is allowed to call loneliness, but from the bareness of the word loneliness itself. A suffering which does not disappear no matter how many words she marshals, even if these words, and her facility at marshalling them, provides her with another kind of pleasure.

Blanchot:

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.[ix]

Writing is possible for our author only insofar as it prevents her expressing her sadness. That is to say, it is possible even as writing denies itself to her as a means of expression for the concrete singularity of her mood. What begins as soon as Kafka writes is the infinite task of answering this singularity. The writer suffers from the distance between singularity and particularity. Kafka's literature is born in the infinite inadequation between the possible and impossible.

*

‘Adam’s first act, which made him master of the animals, was to give them names, that is, he annihilated them in their existence (as existing creatures)’.[x] In ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, Blanchot recalls Hegel’s account of the naming of the animals in a draft of the Phenomenology of Spirit. It is through the negation of things in their real existence, their ‘death’, that they allow language to come to life. But this death brings with it the birth of the world and the birth of the human being as the one who can articulate the world.

For Hegel’s Adam, the world is born again to the human being whose humanitas resides in his ability to speak. Language lends itself to the power of human causality, to the ability to act. It depends upon the representation of being and is founded upon the consciousness to which being is presented. It is through the feat of commencement by which a human being posited itself as the origin of language that it is able to secure a grip on the future. The world is named and thereby possessed for Adam’s descendants, but this possession depends upon the distance that opens between real and ideal existence: between the thing named and the abstract generality of the name.

This already presumes that the humanitas of the human being has been posited as the origin of the origin: as the one to whom the world is already bestowed. But this positing depends in turn upon on a preliminary annihilation. For Hegel, death is the condition of possibility of the human being as the animal who speaks; it is the power proper to the humanitas in question. But this means that there can be no return to life before language. As Blanchot writes, ‘man was condemned not to be able to approach anything or experience anything except through the meaning he had to create’.[xi]

To name is to be able to control and manipulate what is named; things are in a certain sense put into our possession. I learn the word ‘lonely’ and am able to name the desolation I feel; I am comforted by knowing that loneliness is not an emotion only I experience. But the power to name, to label, presupposes a kind of annihilation of what is named even as it seems to bring it into our possession. What, after all, remains of my loneliness once it is called loneliness? This question might seem naïve: after all, since it is a word, a linguistic convention, there need be nothing actually called loneliness other than what the word loneliness is culturally enfranchised to pick out; to that extent, my loneliness is what the word loneliness permits being lonely to be. But what is called loneliness might be ambiguous, more complex than the word itself seems to allow. I might write in order to try to reach what I have lost even as I learn this word. But even as I do so, I am committed to using words to explain a particular word; a whole system of words opens and with them I begin an infinite detour through language.

This detour has already occurred for Hegel’s Adam. ‘The meaning of speech […] requires that before any word is spoken there must be a sort of immense hecatomb, a preliminary flood plunging all creation into a total sea’; things enter language deprived of their singularity, their particularity.[xii] What is named is reborn in signification which can operate even after the destruction of the particular thing. This means that the words I write will still have meaning after my own destruction; they will continue to speak after I die. This holds, too, of the word ‘I’ itself. If I write, I am lonely, I experience not only a disappointment with the word loneliness but with the word ‘I’, too. After all, what does it mean to capture myself, my position as a speaker with this word? I speak as a universal subject yet when I pronounce the word ‘I’, I have already been separated from myself in my singular existence. As soon as I say ‘I’, Blanchot writes, ‘it is as though I were chanting my own dirge’.[xiii] To write that the word ‘I’ annihilates me in my real existence might sound ridiculous: after all, words can’t kill anyone. But it is my singularity which is thus annihilated. An annihilation, even a death, which I cannot escape since it is the condition of possibility of language. Death is the condition of possibility of sense, of signification; ‘without death’, Blanchot writes, ‘everything would sink into absurdity’: without death, that great labour of death upon which language depends, there would only be a chaos of singularities, a silence in which nothing could be determined.[xiv] So it is that language must begin with the void, with absence. A kind of ‘death’, which is to say, the idealisation of particular things, is the condition of possibility of sense.

This means that the power that would first affirm the humanitas of the human being is divided at its source. It is possible to name the world, to grant it an ideal existence. The humanitas of the human being is given in a leap of language that permits the opening of the world as the opening of the human being to itself. It depends upon death, but death is not wholly in the power of the human being.

On the one hand, the mobilisation of death permits the great acts of the literary imagination: the epic, the Bible, the medieval Summa and finally, the novel: books that would say everything. It answers, for Blanchot, to the desire implicit to Western civilisation to recount its history and its experience, recapturing and thereby determining its past. The drive to unify, to relate everything back to a point of origin, is an inherent movement in telling. It is possible to invoke a grand narrative that unifies all other tales – a broader, deeper story that maintains a reassuring order. Lyotard tells us that the age of the grand récit has passed; but the greatest tale of them all, the tale that is retold in the elaboration of any tale, still exerts its dominion.

On the other hand, there is another tale, a detour that tells of another side of the origin, which no longer celebrates Adam’s capacity to speak. There is an experience of language before speech that interrupts the opening of a field of power and possibility. It is here one might discover the originating leap that grants language and the humanitas of the human being. Language is not a tool of which one can dispose freely; naming does not occur by human fiat. Adam speaks not with a language but from it. We inhabit language – or rather, language inhabits us. Language is a field that opens through us and opens the world to us, determining what it is possible to say and not to say. But it is, for this reason, never the ‘object’ of our awareness; it does not spread itself before us in its totality. Or rather, even as it appears to determine what will be experienced – to set the limits of sight, of what can be seen, it dissimulates another experience of language. This is the experience to which Kafka’s suffering leads him and that we suffer in turn as we read his books.

Language appears to open like the day itself, opening the world in the opening of the humanitas of the human being – but this humanitas is bound up not only with what can be said, but with what cannot. Lost in Kafka's writing is the singularity of his despair. Literature begins even as it fails to express its concreteness. Whence the mercy and the surplus: as entering literature, Kafka is given over to the experience of language without end. Sentence must follow sentence; one can never write sufficiently clearly; more images are required, more embellishments.

Some authors have been tempted to wreck the ship of literature – to plunge it into meaninglessness. But literature must mean if it is to be literature; the text cannot become an obdurate thing, closed in upon itself, but must open itself to its readers. Other authors have sought to end everything in silence, the blank page. Yet the page itself has significance; it belongs to literary meaning. Some, still further, have sought to leave literature behind; Mishima supposes it is the interior of the body that is lost to writing. He becomes a bodybuilder, a martial artist; he forms his own militia. In the end, he commits ritual seppuku, opening his interior regions as to the blazing sun. The literary writer, born of literature, cannot escape writing; there is no death; the literary writer wanders like Gracchus.

Whence the dream of leaving literature behind. Kafka dreams of Palestine. What will he do there? Renounce writing; like Rimbaud or Mishima, he will have left the world of writing behind him in order to step into the world of action. Renounce writing? Renounce, rather, the impatient renunciation which would measure the demand of writing by the finished and completed work. Literature opens. Fail if you write it – fail by failing writing – (‘The Judgement’ is a success, but what kind of success? Perhaps only an idol of success, for it is not the absence of the book at which literature aims in Kafka’s writing) and fail if you do not.

*

Still, literature seems to offer Kafka a chance to escape from dying, from endless suffering. It is, he claims, in another disingenuous remark, through literature that he is able to die content:

On the way home told Max that I shall lie very contentedly on my deathbed, provided the pain isn’t too great. I forgot – and later purposely omitted – to add that the best things I have written have their basis in this capacity of mine to meet death with contentment. All these fine and very convincing passages always deal with the fact that someone is dying, that it is hard for him to do so, that it seems unjust to him, or at least harsh, and the reader is moved by this, or at least he should be. But for me, who believes that I shall be able to lie contentedly on my deathbed, such scenes are secretly a game; indeed, in the death enacted I rejoice in my own death, hence calculatingly exploit the attention that the reader concentrates on death, have a much clearer understanding of it than he, of whom I suppose will loudly lament on his deathbed, and for these reasons my lament is as perfect as can be, nor does it suddenly break off, as is likely to be the case with a realm lament, but dies beautifully and purely away.[xv]

Writing, as I have shown, depends upon the exertion of a kind of mastery over one’s own death. No longer is it the limit of what you can or cannot possess – the extremity to which you cannot bring yourself into relation as a sovereign equal – and this is the point: such mastery is tempting because of the very extremity of death. The strength required to realise a book demands the author must summon every power and become control itself, the literary toreador. Then it is against death that the author must test his will. But this is not right. Kafka is not Hemingway or Leiris; writing is not tauromachy.

What, then, is the contentedness Kafka seeks? What would it mean for him to enjoy his death? One suspects a kind of ruse: Kafka, after all, dreams of leaving writing in order to emigrate to Palestine; he puts down his work to take up carpentry. Yet he fills his notebooks, page after page, not with sketches and plans of future stories like Henry James or Dostoevsky, but with tales which begin and then break off, never to be completed. There are dozens of such incomplete stories.

It may appear from this fragment in the diaries that Kafka is playing with death, that it is his toy. It is as though his alleged contentment in death recalls Hegelian wisdom: the conversion of negativity into positivity; the transformation of death into a condition of possibility of truth and the world. Death gives form to the formless and definition to the indefinite. But Kafka is not concerned with truth or the world. Reading the pages of his diaries it becomes clear that his insistent appeal for a content death is a mirror of his dissatisfaction with life; who has written more eloquently of the difficulty of their relations with the world? This dissatisfaction does not afford him mastery over death, but it makes death into a refuge. A refuge from what? From the office, from the demands of his fiancée and his difficulties with his family. But also – surely – from writing, from the uncertainty of writing. For the man who created Gracchus, contentedness in death means a still pen. Kafka dies content when he joins his characters in death. He writes; he dies – but then, when the character is dead, he is given back to his dissatisfaction. And then? He begins writing again.

‘If I do not save myself in some work, I am lost. Do I know this distinctly enough? I do not hide from men because I want to live peacefully, but because I want to perish peacefully’.[xvi] Poor Kafka begins anew. Why? Because contented death should be his wage as an artist; it is the aim of his writing and its justification. It is what he wants. But does he want it? Blanchot: ‘”The capacity to die content” implies that relations with the normal world are now and henceforth severed. Kafka is in a sense already dead. This is given him, as exile was given him; and this gift is linked to that of writing’.[xvii] From the passages in his Diary on ‘the merciful surplus of strength’ it seems the gift of writing gives Kafka strength to endure in this deathly condition. Writing is born from his suffering – this surprises him – and straightaway outstrips it. Literature begins when Kafka begins to ring changes upon suffering. It begins as he seeks, in the manner of the infant of Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, to die content in his characters[xviii] But this only because he cannot die content; because he suffers from what the merciful surplus would grant him. Then the most honest tale, for Kafka, would be the one in which death, for his protagonist, is impossible and the tale itself cannot be brought to term.

The best things I have written have their basis in this capacity of mine to meet death with contentment: one might wonder whether Kafka plays with his characters as a cat does a mouse. Whether, indeed every page of his literary oeuvre were nothing but a massive torture device, analogous to the one in ‘In the Penal Colony’, which Kafka would like to test on himself.

Kafka’s characters, one might say, inhabit the space of dying. It is the movement of dying which claims them as they seek in vain for recognition from the castle or to exonerate themselves in the trial. Like Kafka, they seek a way to come to death, to find contentedness. But what do they find? Death 'like a dog' in The Trial; death without terminus in The Castle. Either way, Kafka survives the death of the characters that die; as for those who do not, he breaks off the tale which narrates their adventures and begins another. Burn my books, he tells Brod, but what he means is: burn what cannot bring itself to the end. Burn what survives me in the stories I wrote to find my way to death. Burn everything in me that cannot die with my mortal body. But Kafka gives Brod this command which means he knows nothing will be burned. Why does he give it? Because something in him survives of the desire for literary immortality, although he seeks only to live in his death, to wander on like Gracchus. He seeks to live not his death but his dying.

Elsewhere in the Diary Kafka writes: ‘Write to be able to die, die to be able to write’. Write to be able to die – write in order to discover the contentment of departing a miserable life, a kind of safe suicide. Die to be able to write – deploy death in order to make sense, to realise a book. What does he mean? That Kafka is in lieu of what he seeks and of the power of seeking. The work fights back; Kafka becomes the work’s mouse; his cry is Josephine’s: pathetic and piping.[xix]

Death is the possibility of the work, but death depends upon a prior dying; how can we understand this peculiar intertwining? In a footnote in The Space of Literature, Blanchot points to the work of his friend Levinas. It occurs after this short passage:

When a contemporary philosophy names death as man’s extreme possibility, the possibility absolutely proper to him, he shows that the origin of possibility is linked in man to the fact that he can die, that for him death is yet one possibility more, that the event by which man departs from the possible and belongs to the impossible is nevertheless within his mastery, that it is the extreme moment of his possibility (and this the philosopher expresses precisely by saying of death that it is ‘the possibility of impossibility’).[xx]

Blanchot is referring, of course, to Heidegger, as part of a more general meditation on the relationship between death and the artwork. The themes here are already familiar: death is the condition of possibility of sense, but at the same time escapes the economy which would allow sense to be produced. Write to be able to die, die to be able to write: the power to annihilate the real existence of things (and the ‘I’) is the ground of action (die to be able to write), yet writing arrests dying, suspending the annihilation of things (write to be able to die).

This remains abstract. Blanchot indicates another way of understanding the relationship between writing and dying in a footnote: ‘Emmanuel Levinas is the first to have brought out what was at stake in this expression (Time and the Other)’. Here, Blanchot refers us to the remarkable series of arguments which leads Levinas to reverse Heidegger’s expression ‘the possibility of impossibility’ to ‘the impossibility of possibility’ in this early book.[xxi]

What does Levinas mean? At the heart of Heidegger’s phenomenology of mortality is the claim that it is always a specific Dasein who dies; death, he writes ‘lays claim to [Dasein] as an individual Dasein’ since no-one, as Heidegger writes, can die in its place.[xxii] It is by facing up to the fact that I will die (that is, to the possibility of the impossibility that I will continue to exist) that I might take on my existence in its uniqueness.

Dasein can be said to be authentically itself, according to Heidegger, when it lays claim to its own existence by liberating itself from what he writes are ‘those possibilities which may accidentally thrust themselves upon one’ by bringing itself into the proper relation to its morality.[xxiii] Dasein can only seize those contingent possibilities as its own, or indeed, chose other ones, once it has faced up to the fact that it will die. This is why Heidegger claims that Dasein can achieve a certain freedom by and through its relationship to what he calls the ‘uttermost possibility’ of death.[xxiv] The possibility of death makes Dasein’s possibilities possibilities for Dasein, which it can thereby assume and take over for itself.

In Time and the Other, Levinas argues that Heidegger illegitimately assumes that death is an ‘event of freedom’; Dasein cannot take over its thrown existence by relating itself to its death.[xxv] ‘Death is ungraspable […] it marks the end of the subject’s virility and heroism’; it offers no purchase for the subject: it remains ‘absolutely unknowable’ and ‘foreign to all light’.[xxvi]

Levinas thus reverses Heidegger’s famous formulation: ‘death in Heidegger is not […] “the impossibility of possibility”, but “the possibility of impossibility”’.[xxvii] What Heidegger ignores about the approach of death, according to Levinas, is that ‘at a certain moment we are no longer “able to be able” [nous ne “pouvons plus pouvoir”]’ – that is, we experience not simply our inability to do this or that, to assume this or that responsibility, or to choose this or that possibility, but the disappearance of our very ability to assume, take responsibility or choose.[xxviii] This experience not only interrupts the tasks and the projects with which we are occupied but entails ‘the impossibility of having a project’ – that is, the impossibility of enacting any kind of task whatsoever.[xxix] It may seem that Levinas is confusedly focusing on the ‘experience’ of dying, that is, the approach or the arrival of death, trying to make this point count against Heidegger when the author of Being and Time is not trying to present a phenomenology of the experience of dying, but is concerned with the stakes of the knowledge on the part of finite Dasein that death is a certainty. Heidegger is producing a phenomenology of mortality, but Levinas a phenomenology of dying – a subtle but profound difference.

Such a phenomenology of dying is part of Levinas’s larger concern with suffering; the phrase, ‘the impossibility of possibility’ is understood as part of a relationship between suffering, dying and existence which is very different to that of Heidegger. According to Levinas, ‘suffering in all its degrees entails the impossibility of detaching oneself from the instant of existence’.[xxx] In this context, this phrase refers to the inability of the suffering subject to reaffirm its freedom – which is, for Levinas, the impossibility of escaping the instant in which it is mired. The suffering subject cannot leave the instant behind: it is attached to it because it cannot summon up the strength to make the future possible for itself. The phrase, ‘the impossibility of possibility’ refers in this context to the inability of the subject to muster its powers. It cannot render its possibilities possible for itself in the manner of resolute and authentic Dasein.

It may seem Heidegger does not need to be anything but agnostic about what suffering or dying might be like whilst his account of resolute being-towards-death is simply an account of how Dasein comes to terms with the fact that it is mortal. All he would require to carry through his existential analysis of Dasein is an account of what it means to be brought into relation with the possibility of the impossibility of one’s continuing to exist. The phenomenologies of dying and suffering that Levinas produces would be ‘regional’ in the sense that they do not trouble the Heideggerian account of the relationship between the human being and death nor indeed the fundamental structure of the existential analytic of Dasein.

However, it is necessary to attend to the context of Levinas’s discussion into which the discussion of suffering and dying is set. Unlike Heidegger, he moves not from the analytic to Dasein to broach the question of the meaning of being, but from being in general to a particular being. Levinas sketches what resembles a cosmology: the ‘there is’ is a chaos of undifferentiated being from which the ego is said to emerge. It is in ‘horror’ that the ego shrinks from the depersonalisation of what he calls the sheer ‘there is’ of being.

The great drama of existence, according to Levinas, is that of struggle to maintain oneself in existence, to maintain that self-becoming which would permit a ‘victory over the ‘there is’’.[xxxi] The ego must first of all take possession of its being (this is what Levinas calls the ‘first ontological experience’) and sustain this possession. ‘Hypostasis’ is Levinas’s name for the event in which the ego seizes itself for itself, thereby securing a basis from which it can act as a principle or archē.[xxxii] Hypostasis permits the opening of an interiority in this taking up of a relationship with itself – ‘it is not just that one is, one is oneself’ [on n'est pas, on s'est].[xxxiii] This relation to oneself as a relation to being is what Levinas calls the fundamental ‘freedom of the beginning’.[xxxiv] To exercise and concretise this freedom is not an impersonal fate but the task of a kind of responsibility, but this is not merely a formal relationship to oneself. It is the effort to be, the constant struggle or work to keep a place from which to exist.

To exist, for Levinas, requires a kind of effort. The human being is not at one with itself but is torn; it takes work and effort to remain oneself; Être is always S’être. The human being as a substantive can always collapse into being understood as a verb. Heidegger’s account of the ecstasis of Dasein passes over the hypostasis through which it was able to achieve its being-there; the ‘Da’ of Dasein is produced and maintained in the effort of Dasein to be. And when this effort lapses? When the ‘Da’ disperses and Dasein’s ability-to-be, its Sein-können, disperses with it?

Suffering, physical suffering, names, for Levinas, the ‘experience’ in which the knot which binds the self to the self is loosened such that the ego is no longer able to preserve itself in its egoity. There is a lapse in the work of identity which insinuates an indefinite suspension at the heart of the ‘I’. In passing over the experience in question as well as the notion of identification to which Levinas appeals, the existential analysis passes over the conditions of Dasein’s existence. The transition from the possibility of impossibility to the impossibility of possibility is emblematic of a shift not merely from a phenomenology of mortality to a phenomenology of dying, but one away from Heideggerian phenomenology altogether.

What has this got to do with literature? Kafka to Janouch: ‘Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering’. What matters here is to understand suffering in terms of what Levinas and Blanchot call dying and how, in turn, this entails the reversal of the possibility of impossibility into impossibility of possibility. Die to be able to write – mobilise determinate negation in order to create something, establish an authenticating being-towards-death; write to be able to die – suspend that determinate negation in order to experience a real and not an ideal death, arrest the relation to death which would permit authenticity: only in terms of this double imperative might one understand Kafka’s predicament and the predicament of literature.

*

In The Space of Literature, Blanchot argues there is something incommensurable about the resolution to take my own life and about that action itself. Death, for Blanchot, is something upon which I cannot seize. The error of the suicide is to think death is an event which occurs in the normal course of time; it is the impatient attempt to die at a particular moment, determining the uncertain futurity of death’s approach. But this futurity is the mystery of what Blanchot calls dying. It does not belong to the order of time as it is measured by what is possible for the human being. The ‘other’ futurity, the time of dying, is what Blanchot will also call ‘the absence of time’: the suspension of time when the dying self cannot leave behind the instant of dying.

Like Levinas, Blanchot claims, the impossibility of possibility can be found, ‘In the most common suffering, and first of all in physical suffering’.[xxxv] ‘Suffering is suffering when one can no longer suffer it, and when, because of this non-power, one cannot cease suffering it’.[xxxvi] There is no subject of suffering – no one, that is, who could draw on a power to make suffering cease – but only ‘the infinite “present” of a death impossible to die’.[xxxvii] A ‘present’ which is not the finite stretch upon which Dasein is projected, but an interruption in which there is no one there and no ‘there’ in which to ‘be there’. There is only a kind of streaming, a flow without subject, a Cratylean stream into which one cannot step into even once.[xxxviii]

Blanchot repeats, in his own terms, the structure Levinas calls hypostasis, that is, both the act of assembling of the self which allows it to begin and the ‘being there’ which the self must maintain in order to have a place from which it can exist. Self-relation, which is also a relation to being, is accomplished through the mobilisation of death, according to Blanchot; the economy of sense depends on the negation of the real existence of things; our only approach to the world is through language. What he calls dying arrests this self-relation and the articulation of sense; the horror of death lies in the way it resists the powers of the self, in the impossibility of possibility it entails.

For Blanchot, dying arrests the relation to being. It is neither nothingness, as it could be dialectically recuperated, but nor is it being, insofar as the existence without existents named by the ‘there is’ suspends the economy of possibility. Blanchot uses the word le neutre, neuter, neutral, making use of its etymologically root as it suggests neither one thing nor the other, to suggest a wavering that settles neither into being nor nothingness. This is his way of naming what Levinas calls in Time and the Other ‘the impossibility of possibility’. Thus it is he writes of ‘a suffering that is almost indifferent, not suffered, but neutral (a phantom of suffering) insofar as the one who is exposed to it, precisely through this suffering, is deprived of the “I” that would make him suffer it’.[xxxix] Likewise, it is to this experience he refers when he writes of this experience as being no longer ‘that of a transcendent Being; it is “immediate” presence or presence as Outside’.[xl] ‘Impossibility, neither negation nor affirmation’, Blanchot writes ‘indicates what in being has always already preceded being and yields no ontology’.[xli]

Kafka suffers – but is Kafka there to experience his suffering? ‘Possibility is not what is merely possible and should be regarded as less than real’, Blanchot writes – it is not understood as what is logically permissible.[xlii] ‘Possibility establishes and founds reality: one is what one is only if one has the power to be it. Here we see immediately than man not only has possibilities, but is his possibility’.[xliii] If Kafka suffering were complete, then it would be impossible for him to write. But his suffering was never complete; he was able to write; literature opens because of the great leap ‘the merciful surplus of strength’ permits. Now Kafka suffers from literature: he cannot bring writing to a close. He writes and seeks to give himself death, that is, the cessation of literature, in the death of his characters. But even this is deprived of him in those tales which answer to his condition. Kafka creates K., Gracchus and in so doing a literature of impossibility, of infinite suffering.

Art, for Blanchot, is linked to this impossibility, this suffering. The possibility of realising an artistic work depends upon an experience in which the artist relinquishes his or her powers and the ability to be. This is because art depends on its relation to the absence of sense, that is, to the ‘night’ beyond the day of meaning. The ‘other’ night no longer grants the rest in which the author might regain strength, but is experienced in a kind of insomnia in which the one who wakes is detached from all creative powers. Who wakes? The suffering or dying self is an analogue to the one born in insomnia. Once again it is the experience of the impossibility of initiative, of the indefinite suspension of an instant, of a movement of dying which cannot find its term. This is the self fascinated with what Blanchot calls the work, l’oeuvre. The work, now, cannot be linked with the creative will but with the dissolution of the will. The work, like dying and suffering, is workless; the attempt to answer to the work is to attest to what cannot come to light in the great day of meaning. Then the task of realising the work is impossible. Impossibility, here, is no longer understood as a logical mode, but as a kind of experience. It names an experience of the limit of human initiative in which the self becomes the site of contestation. True, the work is impossible, but it continues to happen.

This experience is not tragic if this means the great contestation of the limit of the possible through the magnificent will of the hero. Such contestation, if it occurs, happens only in the ‘other’ night and involves not so much the shattering of the self as its dispersal, such that there is no one there to be destroyed. When I say ‘I’, according to Blanchot, ‘death is already loose in the world’. And when I loose the capacity to say ‘I’? When, in the dispersal in question there is no one there, no Dasein, that is, to brace itself against the ‘other’ night?

The work brings us, the readers, into relation which what Blanchot calls worklessness, that is, to the undifferentiated chaos of the il y a. Contrary to all other human products, which are still to be understood in terms of the realisation of a possibility, the work is not testament to the creative ingenuity of the human being but to a kind of decreation, as though art brought the bad deity of Gnosticism into existence – as if it were a matter of dissolving everything fixed and determinate into a primordial chaos. But the artwork is not the black hole which would swallow up the world. The book (as opposed to what Blanchot calls the work, which might also be named worklessness or the absence of the work) exists like other items in the world; it remains a determinate object with clearly defined contours. To write a book is a real achievement; a real birth, as Kafka said of ‘The Judgement’; but the book is not the work.

Kafka writes at his desk; when he cannot write literature, he composes entries in his diary or writes letters. He releases several small volumes of his stories into the world and keeps other stories back. Kafka writes a great deal and destroys a great deal, but such destruction is not what Blanchot calls the work. Rather, the work, which is to say, worklessness, the absence of the book, can only be indicated by Kafka’s tales.

When, in The Step Not Beyond, Blanchot places the words writing and dying together, it is only to mark, in writing, the attenuation of the will. To write, to die: yes, it is possible to write as it is possible to die, only with literature, this possibility depends, in turn, upon an experience of impossibility – upon a lapse in the work of identification. What are called writing and dying are a way of marking the economy of the literary text (or, better, the relation between economy and aneconomy which happens as the work); likewise, the word work is used as a way of marking the relation to non-meaning upon which the literary work depends.[xliv]

Existence, for Heidegger, remains projective and ecstatic; it already assumes being is not a burden. Or rather, even as it admits it, even as Heidegger invokes the ‘burdensome character of Dasein’[xlv] which pushes Dasein ‘to take things lightly and make them light’[xlvi], he still permits the freedom of ecstasis. Dying is an event which cannot complete itself; it cannot, indeed, be localised as an event. It is an interruption or discontinuity, a suspension or reduction without subject. Who is the ‘subject’ of dying? No one. Personne. There is no ‘I’ to be there; no one who possesses initiative. It is here the relation to being reveals itself as the impossible. But to claim ‘being is impossible’, as Blanchot sees after The Space of Literature, still grants too much; it is necessary to underscore the way the account of Levinasian-Blanchotian ‘dying’ and ‘suffering’ breaks with ontology altogether.

Neither death, as Blanchotian dying, nor writing, as it names the relation to the work, can be grasped as a completed event, as the cadaver or the book. Dying and writing defer completion without simply inserting themselves into the temporal order. They Without content, without shape, without form or punctuality, they might be said to happen in the infinitive, if this names a verb which marks a process that cannot be terminated and which does not require a subject. It is a question, rather, of an impersonal ‘il’ without tense. Worklessness is always to come; it never arrives. The absence of the book is never something that happens now. Writing itself, insofar as it is linked to what Blanchot calls the book, has never happened.

To write, to die: how does suffering bear writing? In his famous reflections in The Space of Literature, Blanchot argues I cannot plan to kill myself – the instant stretches forever; I cannot die in the present. Death, on this account, is ungraspable. Preparing to commit suicide, I assume that death is an event in the world. Kafka makes the same mistake when he claims to die content in the death of his characters: he seeks to be intimate with death. The artist plans something which cannot be planned and tests his resolute will against what paralyses that will. The suicide ‘takes one death for another’, the artist ‘takes a book for the work’.[xlvii] Both seek to render the impossible possible, to gain power in the realm of the powerless. Both, furthermore, experience ‘a radical reversal’.[xlviii] The writer writes in order to be able to die, but the power to write, to determine a work depends upon his relation to death. This is the paradox: ‘if Kafka goes toward the power of dying through the work which he writes, the work itself is by implication an experience of death which he apparently has to have been through already in order to reach the work and, through the work, death’.[xlix] The artist no longer receives his identity through writing. To write is to become ‘il’ to the extent that the writer is related to an event which cannot be brought about or identified. The writer is the one who, by writing, produces nothing. This is what is unbearable for Kafka and is why he dreams of coming to death in the death of his characters.

Write to be able to die – but dying is an experience of the impossible. Know that to write is not to receive your identity through writing, but rather to experience the infinite referral of identity. Know the books you have written cannot save you from writing, and all those you will write cannot bring any closer to you the absence of the book they reach toward. Die to be able to write – but know, too, that the capacity to die will fail you and you will have to relinquish your propriety over what you took to be your work. The hypostasis which permits you to work, to gather yourself up, to clear some space and time to begin is suspended.

The merciful surplus of strength delivers Kafka over to literature; he revels in his powers. In Blanchot’s words, death is possible; Kafka finishes literary works. But then Kafka is drawn, too, to an impossible death, a dying – his work is magnetised by the demand that Kafka sacrifice his power to determine in order to lay hold of what he is: a writer, a literary writer. Die to be able to write; write to be able to die: ‘Kafka's heroes carry out their actions in death's space, and that it is to the indefinite time of “dying” that they belong’; it is this context Blanchot will also invoke Kierkegaard’s ‘sickness unto death’.[l]

In The Sickness Unto Death, written by the ‘higher’ pseudonym Anti-Climacus as in others by Kierkegaard, the task is to delineate what it means to become a self; it is necessary to actualise what you are as yet only in potential.[li] To become a self is a matter of relating the two sides of the human being, of reconciling the finite and the temporal with the infinite and the eternal; the physical and the necessary with the psychical and freedom. This is possible only through despair [fortvivlelse].[lii]

In the first kind of despair, there is only a negative relationship between these two poles – we might recognise the form of existence with characterises the aesthetical sphere. A choice is necessary in order to step into the ethical sphere; one must choose oneself, drawing upon a freedom hitherto unsuspected. In this way, the two sides of the human being are dynamically joined: a self is born in their union. Whence Judge William’s admonishment to the aesthete in Either/Or: choose yourself. But then Kierkegaard shows us that the Judge, who presents himself as one who has made a choice (who has chosen to choose himself) does not grasp the origin of this capacity. The self does not give birth to itself; it is not born through an act of will. If it produces itself, it is only by actualising a latent self-relation. But the relation itself was created; it owes itself to a transcendent source. To step into the religious sphere is possible only insofar as the self relates to God. God was there before [ante] everything. The self achieves itself in this relation and is thus free to be itself.

To remain in despair, according to Anti-Climacus, is to forgo this possibility. Despair happens when the self does not relate to itself properly as a self. Only the religious sphere is without misrelation. Misrelation, then, is irresoluteness: the inability to decide, to leap ahead. But what if one cannot become a self through an act of resolve? What if resoluteness itself fails, or meets with no help from above? What if the self itself dissolves in an experience of the infinite? Then the relation that would allow one to leap out of despair is subject to an indefinite detour and it is as if God had a demonic double. This, perhaps, is the 'doubling' that only the doubter (the despairer) experiences: the bifurcation which makes the leap of faith the death leap. For the Christian, one might die to one's old life and be reborn; dying is a passageway. But for the non-Christian there is through this leap only a deepening of the misrelation, only a deeper despair, in which the terms are set apart forever. Only the Christian, according to Anti-Climacus, can understand the significance of the sickness unto death and can be led from despair to be born anew. Some types of aesthetic despair involve an attempt to overcome despair, to die to it, without this ever being possible. It remains a sickness unto death – a dying without terminus.

Kafka cannot make the leap. This, indeed, is another way to understand Kafka’s despair: he cannot make the step through which he would receive by writing what he had lost in life. When he leaps into literature, the suffering with which he began is as though bracketed. Now a new suffering begins: the sickness without end, the sickness which aims at death but never reaches it. Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering: but what does he receive by way of this writing? What is his consolation? Now we come to the great motif of repetition as it is explored by Kierkegaard in Repetition and Fear and Trembling.

Repetition comprises general reflections by one Constantine Constantius and the letters written to Constantius by a young man. We learn from those letters that the young man fell in love, but that no relationship was established between him and his beloved. Who is it he adores? The young man appears to adore adoration; the ‘object’ of his love is loved only because she enables him to love. He loves her as the occasion of his love; this is what he understands when he loses her. As such, she was nothing; if he had written of her, writing out of his adoration, it was only to determine her as the focus of his capacity for loving. She was ideal, not real; as the object of his love, as his beloved, she existed only as an archetype belonging to an eternal past.

As such, the young man is linked to her by recollection [Erindring].[liii] That is to say, he has not reached her; recollecting, he plunges into himself; he is lost. His relation to the beloved is a pseudo-relation, or at least it is one which falls, with him, into his past and to the ceaseless recollection of an archetype which inhabits the past. But then the young man wonders whether this experience is a kind of ordeal – perhaps, he wonders, it is analogous to the trials of Job. Didn’t Job receive everything anew after his test? He kept faith – if he had 7,000 sheep before his trial, he had 14,000 after; if he had 500 yoke of oxen beforehand he had 1000 after. Remembering the time when Job was rebuked in the form of a thunderstorm, the young man writes, ‘I am waiting for a thunderstorm – and for repetition’.[liv] What does he want? To receive himself anew.

What has he lost? His own past, his own future. Better: he has lost possibility, the chance of transformation. And what does he seek? Repetition [gjentagelsen]: to take his life again – to receive it anew.[lv] He wants possibility – he wants the momentum which will carry him into the future. This is how he would break from recollection. And break he does (or at least this is what we learn from his correspondent, Constantius, who later claims that the young man was a fiction, his own creation. Do not believe him. For they are both diners and discussants, as real as one another, at the symposium in the first part of Stages on Life’s Way.)

Kierkegaard will go on to claim the original state precedes the original sin. The relationship to God is received anew through the incarnation and atonement of Jesus Christ. This would be the Christian repetition – the restoration – to which the repetition for which the young man strives can only approximate.

Kierkegaard may have thought he could win back his former fiancée at the time he wrote Repetition, but he learnt, as he finished it, that she was engaged. He ripped up the last pages of Repetition and rewrote them, making the young man discover his beloved is engaged and rejoice in that fact. Is it this which makes Repetition so peculiar? In one draft, Kierkegaard had meant the young man to commit suicide. This would have been more satisfying although the book would be less of an enigma. No longer brought to term through a suicide, it is transformed into a text, like Kafka’s, written in death’s space. Loving becomes a synonym for dying, for writing.

The young man writes: ‘I am myself again. Here I have repetition; I understand everything, and life seems more beautiful to me than ever. It did indeed come like a thunderstorm’.[lvi] Then he didn’t achieve repetition by establishing a real relationship with his beloved, who was already lost to him. What he was seeking and what he found was himself – the one for whom possibility was possible. But this does not convince. Perhaps it was that the young man wanted his beloved before he wanted himself; what he sought, first of all, a relation that was not a self-relation. He looked for a newness or novelty that would come from without – the shattering experience of the Other – and the book should have ended, perhaps, with this experience or his suicide. Who is the Other? His beloved? God? Constantius comments that if the young man were religious, he would never have become a poet. But what kind of judge is Constantius, whose name suggests the inability of movement, of momentum, of transformation?

The young man, by contrast, is nameless. He has no name, it is suggested, because he can find no purchase either on the present nor the future. He is not-yet, pure potential. But when he regains the power to repeat – when repetition allows him to enter, once again, the economy of possibility – one might think he would regain his name, too. Kierkegaard’s text doesn't tell us; the young man disappears from the stage. One might wonder, however, whether there is a repetition which reaches beyond both recollection and the pristine innocence which is recovered in the relationship to God – a non-Christian repetition, then, that would restore not a name, but a namelessness, not possibility, but impossibility. There is a thunderstorm without cease from which no deliverance comes.

Such would be the repetition of the suspension of the instant (the time of the absence of time) to which literary writing is linked. It is not just that Kafka is now as though alienated by the words he uses – as if he could simply keep silent like the Abraham of Fear and Trembling. There is no escape. Yet as Blanchot argues, writing is also linked to the repetition of the experience of the origin as it deprives the self of initiative, the capacity to begin and the ability to be able – of a different thunderstorm, then, the thundering silence of a murmuring without term. It is by this silence that the author loses her name and the signature she appends to the finished work is made to tremble. Giving itself over and again is an experience which deprives her from even the power to remember. Language is not hers; within language, repeating itself, is the experience which deprives her of her name.

What is the meaning of the thunderstorm? Repetition brings only disappointment, failure with respect to what can be said. Who speaks when repetition speaks? No one. Personne. Repetition erodes the position, the being-there of the writer. The finite cannot reintegrate the infinite, the temporal cannot reconcile itself with the eternal, the psychical does not dominate the physical – the writer endures an endless misrelation, a necessary dying, which cannot be reconciled with the freedom of to write. There is only despair and the return of despair – the sickness unto death of the one who would accomplish writing as a task like other tasks in the world.[lvii]

Kafka the failure, the one who places everything to sacrifice without wanting anything in return, is the young man of Repetition who writes to receive himself anew without receiving anything. He is, too, the aesthete of Either/Or who foregoes the chance to choose himself and the atheist lost in despair described in The Sickness Unto Death: Kafka has faith only in a writing he cannot achieve; he writes, but the ‘merciful surplus of strength’ can never carry him to the hither side of writing. ‘What would the testing of Abraham be, if having no son, he were nevertheless required to sacrifice his son? He couldn’t be taken seriously; he could only be laughed at’.[lviii] ‘That laughter’, writes Blanchot, ‘is the form of Kafka’s pain’; only this is a pain which has transmuted itself and become literature.[lix] ‘Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering’.[lx] But this is his vigilance: Kafka’s text watches over his pain; Blanchot, vigilant in turn, repeats the vigilance of Kafka’s writings in his own commentaries.

One might suspect that in writing of Kafka’s pain Blanchot is doing exactly the same as these commentators by rendering The Castle an allegory of Kafka’s life. But this is not the case. Blanchot is writing of what literature demands – of a pain which is specific to literary creativity. If Blanchot tells us of Kafka’s vicissitudes this is with the aim of allowing them to indicate the vicissitudes of literature (Kafka also suffers from literature); he moves not from literature to biography, but from biography to literature, narrating Kafka’s life as Silentio does Abraham’s. This time, however, Blanchot does not celebrate a knight of faith, but a knight of bad faith who can never understand what it is he has wagered nor what he has wagered it for. Kafka is marked by the despair of an endless misrelation – his is a Gracchus-like wandering which leads him to unfold text after text, some complete and some incomplete, but all strangely full, saturated with a voice that bears upon the condition of narrative.

Misrelation, sickness unto death, fruitless repetition: this is Kafka’s experience. But how is this suffering marked in the text itself? What traces does it leave such that Blanchot can retrace them to the experience where it is not a matter so much of the death of the author, but that of dying upon which his capacity to write must also refer: to the strange intertwining of dying and death? It is a question of what Blanchot will call symbolic reading, which he contrasts to that of allegory.

*

Everyday talk, Blanchot writes, has as its ideal the dream of pure communication; words, here, are ‘no more than ghosts, absences of words’; they are signs, indifferent tokens, whose own sonority and rhythm matters little.[lxi] In literature, language is no longer able to present itself simply as the sign of absent or imagined things. To read literature allegorically, according to Blanchot’s understanding of the word, is to suppose the story itself were a sign of something else – that the real story is elsewhere and this one, the one we are reading, is of no consequence in itself. In this sense, allegorical reading approximates to the relation to language present in ordinary communication. If I ask you to pass the salt it is for the most part what is signified by this expression rather than the way I say it that is important.

What Blanchot calls symbolic reading reaches beyond itself, but not by presenting itself in its entirety as a sign; indeed, it is just such signification it seeks to avoid. Imagination becomes symbolic, Blanchot writes, when

the image it seeks, the figure not of such-and-such a thought but of the tension of the entire being to which we carry each thought, is as if immersed in the totality of the imaginary world: it implies an absolute absence, a counterworld that would be like the realisation, in its entirety, of the fact of being outside reality.[lxii]

So it is that as it were behind the details of the story, something else is indicated:

On one hand, it is made of events, details, gestures: it shows faces, the smiles on faces, a hand that takes a spoon and carries it to the mouth, crumbs of plaster that fall from the wall when someone climbs it. These are insignificant details, and the reader does not have to seek or receive meaning from them. They are nothing but particularities, worthless moments, dust of words. But on the other hand, the symbol announces something, something that surpasses all these details taken one by one and all these details taken together, something that surpasses itself, that refuses what it claims to announce and discredits it and reduces it to nothing. It is its own emptiness, the infinite distance that it cannot interpret or touch, a lacunar immensity that excludes the boundaries from which the symbol endeavours to make this infinite distance appear.[lxiii]

The details of the story are not there to contribute to the verisimilitude of the story, fleshing out a world which is never substantial enough. Symbolic literature is not content with narrating a story which takes place in the world and remains in the world. There is an absence, a lack beyond the fullness of narrative incident. What characterises the symbolic story, Blanchot writes, is that ‘it makes out of the lack of its story the subject of its story, it tries to realise in it this lack that always infinitely surpasses it’.[lxiv]

The symbolic tale aims not to retrace a narrative, but to indicate its negation. This is not simply the erasure of a story, but the story of an erasure, as though at one and the same time, the story were possible and impossible. The symbol might be said to join the story to the absence of a story; the events, gestures and details are not signs which point to a signified, but indications of something which does not offer itself to signification. The lack that is thus foregrounded is what makes Hegel’s account of symbolic art peculiarly apposite.

Hegel says of symbolic art that its principal fault is Unangemessenheit: the exteriority of the image and its spiritual content do not succeed in coinciding fully, the symbol remains inadequate. Undoubtedly, but this fault is the essence of the symbol, and its role is to send us endlessly back to the lack that is one of the ways by which it would like to make us experience lack in general, emptiness in its entirety. The symbol is always an experience of nothingness, the search for a negative absolute, but it is search that does not succeed, an experience that fails, without this failure being able to acquire a positive value.[lxv]

What, then, does the symbolic story seek? The negative absolute? Art, as Hegel explains in his lectures on aesthetics, is the sensuous appearance of the Idea.[lxvi] What does this mean? The painter lifts her subjects out of prosaic, everyday life, elevating the instant into a kind of eternity. ‘Natural’ time and space are overcome. The vitality and dynamism of the painting answers the wholeness of our experience in its unity and coherence, celebrating the richness of life in its free movement. The shining forth of the underlying unity and harmony passed over in everyday life is presented in sensuous form. Presented thus, the subject of art is disinterested; it allows a contemplative detachment of the Absolute. As such, the Absolute is never, for Hegel, an empty beyond, a Jenseits beyond experience; it unfolds from experience. The philosophy of Absolute Spirit articulates this explication, attending to art, alongside religion and philosophy, as a mode of meaning.

But for Hegel, the epoch in which art can be said to reveal the Absolute has passed. The typology of art begins with symbolic art, which Hegel associates with that the ancient Orient, in particular the Egyptians, who represented their beliefs through animal symbols. The Symbolic work of art presents us with what remains indefinite and opaque. By contrast, the classical work of art, exemplified in the statues of Greek gods, joins the human and divine in sensuous unity. With the Greeks, the sensuous is transformed as the self articulates and objectifies itself as Spirit. The self does not lose itself in sensuousness, but rediscovers itself in its objectification as a statue of a human being, which is why Greek statuary is so important to Hegel. The sensuous can now shine forth as Spirit and leave behind its crude, unformed materiality. A statue is not bare marble and a poem is not sheer sonorousness. The marble and sonorousness are idealised; the concrete is thereby lifted from itself as it discloses its content by way of the sensuous. The Ideal names nothing other than this: it is the way the Idea presents itself sensuously, in the transformation of matter as it is shaped by artistic activity.

With the Greeks, the Idea is immanent in the Ideal; art clearly constitutes an autonomous sphere of meaning. Romantic art, which follows the rise of Christianity, attends to an inwardisation which Classical art does not; the infinite is not the amorphous materiality of Symbolic art; nor indeed is it embodied in the perfect form of Greek statuary. The infinite has been inwardised; Spirit discloses itself just such an inwardisation. With Romanticism, the balance struck with classical Greek art has been lost; the artwork can no longer be regarded as an end in itself. While art brought the gods into the presence of the Greeks, Christian spirituality outstrips it in its emphasis on the inwardness of the soul. As such, art falls behind religion as a form of Absolute Spirit. The inward turn of Christian spirituality is superseded once again as philosophy comes to itself as the final form of Absolute Spirit. Philosophy, according to Hegel, succeeds religion; Romantic art succeeds Classical art, which, in turn, supersedes Symbolic art.

Why then does Blanchot think the negative absolute in terms of the symbol? It may seem he retreats to an older, pre-Hegelian sense of the absolute as an empty beyond. But if the negative absolute indicates such a Jensheit, only it is one which is, as it were, ‘within’ experience. Blanchot no longer celebrates the Idea as it shines through aesthetic sensuousness, but emphasises the weight, density and materiality of matter as it refuses dialectical development. The sensuous is no longer idealised, but falls back to an unformed materiality from which Hegelian art was able to lift itself.

If Blanchot writes of the image, he does not follow Hegel’s modified conception of the way in which the image, or sensuous shape of the artwork is brought together with the Idea in the Ideal. For Hegel, image and original (the Idea) come together; the artistic whole is such that it cannot be broken into its constituents without losing the shining of the Ideal. Yet for Blanchot, the image, the materiality of the work, outplays the Idea, refusing reconciliation and peaceful repose in the Ideal.

What does that mean? Is Blanchot claiming for art the capacity to direct access to the immediate? If so, he risks retreating to a position Hegel exposed as hopelessly naïve? When Blanchot writes of the immediate it is to evoke the excessiveness of materiality, of sensuousness, over form, which is to say, the self-articulation of the Idea. This excessiveness resists the good infinite of the work of art as it gathers up the apparently arbitrary and contingent, binding them in such a form that the truth of the whole becomes visible in the concreteness of the artwork. The bad infinite of sensuousness unbound from the Idea cannot be understood as part of the positive sense of the whole. It repeats itself by affirming the neutral double of the world, the dimension of materiality which resists the light of meaning and truth.

Thus it is that the symbolic tale evidences the demand of the symbol – the demand, that is, of a universal negation not, as Blanchot emphasises, ‘as an abstract universal but as a concrete emptiness, a realised universal emptiness’.[lxvii] Symbolic literature does not seek so much to realise a world as to derealise it, to press upon the reader the experience of the failure of signification. The work is not a finished masterpiece that would celebrate the movement of life, but a black hole, a point of infinite density which draws the reader across its event horizon.

How should one understand this? ‘Any possible world’, writes Maurice Natanson in his account of the relationship between phenomenology and literature, has a ‘horizonal character’; that is to say, it is delimited. ‘For something to be “in” the world means that we can grasp it through the primal horizon of its being’; what we experience is more or less familiar, more or less strange to each of us, but it remains intraworldly.[lxviii] Blanchot, by contrast, argues that with a certain literary fiction, this horizon cannot be drawn; there is another distribution of the familiar and the strange. Natanson insists ‘A thing or event, then, is horizonal at the outset. For something to be or to transpire is for it to have regional or zonal character’; Blanchot suggests that the things or events that come forward to us in fiction have a fragmentary character.[lxix]

For Roman Ingarden, whose classic phenomenological studies of literature Natanson recalls, the reader attempts to concretise what she reads. The declarative sentence in the novel is only, he claims, a pseudo-statement. To read is to fill out what is read by comparing it to our experience of the world. Thus it is we become frustrated watching an adaptation of our favourite book – when, for example, Anthony Perkins plays Joseph K., and Orson Welles takes the role of the advocate. This is not to give the determination of the literary work of art over to the will of the reader, but to claim that the work lives by lending itself to such concretisation even as it withdraws from it, permitting, from its mesh of text, a million different ways of seeing K. the landsurveyor his assistants or even the castle itself.

On Ingarden’s account, a reader builds up an image of a fictional world by concretising particular clauses found in a story. For Blanchot, however, such concretisation only holds sway in ordinary speech. Ordinary speech, he argues, is close to what he calls allegory where the physical and sonorous qualities of speech falls away in favour of the meaning speech is meant to convey. In literary writing, by contrast, the relation to the text is such that those same qualities are foregrounded. It is the symbol which is the model of the reader’s relation to the text. For Blanchot, reading literature does not depend upon an animating intention; this is simply to treat literature on the model of everyday speech. What happens as the literary work resists the opening of meaning even in the midst of what makes meaning possible. This is the case even when intentionality is transmuted by Heidegger into ready-to-handedness or the understanding-of-being and set into the context of being-in-the-world.

How, then, is the text animated at all? How does it come to mean? It is not that it resists the economy of meaning altogether but that it withdraws from meaning even as it offers itself to it, which is to say, it both grants the possibility of interpretation and withdraws from that possibility.[lxx] This may seem analogous to Ingarden’s argument, but in fact it inverts it. What, for Blanchot, is encountered with the literary work is not simply the donation of sense which would animates the fictional world of the book, but the senselessness which prevents this animation. The book is not alive but undead; if it appears to live, it does so only as a simulacrum of life. Indicated in the letter of its text is the same absence of the world one experiences in suffering, affliction or weariness.

Art is the shattering of the horizon of the world. Understood from Hegel’s perspective, the passage of Absolute Spirit is reversed. The sensuous is no longer illuminated by the light of the Idea. No inward turn separates Romantic art from Greek art; likewise, Greek art only delimits what happens in the event of the work Blanchot describes. All art is Egyptian; the infinite cannot be inwardised, but escapes the economy of interiority. From the perspective of phenomenology, the neutral double of the fictional world turns intentionality back upon itself. Meaninglessness presses forward in the very meaning of the literary work.

Here, the stakes of the repetition to which literature is linked cannot be confined to aesthetics alone. Blanchot is true to Surrealism insofar as literary writing is, for him, a mode of research in which it is thinking in the broadest sense that is at issue. To claim, as I will now show, that reading literature can be thought by analogy to the phenomenological reduction is also to claim that a practice analogous to phenomenology is born in Blanchot’s account of literature.

*

In the first volume of the Ideas, Husserl expounds his notion of the phenomenological reduction, understood as a suspension of judgment with regard to the existence of that which is taken to exist. The reduction, Husserl writes, leads to a reversal in ‘the sense commonly expressed in speaking of being […] the being which is first for us is second in itself; that is, it is what it is, only in “relation” to the first’.[lxxi]

In his dissertation, which bears the strong influence of Heidegger, Levinas argues against what he takes to be Husserl’s excessive theoreticism.

Yet it seems that man suddenly accomplishes the phenomenological reduction by a purely theoretical act of reflection on life. Husserl offers no explanation for this change of attitude and does not even consider it a problem. Husserl does not raise the metaphysical problem of the situation of the Homo philosophus.[lxxii]

Or, once again,

By virtue of the primacy of theory, Husserl does not wonder how this ‘neutralisation’ of our life, which nevertheless is still an act of our life, has its foundation in life…. The freedom and the impulse which lead us to reduction and philosophical intuition present by themselves nothing new with respect to the freedom and stimulation of theory. The latter is taken as primary, so that Husserl gives himself the freedom of theory just as he gives himself theory. Consequently, despite the revolutionary character of the phenomenological reduction, the revolution which it accomplishes is, in Husserl’s philosophy, possible only to the extent that the natural attitude is theoretical.[lxxiii]

This theoreticism is what Heidegger would resist when he reconsiders the ‘sum’ of Dasein’s existence as part of his inquiry into the meaning of being, according to Levinas. Husserl, according to Heidegger, has failed to grasp the significance of the ego sum; it remains to plunge Dasein back into the world. The existential analytic would attempt to retrieve the being of the self, of Dasein, from its metaphysical appropriation. For Levinas, there is still a question of how one attains that position from which it is possible to philosophise, thus breaking from the ‘natural attitude’ which has a similar structural role to the analyses of Das Man in Being and Time.

What is left of the reduction in Heidegger is no longer understood as a reflection on the experiences delivered up by the exploration of intentionality. Affects ‘assail Dasein in its unreflecting devotion of the “world”’.[lxxiv] Indeed, affectedness allows things to show up as phenomena – ‘existentially, Befindlichkeit implies a disclosive submission to the world out of which we can encounter something that matters to us. Indeed from the ontological point of view we must leave the primary discovery of the world to bare mood’.[lxxv] Moods come and go, taking determinate objects. What is singular about anxiety (and later boredom) for Heidegger is that it has no particular object and is directed towards Dasein’s being-in-the-world as such. Moreover, the fundamental mood of anxiety opens within everydayness such Dasein can come to itself as it breaks with the net of involvements with things and persons in which it is caught.

This is what remains of the Husserlian reduction: the world is revealed in the fundamental mood of anxiety as it deprives beings of their familiar places and functions in Dasein’s world. No longer are beings ready-to-hand, placed at our disposal. Dasein breaks from its involvement with intramundane things; they lose all significance. For anxious Dasein, the world ‘has the character of completely lacking significance’.[lxxvi] Yet even as it does so, things in the world come forward without the animation of Dasein’s tasks and projects as though they were no longer ‘existed’ by the ek-static projection of Dasein. But anxiety also as it were reduces Dasein to itself, wrenching it from the idle chatter and aimless curiosity which prevents it from ever grasping itself as an individual. As disclosing, anxiety reveals to Dasein the possibility that it might exist authentically; now it has the chance to become what it already is at an existential level: a self.

It may seem Dasein thereby arrives in the experience Blanchot places at the heart of his account of suffering: it becomes no one in particular as it loses grip on what is conventionally assumed to be its identity. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger focuses on the expression, ‘es ist einem langweilig’ in order to comment upon the Grundstimmung of boredom, which in plays the same role as anxiety in his writings and lectures of previous years.[lxxvii] As William Large comments, ‘Es’ and ‘Einem’ are both neutral, es being a ‘dummy subject’ which, in this expression, refers to the world as such, but not to any particular person or thing in this world, rather a world where everything has dissolved in the same of fog of indifference’.[lxxviii] Likewise, einem no longer refers to a specific person; for Heidegger, profound boredom happens ‘not to me as me’, Heidegger says, ‘not to you as you, not to us as us, but to someone’.[lxxix] Yet the fundamental mood of boredom still permits one to choose oneself. This is because of the fundamental reflexivity which, for Heidegger, is built into Dasein at an existential level: its selfhood. This reflexivity depends in turn on the structure which, Levinas claims, is the organising principle of Heideggerian thought. It is in terms of the suspension of this reflexivity that Blanchot’s account of suffering and literature might be understood.

*

In Time and the Other, Levinas writes, discussing the difference between being and beings: ‘in Heidegger there is a distinction, not a separation. Existing is always grasped in the existent, and for the existent that is a human being. The Heideggerian term Jemeinigkeit precisely expresses the fact that existing is always possessed by someone’.[lxxx]

What does this mean? Heidegger explains how the things themselves are bound up with the way in which they are encountered and used in the everyday, familiar environment [Umwelt] that forms the context of Dasein’s existence. Understanding is therefore automatic and tacit, involving a grasp of a given situation that allows Dasein to know what to do there. Things are first experienced within a pre-conceptual contexture, making sense in terms of the possibilities they offer for manipulation or deployment.

Thus, Dasein has from the first an interest with that with which it engages. Dasein understands things in view of certain possibilities that Dasein can fulfil. It is the preconceptual understanding-of-being which bestows Sein-können, the ‘to-be-able-to-be’ of Dasein. ‘As understanding’, Heidegger writes, ‘Dasein projects its being upon possibilities’.[lxxxi] Dasein understands things as part of those projects with which it is engaged and, more generally, as part of a broader self-understanding. The understanding-of-being is part of a ‘being towards oneself’ that, Heidegger argues, ‘constitutes the being of Dasein’.[lxxxii] As such, Dasein always and already transcends the given and projects itself towards the future. Dasein’s activities must always be grasped in terms of its overall concern for itself. Dasein is a worldly being, whose self-understanding is part of its understanding of being.

There is, as Levinas acknowledges, a difference between being and beings (or what he terms existence and existents) for Heidegger. This does not mean that existence should be understood in terms of the supreme being of the medieval theologians nor as the most empty and most universal concept that we reach by abstracting what is common to anything that exists. Nor should the difference between existence and existents be mapped onto the relationship between being and becoming, where the former is understood as what endures in the midst of the flux of the latter. Being is, as Heidegger writes in Being and Time, ‘transcendens pure and simple’, and the question of its meaning must be broached through an account of the temporal transcendence of Dasein.[lxxxiii] Being must be thought from the pre-voluntary act of surpassing which happens as the understanding of being that Dasein originally is. It must show, as the fundamental-ontological question par excellence how the understanding of being is possible. And it can only do this by laying bare and reflecting on the very mineness of Dasein, the fact that ‘the being of this being is in each case mine [je meines]’.[lxxxiv]

It is in terms of this fundamental ontology that we should understand Levinas’s claim that existing is, for Heidegger always ‘possessed’ by someone. Such ‘possession’ (Levinas’s word for what Heidegger calls Jemeinigkeit, translated by Macquarrie and Robinson as ‘mineness’) does not refer to something that belongs to one in the sense of having something as one’s own or in one’s control; I do not own being as I would a piece of property. There is, as Levinas writes, a distinction between being and Dasein and not a separation: they must be thought together. Without this distinction, Heidegger could not begin his attempt to broach the question of the meaning of being that so transforms phenomenology. ‘Dasein is an entity which, in its very being, comports itself understandingly towards that being’.[lxxxv] Dasein does not constitute being through acts of reflection; it as it were inherits being, being delivered over, abandoned or ‘thrown’ into existence. Dasein cannot, as it were, get back behind its thrownness but has to be. As Levinas puts it in his oral defence of Totality and Infinity, ‘this ‘obligation’ to be, this manner of being, is an exposition to being that is so direct that it thereby becomes mine!’[lxxxvi] It is only because Dasein is mine that there is an ‘I’.

Yet there is still a reflexivity, even if it is not that of the transcendental ego reflecting on its experience. This is indicated, Jeffrey Kosky notes, in the verb Heidegger uses to designate this primordial being-affected: sich ängstigen.[lxxxvii] Quoting Heidegger, who writes that anxiety is ‘a threat which reaches Dasein itself and which comes from Dasein itself’, Kosky comments, ‘he seems to acknowledge the existential-ontological significance of this grammatical-reflexive. In a sense, then, Dasein gives its anxiety to itself […] Dasein’s passivity is rooted in an existential and reflexive auto-affection’.[lxxxviii] Moreover, the whole account of authenticity repeats this auto-affection insofar as one gives oneself authenticity. It can do this because Dasein is ‘always mine’ even as mineness is subject to a lability.

It is this fundamental reflexivity which is undone in Levinas and Blanchot. For his part, Levinas understands existence in terms of a division: the human being is not at one with itself but is torn; it takes work and effort to remain oneself; Être is always S’être; the human being as a substantive can always collapse into being which is understood as a verb. The emphasis on project and intentionality passes over what Levinas might be understood to present as one version of the reduction: nausea (On Escape) or physical pain (Existence and Existence, Time and the Other) which Blanchot follows in his own work.[lxxxix] What does it reveal? The way in which the bond between being and beings indicated in expressions like je me suis and on s’est is suspended. The verb is attenuated, worn out; the infinite explicates itself in the finite.

It may appear Blanchot retains two versions of the reduction which are indicated in the quotation from Janouch: Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering. With regard to the first, Blanchot follows Levinas; it plays the same structural role as anxiety in Being and Time and ‘What is Metaphysics?’ with respect to the existential analytic of Dasein: that is, it reveals bare Dasein. For Blanchot and Levinas, however, it reveals an impersonal opening which no longer has the possibility of attaining authentic selfhood. In the second, Blanchot indicates a suffering born of the step into literature itself as it issues in an indeterminable speech. Le pas au-delà. The second reduction is structurally linked to the first one insofar as it is also concerned with an experience which cannot be brought to term. Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering: Kafka would then pass through a first reduction – suffering, and pass into another – literature.

Yet the separation of the first and second reduction remains too simple as long as it rests on the model of a field of emotion (suffering, loneliness, weariness) that would exist before language and which the writer, employing language as she would an instrument, would attempt to bring to expression. Writing is not such a tool. The words suffering, loneliness and weariness operate as concepts; they are inherited, along with other words, as part of our culture. Certainly, they may seem to fit with what we experience, felicitously capturing experiences hidden in the recesses of our soul. But what if those same experiences depended on those words? What if those experiences crystallised around the words themselves, accreting and coming together so they appear as nothing other than suffering, loneliness and weariness? Then it is not a question of losing something through writing, if this loss is framed in terms of the written betrayal of an experience which is completely extra-linguistic. Rather, this loss must be thought in terms of a struggle between the singularity of an experience and the words that seem to offer themselves to describe it. These words are particulars which stand beneath universals; they are conceptual.

The struggle, then, is not between language and its other, but between the singular and the particular. In this sense, it may seem there are not two reductions but only one, which is given in terms of this struggle as it is endured by the writer. The writer is the one who suffers from this struggle, who undergoes it and cannot help but undergo it. But the writer struggles as a writer, that is to say, as one who has to write. Asked in a questionnaire, ‘Why do you write? Blanchot replied: ‘I will borrow from Dr Martin Luther when at Worms, he declared his unshakability: Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. May God help me. Which I translate modestly: In the space of writing – writing, not writing – here I sit bent over, I cannot do otherwise and I await no help from the beneficent powers’.[xc] I could not do otherwise, which is to say, literature works through the writer. But even this formulation is misleading. For the writer would not be a writer without words. It is with language the writer suffers. Literature is this struggle, and not its result. It is that place of torsion from which a work is born.[xci] As such it not only occurs for a writer about whose life we can learn from biographies or literary-critics, but also for the readers who encounter the text. What Blanchot allows to be called the reduction is marked in the text as readers encounter it, the text being nothing outside such encounters. It reaches the reader in literary fiction, as I will show, in what Blanchot calls the narrative voice.

*

‘Often in a bad narrative’, Blanchot writes, ‘we have the impression that someone is speaking in the background and prompting the characters, or even the events with what they are to say: an indiscreet and awkward intrusion’: the author’s voice obtrudes, it is overbearing.[xcii] But it is in way a way analogous to this intrusion that the ‘neutralisation’ of the narrative voice reveals itself. There is, Blanchot writes, a voice which resounds outside the circle of narrative and it is as though this circle, this zone or bounded horizon, has been decentred; ‘as though the outside were precisely this centre that could only be the absence of any centre’.[xciii]

What does this mean? Blanchot reprises his reflections on the phrase ‘this merciful surplus’, taking a sentence from The Castle for his analysis. Imagine a writer, he says, writing a sentence like ‘The forces of life suffice only up to a certain point’.[xciv] Here, as before, there is a bad faith in evidence that is similar to that of the writer who writes of her loneliness or her suffering, since the writer still had energy enough to turn the exhaustion in question into an idea. What happens when it is placed in a narrative? It no longer has anything to do with the author’s life or anything outside the narration itself. Who speaks? What speaks? Neither Kafka nor one of his characters; it is, rather, it is the narrative voice which speaks, an ‘il’ without source. Who is this ‘il’? Is Kafka allegorising his life in his work? Are we to read the pages of The Castle as a veiled autobiography? Is Kafka assuming the mantle of a kind of philosopher or moralist as Brod would have it, instructing us about the necessity of loving others? To answer in the affirmative to either question would be to miss what happens in the unfolding of the narrative. The ‘il’ belongs only to the narrative. In Kafka’s The Castle, the narrative voice no longer seeks the disinterested detachment of the narrator of, say, George Eliot’s Middlemarch. There is no breathing space; we do not as readers stand apart from the text as its spectators, but are enfolded in its steady narration, the streaming of words. ‘We hear in the narrative form, and always as though it were extra, something indeterminate speaking’; something speaks without determinable contour.[xcv]

With the rise of the novel, there is a chance for the novelist to become the creator of the novel-cosmos, the disembodied, omniscient deity who is everywhere in the novel, enjoying every perspective, but who is able, nonetheless, to bind these perspectives into a single vision. The monistic vision of this kind of novel, its narrative feast, is unified in its multifariousness by the authoritative, God-like narrator. Here, the narrative voice is not simple; on the one hand, as Blanchot writes, there is ‘something to tell, the objective real such as it is immediately present to an interested gaze’; on the other, there is ‘a constellation of individual lives, of subjectivities­ – a multiple and personalised “il”, an “ego” manifest under the cloak of a “il” that is apparent’.[xcvi] The narrative voice divides itself between these perspectives.

Compare Flaubert. Kafka admires the aesthetic distance in Madame Bovary. For Kafka, it is an absolute book existing unto itself; it is disinterested; the author maintains a distance from all events and asks, in so doing, the same of his reader. Blanchot comments, ‘the ideal is still the form of representation of classical theatre: the narrator is there only to raise the curtain’; the novel is autonomous; ‘it must be left free, the props removed, the moorings cut, in order to maintain its status as an imaginary object’.[xcvii] Then for all its supposed impersonality, Madame Bovary divides itself between an ‘objective’ narrator and the characters themselves. With Kafka, by contrast,

everything is different. One of these differences is essential to the subject that concerns us. The distance is the creative disinterestedness that Flaubert struggled so hard to maintain; it is that of the writer’s and the reader’s distance from the work and authorised contemplative pleasure, now enters into the work’s very sphere in the form of an irreducible strangeness.[xcviii]

What does this mean? Blanchot: ‘in the neutral space of the narrative, the bearers of speech, the subjects of the action – those who once stood in the place of characters – fall into a relation of self-nonidentification. Something happens to them that they can only recapture by relinquishing their power to say “I”’.[xcix] Consider K. of The Castle: the landsurveyor is, above all, a man unsure of his employment, his position – he is only a man who wanders among a community to which he does not belong. What does he want? Security? But he has abandoned the country of his birth and has even forgotten this abandonment; once, he says, he was married, he had children, but now? K. is the man who has forgotten everything except his position as a landsurveyor and the rights which would accrue to him as a holder of such a position. Whilst he was once married, he has become one of Kafka's bachelors, an eternal Junggeselle, a 'young-fellow' who has not found his station.

It is a matter, for K., of working out the intentions of the denizens of the castle. What do they want with him? Can they clarify what his duties are as the new Land Surveyor? Can they reassure him that he even has this position? Was he right to think he had even been summoned to the village by the castle authorities? He seeks to confirm his station; he is a Vermesser, a surveyor, one who measures and delimits the world, and, as a commentator points out, one who presumes, sich vermessen, who causes a fuss because he will not accept his place.

When he arrives in the village, K. is confident, bold; but he is soon defeated by the distance of the castle itself (he tries to reach it on foot, but collapses, exhausted) and the inscrutability of the castle officials. K. is not the pilgrim on a steady way to his goal, but the weathervane, blown this way and then that, gaining confidence and then losing it again, hopeful and then resigned.

All along, K.’s pomposity is mocked by his assistants; their antics mimic the persistence of their master as it approaches hubris; but he, K., does not understand. His confidence withers only when K. is overwhelmed by weariness. We know, although the book was unfinished, that K. himself was meant to die. In the final lines, listening to Gerstäcker’s dying mother, it is as though K. will die of his own weariness, as if that weariness itself were infinitely attenuated, that K. himself were stretched so thinly that there is nothing of him left. It seems, in these final pages, that his defiance towards the castle and its officials has disappeared. His weariness is such that the castle can appear as what it is: co-extensive with the village, a ramshackle collection of huts, yet, for all that, the repository of an authority which remains fascinating.

Joseph K. of The Trial is more defiant than The Castle’s K. At first, he believes his own trial is singular, separable from all others because he is innocent. His trial, he supposes, may even become a test-case and he goes about the court under the impression the other accused take him to be one of the judges or magistrates. Yet he too spins from assurance to unconfidence and he, like K., will fall victim to a weariness which brings him towards a kind of resignation: to his sense that the trial was his fate and he had to recognise its necessity.

Joseph K.'s death is not tragic; he dies ‘like a dog’; he ‘perishes’ rather than ‘dies’, as Heidegger would say, contrasting such annihilation from the death of resolute and authentic Dasein. He perishes; he does not die the great death in which he runs up against his own finitude. His is not an experience so much of the limit but of the limitlessness of that limit; his death does not bring himself up against what would reveal the magnificence of human striving. Still he perishes, but even as he does so, it is as though he has to die for Kafka to end a book which would otherwise stretch for a million pages. He perishes, but The Trial, like The Castle, is unfinished and it is as though within its pages there were another story: the infinite account of K.’s own weariness, his perishing, a detour which cannot find its term in death.

Yet until his last, fatal weariness, K. moves; he is restless, and in this regard is very different from Joseph K., who felt sure of his good position as a high-ranking bank official and does not know until too late he has been thrown out of the world. Over and again he throws away whatever advantage he gained for himself. The housekeeper’s promise, the benevolence of the mayor, the offer of a job: he is suspicious of all good fortune; nothing satisfies him.

If K. chooses the impossible, it is because he was excluded from everything possible as the result of an initial decision. If he cannot make his way in the world, or employ, as he would like, the normal means of life in society, it is because he has been banished from the world, from his world, condemned to the absence of world, doomed to exile in which there is no real dwelling place.[c]

The choice and the decision had been made for K. before he crossed over the wooden bridge into the village of the castle. Who decided? Fate? is that the word? But The Castle is not a tragedy; it is not fate that will break the tragic hero or heroine against the ultimate limit. Nor is it heroic death that would confront its readers with the magnificent fragility of the human being.

K. is not a magnificent tragic hero. He is febrile, restless, he seeks, but nothing satisfies him. Would the novel have ended with him finding acceptance as a member of the village? It may appear the novel does not develop at all, simply repeating, in various forms, the impasse which was evident from its first page. Integration into the village community was impossible for K. from the start. Should K., then, defy the village, leaving it behind (at one point, he suggests to Frieda they should elope together)? Even this is impossible; K., who says, early in the novel, 'I want always to be free', is never free of his desire to receive recognition from the castle authorities. 'I want no grace and favours from the castle but my rights' he says, a little further into the book. What does he want? K. may appear to embody a new modernity: he seems to confront the castle, as Elizabeth Boa remarks, 'as an equal and critical partner'; he is, after all, the land surveyor, whose business it is to 'measure and redefine prevailing relationships'.[ci] Yet K., for Blanchot, is not the modern bourgeois; he is the one who brings himself into relation with the outside, who cannot rest; the one who could not do otherwise.

The Castle, it is often observed, is narrated exclusively from K.’s point of view.[cii] We are always sure, as readers, of what K. is thinking. And what does he think? It is always a matter of coping with the course of events; his attention is always focused on his predicament. K. thinks of nothing but the situation in which he finds himself. Except that this situation is itself without exit, absurd. Kafka’s books are labyrinths in which his characters wander until they fall down exhausted.

The drama of the novel is given in the collision between K., the man of the outside, and the implacable authorities of the castle. As a result, it can only be a matter of frustration, of the alternation between moments of grace and moments of setback. Absurdity: nothing is possible; there can be no progress, no resolution; The Castle might run on forever. It would seem Kafka intended for his hero K. to die. But Kafka is true to his suffering of literature and thus can never let K. reach death. This is why, one presumes, K. suffered a great weariness at the moment the secrets of the castle were to be vouchsafed to him. He would live on in a phantom version of Kafka's novel: a book with an infinite number of pages; a book which, somewhere, Kafka is still writing.

*

The vicissitudes of K. are only one aspect of what, for Blanchot, makes The Castle a symbolic story. ‘The symbol is always an experience of nothingness, the search for a negative absolute’, Blanchot writes.[ciii] But what does this mean? The positive absolute might be understood in term of the absolutum which Nicholas of Cusa used to name God or das Absolute of post-Kantian philosophy as it indicates what is unconditioned, self-contained and perfect. Hegel breaks from the conception of the Absolute in both cases claiming the absolute has been separated from the phenomenal world. It is necessary, for Hegel, to think the Absolute and the phenomenal world alongside the knowledge human beings have of the relationship between them. The Absolute, for Hegel, is the conceptual system which is contained by the phenomenal world as it develops and gives itself to human knowledge. This is the sense of the absolute against which Blanchot sets himself. The negative absolute of which he writes reveals itself in the details of the story. Klamm’s pince-nez, the icy light on the snow, the faces of the peasants and other details are only indications of something which cannot be directly presented. Here, the 'object' of such indications is not separate from those details in the manner of, say, Schelling's Absolute which Hegel criticises, but nor are those details merely a moment of the presentation of the Absolute to human knowledge as for Hegel. The details now resonate with an ungraspable materiality; it is as though they bring with them a vast reserve of materiality, in the manner of the heavy plinths Giacometti sometimes attached to his sculptures. The novel, in its details, indicates the impossible; it is symbolic.

Certain novels attempt to seize this shadow for itself; this, perhaps, is how The Castle gives itself to be understood. On a symbolic reading, it is a system of indices comprising specific encounters and details. The novel, one might say, is on a perpetual quest to discover its own condition of possibility. It is a story which tells its own story, which seeks to reach behind itself and seize upon its genesis – to manifest, through its details, the outside from which it sprung. The sickness unto death is not simply K.’s condition, a name for his suffering; it is the condition of the story itself.

This is what the reader experiences as she attempts to concretise the world of the novel. No longer does she find herself in the position of contemplation; she cannot identify with its events from a distance. The interest of reading vanishes. Narration might be said to reveal itself in its purity as it is detached from any particular perspective, even that of a God-like narrator. The reader is exposed to what Blanchot calls the narrative voice. What does this mean?

In the end, it is neither the characters nor the details of the story that are the source of the voice in question. The narrative voice can no longer be confined to any particular point of view; it is not one perspective among others; what it recounts is not being recounted by anyone in particular. This does not need to compromise the linearity or the continuity of the story. The voice may, for a time, possess that of a particular character, but it is never a personal voice; to call it ‘spectral, ghostlike’ is to indicate the way in which it sets itself back from the speaker whose voice it appears to grant.[civ] In Blanchot’s words, narrative accomplishes a neutralisation; commenting on the sentence from The Castle, Blanchot writes, ‘the narrative would be like a circle neutralising life, which does not mean without any relation to it, but that its relation to life would be a neutral one’.[cv] This neutralisation is a kind of withdrawal or suspension which can no longer understand in terms of meaning or lack of meaning. Rather, it opens ‘[a] reserve that exceeds every meaning already signified, without being considered either a richness or a pure and simple privation. Like a speech that does not illuminate and does not obscure’.[cvi] It is by allowing this aneconomic reserve (this negative absolute, this symbol) to resound that literature carries over the reduction Kafka experiences to the reader.

‘There is in literature an emptiness of literature that constitutes it’, Blanchot writes.[cvii] It is this same emptiness with which the reader is brought into relation by the narrative voice. What does this mean? Blanchot reminds us of Kafka’s awareness of the rabbinical traditions of commenting on the Bible; an ongoing, incompletable task. Exegesis does not precede the Book in this tradition; everything begins with the commentary that will fill many other books. It is a desire to return to a kind of originary speech which summons Kafka towards the absence of the book – an approach he makes by way of writing, only by writing. Yet K. of The Castle is not Kafka; nor is the castle itself the Biblical word. The Castle is structurally concerned with the question of writing: ‘the essential element in the narrative – that is, the essential aspect of K.’s peregrination – consists not in K.’s going from place to place, but from exegesis to exegesis and from commentator to commentator, listening to each of them with impassioned attention, then breaking in and arguing with certain turns of the Talmudic dialectic’.[cviii] The movement of The Castle is one of various exegeses, the opening of which bears upon, finally, ‘the impossibility of writing (and of interpreting) The Castle’.[cix] This is why the book cannot end. Kafka intended to have K. die. But it would be this death K. could not reach. On the last night The Castle records, K. responds to the chance of his salvation by falling asleep, as if, Blanchot suggests, this infinite weariness were the analogue of an endless speech.

Whence the temptation of the commentator to resist the literary reduction by attempting to account for a movement that is apparently magnetised by nothing determinate. Brod ‘completes’ Kafka’s The Castle in his theatrical adaptation; he writes several critical studies of the work of his friend and writes novels where Kafka appears barely disguised as ‘Garta’. Brod attempts to fill in the void which opens in Kafka’s writings the better, he thinks, to preserve their greatness. The same occurs in those readings (Brod’s amongst them) which suppose the castle of Kafka’s novel is an image of another world. True, there are always motifs of salvation in Kafka’s work, but to assume the castle – which, as the landsurveyor K. sees, is only a collection of village huts – is a symbol for a heavenly beyond is to commit the same impatience as K. Do not think K. will find what he seeks; the castle is a collection of huts and Klamm himself an ordinary man given to ordinary passions; neither the castle nor its officials are hidden. To understand them as the goal itself is to be content with intermediary figure; there is no goal, no resolution.

There is a temptation on the part of the reader to judge Brod to be Kafka’s ape, a ludicrous, capering figure. Such a reader, by insisting that the various interpretations of The Castle are ridiculous, remains secure in his good conscience: ‘I am not an ape’, he says to himself and believes he knows what this book is about: ‘it presents us with the nothingness, the absurdity of existence’. But what if another apishness, another buffoonery were also present in this interpretation? If the mesh of text we call The Castle is bound up with a gaping void, if this virtual dimension is something like the secret heart of the work which can only be covered over each time it is read and lends itself to its own dissimulation, then the book itself speaks of nothing other than itself.

One does not serve the book by making a theme of its putative nihilism, whether tentative or definitive. The book is a symbol of nothing but itself. Does this mean that commentary on The Castle – even the one I am writing now to accompany Blanchot – is impossible? But there is a kind of commentary which keeps fidelity with the void, maintaining the space or interval of literature, literature’s remove, before all other interpretations as though it stood at the door of the work knowing that it will admit no one, not even the ‘man of the country’, which is to say each of us, all of us, as we begin to read. That closed door was made for each of us, readers and writers, but remains closed to each of us in a different way. It is upon its hard surface we scratch our own interpretations of what we dream is inside.

The reader need not be the ape of the artwork, grotesquely supplementing something that is already sufficient unto itself. For some, its self-sufficiency is intolerable; the commentator is envious of what keeps the artwork closed from the world. But what of the artwork itself? To claim the artwork incarnates itself in matter, that it happens in the details of the story and the vicissitudes of its characters is to risk suggesting the work merely clothes itself in language as though it were a pure idea that had found incarnation. The temptation is to conceive the artwork like the dresser crab that seizes the ephemera from the ocean floor clothing itself in details and incidents which, in the end, are merely ornamental. But The Castle is nothing other than the characters and the details of the description even as the voice which surges through every sentence and joins the artwork to an indeterminable reserve, to what Blanchot calls the work, refuses form and presence.

The risk is the commentator, the literary critic, seeks to bind the artwork to the world, folding back the peculiar self-resembling of the artwork to show that it would speak of something other than itself. Read closely, however, and it is clear not only that such commentary happens in the work itself but, too, that that commentary is always provisional. The possibility of commentary is the possibility of an artwork. The artwork is not simply what gives itself to be repeated, it exists as its repetition. It is not only the aircrash which kills everyone on board, but the black box recorder which survives the crash. It is not only the nova, the star exploding, but the nova’s husk.[cx]

The finished artwork is already joined to the world – it means, it must mean in order to present itself to a reader. In this sense, it is only a commentary upon itself, upon the surprise of its own existence. It is its own ape, its own buffoon because it shows the work of art is nothing but a bareness, an affirmation without content, which seeks to clothe itself in order to give itself what is ultimately only the illusion of substance. The artwork happens when it is encountered, when it gives itself to be read singularly by each reader. It is as though it waited like a door which cannot be opened; what differs from reading to reading is only the physical aspect of the shut door. The artwork itself is its own commentary, its own difference and repetition, reaching its audience through the contentless repetition that it is.

The work disjoins the world from itself. To read is not to step through the mirror into a world that is like our own, but to bring oneself into relation with the absence of the world. What happens as the work is the unravelling of the world, a difference that happens in and as repetition as things give themselves to be experienced. To invert a Heideggerian formulation, it occurs as the unworlding of the world by repeating and as it were commenting upon itself each time it is encountered. This formulation is misleading, because it threatens to substantialise the ‘there is’ of the ‘there is the work’, but what formulation would suit this curious occurrence, which happens without ever hardening itself into what could properly be called an event? Better to say the work is a dissemination without determinable origin, a happening which repeats itself without determinable content. The narrative voice is this repetition, this reduction, as it happens as the work.

A recording of the ICA talk from last week (I start 15.50 in in part one, and sound like a thespian gone mad.). (Part one, part two).

TChris reviews Spurious at Tzer Island.

'The Death of Literature'. Fascinating article by Andrew Gallix in the Guardian. 

The comments are also interesting. See, e.g., Terces's Derridean comment, various things PBrennan writes, Jerome Fletcher, Paul Bowes (responding to Fletcher, and then responding to me).

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.

I'm speaking with Laura McLean-Ferris and Paul Pieroni at the ICA this Weds (11th January), at 6.45, on the topic, 'The Trouble With Productivity'.

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?

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?

New long interview at Full Stop, on the situation in American writing.

Spurious is novel of the year at 3:AM (longlist here).

New review of Spurious by TChris at Amazon.com.

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.

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.

Spurious featured as one of the best reads of the year at Of Books and Bicycles.

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. 

Swimming in the Real

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Blanchot, Foucault writes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Foucault:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow me at Twitter: UtterlySpurious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few loose, casual notes on this experience.

Language and Death

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Survivors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Other Side of the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blanchot again:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Swimming in the Real