Category: Blanchot

<Paper written in 2005, and published in Parallax. Summarises Blanchot's Vigilance.>

The Becoming of Being

For Blanchot, like the early Levinas, the world of things is a dead world, but it is one that is not inert. It is a dead world, but one possessed of a strange kind of life – a dying that is active, a force of becoming that is the experience of the being of things. How can being be brought together with becoming? The difference between beings and being, as Levinas and Blanchot will present it, is given in the relation between the thing and its image. As readers will know, for Levinas and Blanchot it as though, for them, the image was the condition of possibility of the thing and not the other way round. Broadly speaking, the image is what gives itself in the relation to the thing when it is turned from the tasks and projects to which we subordinate it, resisting the very impulse of our existence to create meaning, to, as it were, ‘exist’ things by bringing them towards us as potential tools or as potential raw material. It gives itself as what ‘in’ the thing exists over and above our interests. But even as it does so, its resistance captures my attention and struggles with it, escaping me even as it seems to offer itself to me. Yet I am not indifferent to it, and this is the point. The image of the thing no longer exists at any distance from me at all; fascinated, I am as though pressed by the thing against its image, as though the heart of the thing held me at what one commentator calls ‘its distance’.[i]

What does this mean? Compare Heidegger. Dasein, for the author of Being and Time, is not a substantive and self-present unity, but an opening to the future, an ecstasis or standing out which understands itself in terms of what it will accomplish. The ‘I’ of Dasein is first of all the ‘I can; Dasein relates to itself as potentiality-to-be, Sein können: its being-in-the-world must be understood in terms of the measure implicit in this potentiality, that is, of the ability to be able. Then it is as though the ‘I’ were the Ulysses of the Odyssey, adventuring, risking himself, but always as part of the task of returning to Ithaca, to his Kingdom. In truth, these adventures do not change Ulysses; likewise, the ‘I can’ presupposed in Dasein’s engagement in projects and tasks itself remains constant in its dealings with the world. Yet in the relation to the image, something different occurs. No longer are things experienced in terms of what is arguably ultimately a mediating self-relation. It is as though the relation itself were suspended or attenuated and can no longer be understood in terms of the ecstasis of Dasein. It is rather that there is an ecstasis as it were on the side of the thing. True, this recalls Heidegger’s account of the mood of anxiety in What is Metaphysics?, but that mood still permits Dasein to recollect itself and to seize upon an authentic existing.[ii] The Levinasian and Blanchotian ‘I’ is lost to itself in the experience in question; the image is experienced as the ‘there is [il y a]’, the pell-mell from which things can never be disassociated.

If, as he argues, Heidegger’s conception of being is organised by the notion of mineness, Levinas’s turns around an experience in which there is no one there to possess being; the ‘Da’ of Dasein is more precarious; the self-relation of the ‘I’ cannot secure a relation to the future but is fleeting and tentative. Being is now experienced as a burden that weighs down existence, rather than revealing it as the nothing which allows a leeway with respect to beings in the world. There is always too much of being – the weight of the world is too great –, so the drama of existence lies in the attempt to escape its burden. This ‘no escape’ is experienced as a kind of lagging of existence, as though the ‘I’ fell behind itself. Existence is no longer contemporary with itself, let alone able to project itself into the future. There is the constant danger that the stability of the world will give way, that existence will lose its hold on things and on itself, giving way to what Levinas and Blanchot will call vigilance. The ‘subject’ of vigilance is not an alert ‘I’, but what Blanchot calls the ‘il’, the ‘he’ or ‘it’. The ‘il’ is a name for the ‘other’ within me; it is a suspension or reduction of the conscious, self-present ‘I’ [le moi].

When Blanchot writes of becoming, it is to name what he also calls the ‘there is’. Here he refers no longer to a potentiality or ecstasis of the human being, but a potency or ecstasis on the side of things, or, better, of the image of things, of the infinite attenuation of being. Blanchot will come to present this attenuation as wearing away what he calls our ‘facile reverence’ for ontology. This may seem too quick – was it not Heidegger, after all, who desubstantiated the subject by attending to its temporality? Read alongside Levinas remarks on mineness, Blanchot’s comments on Heidegger form part of a more general rejection of Heidegger’s foregrounding Dasein as the locus from which being is to be thought. To invoke becoming or dying is to emphasise a resistance implicit to things as they swell with the pell-mell of the ‘there is’. Such a pell-mell never gives way to a stable and enduring ‘Da’. For Blanchot, being may always return as a chaotic streaming which undoes what Levinas calls the hypostasis upon which Dasein, unbeknownst to Heidegger, depends. This being the case, it is uncertain as to where one might ‘situate’ the becoming of being since it streams like Cratylus’s river, in which it is impossible to step even once.[iii] Does becoming happen to the ‘subject’ of the experience in question, or, by contrast, does it belong to the ‘object’ of this experience? Neither, for to polarise the experience in question into ‘subject’ and ‘object’ is already to have dissolved its animating tension. The ‘il’ is the ‘site’ of a struggle between the ‘I’ as it would maintain itself and the order of being, and the ‘non-I’ who no longer belongs to the world. Dying and becoming name a struggle and not a result; I cannot step into the same river once, that is true, but this experience of stepping is registered nonetheless, not by the ‘Da’ of Dasein, but by the ‘il’ who doubles or accompanies the ‘I’ and disappears almost at once, but who nevertheless registers the vigilance in question.

Early to late, Levinas seeks to escape this struggle through the relation to the Other. Only thus is our fascination with the image of things, with the ‘there is’, freed from itself, and we can recover our relationship with the world and with the future. But ecstasis is not returned to us; Dasein is not the locus of what Levinas calls the for-the-Other. I am not Ulysses, but Abraham, the one who has heard the ‘here I am’ addressed to the Other as it reaches me upstream of the content of anything said. ‘Here I am’ is the saying that bears all language, speaking otherwise than being, that is, by breaking with the model of mineness that organises Heidegger’s account of the difference between being and beings. If Levinas writes of vigilance in his later work, it is with reference to the one who spoke this ‘here I am’. Levinas dissolves the struggle between being and beings by arguing the relation to the Other which happens as saying is otherwise than being. Blanchot, while appearing to endorse Levinas’s argument, and appearing to write against Heidegger and ontology, nevertheless appears to remain ‘within’ what Levinas calls the neutrality of being. That is, he would think the exteriority of being as the neutral [le neutre] without insisting on the alterity of the good as what is otherwise than being.[iv] For Blanchot, surprisingly, the neutral, which overlaps with the notions of the ‘there is’ and the image he shares with the early Levinas, can be said to bear an ethical significance.[v] Like Levinas, Blanchot insists alterity is to be thought first of all in terms of the human Other. How is this claim, which Blanchot develops through a detailed negotiation of the thought of Levinas, reconcilable with his account of the image, the ‘there is’ and the neutral, especially as they are set forth in his account of the work of art? Can the Other be thought as an image of the human being, as its neutral double?

Self-Resemblance

In a famous section in The Space of Literature, Blanchot takes up Levinas’s notion of the image (itself no doubt indebted to Blanchot’s fiction and criticism) in order to discuss the special mode of existence of the work of art. Along the way, he provides an example of the image in the relationship of the corpse to the living body, noting that the mourned deceased, before us as a cadaver ‘begins to resemble himself [ressembler à lui-même]’:

Himself: is this not an ill-chosen expression? Shouldn’t we say: the deceased resembles the person he was when he was alive? ‘Resembles himself’ is, however, correct. ‘Himself’ designates the impersonal being, distant and inaccessible, which resemblance, that it might be someone’s, draws toward the day.[vi]

‘[N]o man alive, in fact, bears any resemblance yet’, Blanchot writes.[vii] The friend we know through his many attributes – his gestures, his laughter, the tone of his voice – conceals a kind of presence which comes forward only after he dies.

Why does Blanchot write that the corpse resembles himself? Typically, a thing sustains itself as itself such that it can be experienced as if held together by our interest, our understanding; it is animated by our existence. What of the Other? For the most part, I understand her through the cultural categories through which my relation to others is mediated. You are my employee; I am your client; I know you as a service provider; you know me as a vendor of your company’s products – each time, it is a question of passing over the alterity of the Other in favour of relations which are instrumentally defined. That is to say, others are sustained in their coherency for me in terms of my understanding of their place in the world. What, though, about the corpse? Something in the corpse resists that power; which means, too, I cannot situate myself with respect to what happened as I approached the cadaver of my friend. To claim the corpse resembles itself is not to invoke a magical power it would possess but rather to indicate the way it withholds itself from my capacity to accommodate myself with respect to its differentiation. Here collapses into nowhere: the place I hold becomes uncertain; my hold on time falters.

It may appear the ‘I’ always survives its encounters with things and with persons as long as it is alive, always retaining a hold on the future. But there is always the chance of an experience which makes it lose its grip, suspending its relation to itself. Something remains – not the self, it is true, but something like an awareness of the river upon which the torn body of Orpheus was cast (an awareness of the river ‘in’ his dispersed body): of the river which flows in my place, the outside streaming in what was once my interiority. No one is there – but there is a way of understanding this ‘no one’ as designating an impersonal vigilance – the ‘il’, the ‘he’ or ‘it’, the impersonal vigilance which thereafter leaves its trace in memory. So does the encounter with the corpse lay claim to me.

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

Then is this the way the alterity of the Other should be thought? As an image?

Close to Death, Close to the Night

At one point in The Human Race, his testimony to his experiences in the work camps, Robert Antelme learns that K. is going to die; he’d been in the infirmary for a week. He looks for K. at the infirmary, but cannot find him, although he recognises a few of the patients as he passes a row of beds. ‘I went over to the next bed and asked the guy lying on it, “where’s K?”’[viii] He turned his head and with it motioned towards the person propped on his elbows’. Antelme: ‘I looked at the person who was K. I became afraid – afraid of myself – and I looked at the other faces, seeking reassurance. I recognised them clearly enough. I wasn’t wrong; I still knew who they were. The other person was still leaning on his elbows, head down, mouth halfway open’. Where is K.? Antelme looks into the blue, unmoving eyes of this patient. Then he looks at the other patients, whom he recognises. Then Antelme addresses the unknown patient (the one who has taken the place of K.): ‘Hello, old man’. ‘There was no way I could make myself more visible. He kept that appearance of a smile on his face. I didn’t recognise anything’.

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

Blanchot comments on this passage in a late essay on Antelme:

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

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

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

The Presence of the Other

Is this what Giacometti’s sculptures indicate for Blanchot? Blanchot quotes a remark from Jacques Dupin’s commentary on Giacometti: ‘the spectacle of violence fascinates and terrifies him’, and comments:

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

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

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

What does this mean? Blanchot writes: ‘Each time, we receive from Giacometti this double discovery that is, each time, it is true, immediately lost: only man would be present to us, only he is alien to us’.[xiii] For Blanchot, the otherness of the human being is qualitatively different from all other others. How can this be reconciled with Blanchot’s discussions of the ‘there is’ of language and the world that has become image? To think through Blanchot’s argument, it is necessary to trace his negotiation of the work of Levinas.

The Event of Language

Dasein is bourgeois: this is the upshot of Levinas account of the conditions of the genesis of the ego. The ego, he explains, needs material to produce its own identity; the effort to be takes the form of the attempt to organise the world into sources of food and nourishment. Labour and possession are required for the ego to consolidate its being in the world. Likewise, reflection and comprehension are needed if the ego is to protect itself from the uncertainty of the future. Drawing on Heidegger’s claim that being is in each case mine, Levinas claims the activity of the verb ‘to be’, the verb of verbs, is accomplished in the structure of mineness. Just as Heidegger uses Wesen as a verb, Levinas argues ‘esse’ is ‘interesse’; the human being, turns upon and hypostatises itself. As such, the ego’s practical and theoretical involvement with the world answers the interests of being. Even Heidegger’s transformation of the notion of the understanding from the ‘knowing that’ of purely theoretical speculation to the ‘knowing how’ of practical engagement with the world is ordered by the need for the ego to maintain the security of its hypostasis.

The Other, for both Levinas and Blanchot, is experienced as an interruption of the spontaneous need of the ‘I’ to lay claim to existence, to seize and as it were digest being. The hunger to be, to exist, is also the need to have done with the Other. Practically, I work to meet my needs, consolidating my identity; this is a way of confirming my essence as active interesse. Theoretically, I reflect in order to increase my emprise, com-prehending the world, reducing everything that is different to the measure of the same. In this way, the singularity of the Other is transformed into a particular. That the Other resists this conceptualisation is not a tribute to her agency. The word Other only makes sense as the term of a relation; as Other, she does not exist for herself as an ego with powers commensurate with my own. The Other resists, this is true, but she does so because she is the Other for me, and what she resists is the power implicit in my existence as it confirms the tautology of being. The Other resists, but she does not do so as another ego. The Other resists and addresses me in this resistance, which is to say, as a interdiction against my desire to subordinate her to the interests of being, whether practically (murder) or theoretically (conceptualisation).

My response to this silent address, according to Levinas, happens as the primal event of language. Language begins and begins again in this address; the relation to the Other as it is marked in language animates the dead letter of speech or writing. The Other addresses me; but this does not mean there is anyone ‘behind’ the address; she does not ventriloquise God or speak in place of anyone else. Nor is it a matter of what she would want to say since she does not exist as the Other for herself. The Other resembles herself, Blanchot maintains, she is held at a distance, but it is not the Other who holds herself thus.

Is this what Blanchot indicates when he writes on Giacometti?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Narrative Voice

Imagine a writer, Blanchot writes in ‘The Narrative Voice’, one of two essays on Kafka in The Infinite Conversation, writing a sentence like ‘The forces of life suffice only up to a certain point [Les forces de la vie ne suffisent que jusqu’à un certain point]’.[xvi] 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? The sentence comes from Kafka’s The Castle, but what speaks is neither Kafka nor one of his characters, Blanchot claims, it is, rather, the narrative voice [la voix narrative] which speaks.

Whose voice is this? 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 voice 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.

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’. 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.’

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-non-identification. Something happens to them that they can only recapture by relinquishing their power to say “I”’.[xvii] 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? 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 landsurveyor? 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?

Blanchot’s argument may be summarised this way: With The Castle, the world never retrieves itself, the novel does not end, there is only the infinite attenuation of the absurd. Without characters with whom to identify, without the indulgence of a fully realized fictional empire, it denies the reader the chance of catharsis or sublime spectacle. How is this experienced? As the gap between castle and village that calls for interpretation, The Castle cannot be made into a figure, but nor can it be designated a ground as for that for which things stand in. It is thus that it becomes what Blanchot calls the image. Any attempt to determine what it is only raises the necessity for another ground against which this can be seen. No relation between ground and figure is possible. But that non-relation is the negative aspect of a withdrawal implicit to the book in its relation to its readers. A withdrawal, now, that cannot be measured against human possibility or potentiality and in particular, the ability to interpret. It is thus that The Castle resembles itself.

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

Then the reader is in the same quandary as Antelme was before K. in The Human Race. ‘It would remain true that between the man I’d known and the dead K., whom we all know, this nothingness had existed’: the same nothingness opens itself in the instant between the lofty work of literature called The Castle by the celebrated author Franz Kafka and the book you opened by chance in the library which begins, ‘It was late in the evening when K. arrived’. A book that, from the outset, speaks in the voice of the Other (l’Autre, this time, not Autrui).

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

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

Blanchot does not refer, here, to the personal Other, Autrui, but to l’autre. Yet it shares several features in common with Levinas’s Autrui. It is linked to a kind of saying: ‘it says nothing, not only because it adds nothing to what there is to say (it knows nothing), but because the narrative voice subtends this nothing – the “silencing and keeping silent” – in which speech is here and now already engaged; thus it is not heard in the first place, and everything that gives it a distinct reality begins to betray it.’ What does this mean? It speaks without content; as Blanchot goes on to claim, even as the narrative voice can assume the voice of a character or a narrator, it cannot be confined to their voices. It is impersonal; it does not mediate information but presents itself in a manner analogous to what Blanchot writes of Autrui.

The narrative voice resembles itself. It is a name for the fascinating voice which addresses as the image of The Castle. That is, The Castle is experienced as resembling itself as the narrative voice. Thus it is possible to invoke the immediate presence of the language which, like the Other, does not exist at the same level as me. Like the relation to the Other, the relation with the language of The Castle is dissymmetrical; I speak as I am brought into contact with the inexhaustible murmuring of language such that I lose my uprightness. I do not speak; there is only the donation of the narrative voice in the event Blanchot allows himself to call saying.

The Speech of Writing, the Writing of Speech

What, then, is the relationship between the narrative voice, considered as saying, and the relation to Autrui considered as speech? What, more broadly, is the relationship between writing and speech?

When Blanchot remembers his conversations with Bataille, it is not to present his friend in the manner of Plato’s Socrates: true, there is a seriousness in his conversation, a sense that everything is at stake; what takes place between the speakers is a play or a game of thought. It is not the content of what is said which matters, but that it is said at all. What counts is not the order of discourse, spoken and written, which Levinas calls the said, but the event of saying. Invoking a kind of shame that happens whenever we use words, fearing we speak to adroitly or too awkwardly and thereby betray what he calls the ‘seriousness’ of speech, Blanchot reflects:

I do not mean to say that every conversation with Georges Bataille was free of this feeling, but rather that speech then took up its own malaise, and as soon as it was sensed, assumed it and respected it in such a way as to offer it another direction. Here speech’s lack interceded on speech’s behalf, becoming the way that, through a decision each time renewed, one turned toward the other so as to respond to the frankness of a presence (just as the eminence of being, its height, cannot be separated from its decline)[…].[xviii]

Why would we feel shame when we speak, or hear someone else speak? Because to speak of serious matters is to risk betraying them by speaking too easily, as if the topic of discussion were entirely under our command, or too frivolously, thereby losing the seriousness of the topic altogether. To speak of insignificant matters is to pass over a seriousness no longer tied to that of a particular topic, but to speaking itself. The presence of speech would be a serious affair, one in relation to which we would feel shame unless, like Bataille we were able to allow this seriousness to speak. How is this possible? By allowing language to reveal its malaise as it is vouchsafed in my inability to say something, to find the right word, failing, thereby, to turn language into something over which I could exert power. Language suffers; it undergoes a malaise. It comes to resemble itself as it refuses to lend itself to human power. As such, the one who speaks exhibits a kind of reserve with respect to speech. This was Bataille’s gift, and the gift he allowed those who conversed with him: speech was able to speak in what they said; saying was given its due.

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

Each in turn becomes Autrui for the other person; each presents himself as the corpse who will not respond to Jesus’s call to come to life. Each becomes the ‘other’ Lazarus, the stranger who cannot be experienced by an intact ‘I’. This is experienced as a kind of speech – as a plural speech which happens as the opening of language to difference, that is, to a saying which cannot be exchanged, but is given each time unilaterally and dissymmetrically from one to the other. What Blanchot calls the seriousness of language is unrelated to the content of what is said. Each speaker, as he acknowledges Autrui, which is to say the seriousness of plural speech, of the neuter, is vigilant in turn.

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

The Image of Language

What separates Blanchotian from Levinasian vigilance with respect to speech, to writing? Totality and Infinity presents a claim ostensibly similar to Blanchot’s since the relation to Autrui, according to Levinas, obtains as language, as discourse. In this way, the Other might be said to resemble herself: the relation to Autrui is not one of identification but of differentiation. Speech happens not because of this differentiation but as this differentiation; it is my response to the alterity of Autrui. But for Blanchot, in contrast to Levinas, I am related to Autrui such that I experience the image of language. The ‘there is’, for Blanchot, as for Levinas, is what is experienced in suffering, affliction and weariness. But Blanchot also thinks the ‘there is’ in terms of the malaise of language – the way it turns itself aside from those who would assert their power over its impersonal murmuring. This is not a question of invoking an occult force implicit to language itself, but of indicating the way in which language resists our power and the interest of being. It is this ‘there is’ which speaks as the narrative voice of The Castle. Something like the narrative voice is also at stake for each of the participants in the ‘game of thought’ Blanchot presents in his essay on Bataille.

The Other, Levinas writes, is ‘a being which surpasses every attribute. Through an attribute, it would be precisely qualified, that is, reduced to what it has in common with other beings; an attribute would make this being into a concept’.[xix] To reduce the otherness of the Other to an attribute would be to create an idol; the prohibition against making representations of God also holds for the Other. Blanchot seems guilty of this idolatry when he appears to claim Giacometti has presented the Other in material form. Of course, like Levinas, Blanchot presents the relation to the Other in terms of language – in this case, in terms of Dupin’s commentary on Giacometti’s sculpture. But unlike Levinas, it is, for Blanchot, the image of language, its neutral double, which both writing and the relation to the Other (speech) allows me to experience.

For Levinas, language begins as I face the Other, acknowledging her alterity. Saying accomplishes the reduction of the economy of the said as it neutralises the singularity of the Other. It also reduces the drunken song of the poet as it merely loosens the ties which bind us to the world of things, singing of a world where the Other has not yet appeared. To be vigilant in Levinas’s later writings mean to have been awoken by this reduction, this interruption of being. Such vigilance, as Levinas knows, is quickly compromised; the Other is forgotten in her singularity and I, too, forget the way I have been elected to my own singularity. Whence the need to repeat this reduction in turn, to redouble vigilance in the letter of the said. This is the task which falls to Otherwise than Being. Levinas’s text would watch over all language; it is vigilant over vigilance as it occurs, if we have ears to hear it or eyes to read it, in all language. When Blanchot likewise calls for vigilance, this is has a different meaning, although his writing would also watch over language. Considering the statement, ‘the meaning of meaning would be neuter’, Blanchot allows a conversationalist to invoke ‘an ironic outbidding of the epochē’, referring, here, to the way in which ‘meaning operates or acts through a movement or retreat that is in some sense without end, through an exigency to become suspended’.[xx] What does this mean? Saying, for Blanchot holds the order of power and possibility in abeyance; the measure of time and space fails along with the economy of meaning. But this failure, even if it might be said to interrupt or reduce being, escaping its interests, is not otherwise than being in the strong, Levinasian sense.

At the same time, Blanchot is not rejecting Levinas’s account of the singularity of the relation to Autrui, losing it among things and the image of things. For Levinas, the relation to Autrui in its singularity interrupts the neutrality of discourse (the said) as well as the attenuation of that neutrality which he claims happens as poetry. What is offered to me by way of the Other, according to Blanchot? An opportunity to as it were lighten being by way of my address.[xxi] As he says of his conversations with Bataille ‘speech then took up its own malaise, and as soon as it was sensed, assumed it and respected it in such a way as to offer it another direction’. Perhaps what is suggested here that it is the weight of the world, the image of things that is ‘offered a new direction’ – that the Other calls forth a response from me which passes through all the things of the world, bringing forward their image, the ‘there is’ as it is redoubled in the image of language, but that this response, as it is permitted by the address of the Other lightens this burden. This is not because the image of the world is shared by the Other as by another human being on the same level as myself, but because of the characteristics of the relation itself as it is unilateral and dissymmetrical. As such, this relation, as saying, can be redoubled in turn, just as it is between Blanchot and Bataille. Here, the relation to the Other accomplishes something the relation to the narrative voice cannot: redoubled friendship – the doubly dissymmetrical relation to the Other.

Yet for Blanchot, both the address to the Other and my reading of The Castle are occasions of saying and he will also use the word friendship of that kind of writing which opens itself in Bataille’s Inner Experience. In both cases, the burden of things can be said to be lightened, and speech is offered another direction. Speech is received as novelty itself – not as what is otherwise than being, but as what reaches us in the attenuation of being, in the withering of the ‘I can’. Does this mean literature and the Other have equal status with respect to what Blanchot calls saying? If so, this would directly contradict Blanchot’s claim that the lesson of Giacometti’s sculptures as they are revealed by Dupin’s commentary is that ‘only man would be present to us, only he is alien to us’. Perhaps it is that for Blanchot the relation to the Other that obtains as saying repeats the relation to the Other. Writing, in this case, would come after the relation to the Other which first grants speech another direction. The narrative voice recalls us to the turning that occurs with respect to language, to our power over language, from the first, whereby it is the saying of the Other that elects the ‘I’ to speak, and, in so doing, breaks the ‘I’ out of the closed economy of mineness. The relation to literature offers language another direction just as language was offered another direction in the relation to the Other.

'Jewish Messianism is in its origins and by its nature – this cannot be sufficiently emphasised – a theory of catastrophe', says Scholem. In disastrous times – when the stars that crowded the sky of Western civilisation fall one by one – the Messiah would arrive in the midst of the disaster as the redeemer, the most just of the just: is this how we should understand Blanchot's reflections on the Messianic idea? Only if we remember that this arrival will not occur once and for all - at the end of history, say, at the wrap up; it promises neither a stable utopia nor a restoration of a lost order. 

The Messiah comes, if he does so, without having a part in duration. It is certainly possible to wonder whether anything happened. Whether it did, for Blanchot, can be decided only if we abandon that variety of narrative which raises the representation of the past over against the lived past, albeit a living or being-lived that is very close to what he will call dying. We will have to learn to speak of ourselves in another way; a task for which Jewish monotheism – as rethought by Blanchot in dialogue with his friend Levinas – is peculiarly fitted.

The Messianic Now

Towards the end of The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot retells the familiar story of the Messiah who waits in hiding with the beggars and lepers at the gates of Rome. He is recognised and asked, 'When will you come?' Blanchot comments: 'His being there is, then, not the coming'. The Messiah is, on one sense, present – he is there with the others, a beggar among beggars, a leper among lepers; he is one to whom questions can be asked. But, for Blanchot, 'His presence is no guarantee'; 'With the Messiah, who is there, the call must always resound: "Come, come"'.

When will you come? The Messiah, as Scholem comments, is often understood in the Rabbinical literature to be already amongst us. He is present, but occulted; and here, Blanchot highlights that this occultation occurs even in the Messiah's ostensible presence. It is as though the Messiah were here and not yet here, present and not yet present, still to come.

This, to be sure, is also in keeping with the literature on the Messiah. The Jewish idea of the Messiah is not eschatological, as it is in Christianity. The Messiah does not arrive at the end of a linear course of time, but interrupts it, redeeming it. Is it for this redemption that the questioner of the Messiah, on Blanchot's account, is asking? 'Today', the Messiah replies to his questioner (traditionally the Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, although Blanchot does not name him).

On its usual recounting, the Rabbi doesn't believe him, and complains to Elijah, suspecting he is being lied to. Elijah explains that what is meant is 'Today, if you will hear his voice'. In The Writing of the Disaster, this explanation is put into the mouth of the Messiah. To the unnamed questioner's 'When will you come?' we find the answer, 'Now, if only you heed me, or if you are willing to heed my voice'.

When will the Messiah come? The Messianic literature sometimes suggests a causal link between the morality of human beings and the Messiah's coming. The Messiah will come only if specific conditions are met. Is this why the Rabbi is unable to truly hear his voice? Certainly, the Messiah is, for him, a man among men, a human being as ordinary as you or I. But in another sense, he is not there yet; he is still to come. Then to hear the Messiah means a condition must have been met. One would have to have been able to receive the Messiah's speech, to have earned it.

Still commenting on the Messianic literature as it passes through the readings of Levinas and Scholem, Blanchot notes that the Jewish Messiah is not necessarily divine. Certainly he is a comforter, even 'the most just of the just', as is his traditional apothegm, 'but it is not even sure that he is a person – that he is someone in particular'. As Scholem comments, the figure of the Messiah is always vague in the literature. 'Features of the varying historical and psychological origins are gathered into this medium of fulfilment and coexist within it so that they do not furnish a clear picture of the man'.

But Blanchot sees in this vagueness something other than underdetermination. 'When one commentator says, The Messiah is perhaps I, he is not exalting himself. Anyone might be the Messiah – must be he, is not he'. Anyone might be the Messiah: this is truly surprising. For Scholem, the Messiah is occulted, waiting in hiding; perhaps there are conditions set for his arrival. But now Blanchot suggests that the Messiah is hidden in each of us, inseparable from us and that we each of us might be in some way the 'comforter' and 'the most just of the just'. But how so? What licenses this interpretation?

Speech

Blanchot is indebted, of course, to Rosenzweig and Levinas who, as Martin Kavka has shown us, seek to embed religious notions into the deepest categories of human existence. Both place emphasis on the uniqueness of the uniqueness of the interhuman relation, whose terms are claimed to belong to no genus, and to the importance of love as a commandment, as a summons to take responsibility for the Other.

For both thinkers, redemption occurs through the task of loving. But for Rosenzweig, the revelation of God does not take place solely in tems of the interhuman relation. It still bears a relationship to a revelation whose source is extraworldy. Levinas's adherence to phenomenology, however, demands he search for the source of religious notions in what is concretely given. God, for him, is revealed exclusively through the relation to the Other. But what does this mean? 

As is well known, Levinas focuses in Totality and Infinity on a particular kind of relation, the relation to the human Other, Autrui, which he claims obtains in a particular act of language, as speech. He characterises this relation as asymmetrical, insofar as one of its terms, the Other, is said to be higher than the other, the ego, and unilateral, insofar as the Other is said to face the ego and to call it to its responsibility.

For Levinas, this moment of facing, of expression grants the ego a stable and enduring ipseity, a selfhood. Prior to this moment, we have what can be called a proto-self, separate and selfish, concerned only to secure its nourishment in an uncertain environment. At the moment of expression, the self comes together in its response to the Other, which Levinas thinks as the linguistic act in question. Speech opens in the response of the ego to the Other's silent expression. It is in discourse, language, that I can come to myself as an ego.

What does this mean? I become a self only at the moment when I can say 'I' (or imply the first person position in my response to another) in response to the face of the Other. As such, I owe my egoity, my ipseity to the alterity of the Other which, with respect to the meditation which occurs, for Levinas, at a practical and conceptual level by the ego (he calls it the same), can be called immediate.

Whereas philosophers have, according to Levinas, traditionally privileged the mediating activity of consciousness, this activity is predicated upon a linguistic act of acknowledgement and hospitality that is upstream of anything the ego might want or not want to do. Consciousness cannot help but be affected by the Other such that its constitutive activity fails. That is to say, consciousness does not measure the form of the relation to the Other in advance, which is why Levinas says the Other reaches me as the immediate.

Here, speech is very different from the ideality that consciousness introduces in the form of language. As we have seen, language, to the extent that it depends upon universals, passes over the singularity of the immediately given. But for Levinas, speech, understood as the address to the Other, acknowledges this immediacy (that is, it responds to the singularity of the relation to the Other) by suspending the constitutive work of consciousness.

Speech, accordingly, is not voluntary, since it does not stem from the will (which is governed by the same autonomous demand that governs consciousness), though nor can it be called involuntary either, since consciousness is not present to speech such that it might struggle against it. Speech simply happens as the acknowledgement of the Other as it suspends the form of relation that Levinas calls the same. This is why Levinas uses formulations such a 'relation without relation' when writing about speech: what he wants to emphasise is the suspension of the constitutive work that makes reality seem to be the result of linguistic representation.

For Levinas, God is not revealed with the Other, a face behind the face, as a kind of divine supplement, but is present only in my spoken answer to the Other. When I speak to the Other, God likewise speaks. It is not that there is anything specific about the Other outside of my relation to him, that commands this response. A kind of commandment is already present in what I say to the Other ('the command is stated by the mouth of him it commands'). In speech, in what Levinas calls witnessing, there is produced something in me that is not of me ('the-other-in-the-same'); the infinite, conceived by analogy with Descartes' idea of the infinite in the third Meditation – breaks into the closed order of my finitude.

But how is the infinite actually experienced? Levinas coins the word illeity in order to indicate the way in which God is transcendent. This word is formed from il or ille, indicating the passing of the infinite, that is, the way in which the infinite reveals itself without yielding to the meaning-giving powers of intentionality. The word illeity, he-ness or it-ness, is meant to express the way in which God is given to be experienced.

Why does Levinas refuse to speak in the manner of Buber of God in the second person, as a you-ity? Why does illeity remain in the third person? In speaking, in witnessing, the 'il' of illeity is a word for the impersonality of the relation to the Other. It thus expresses the enigma of this relation insofar as it holds God apart from me, from my finitude, even as it interrupts that finitude (the-other-in-the-same that is Levinas's notion of the subject). Illeity, in its impersonality appears in the particular personality of the Other.

But this bestows the possibility of another reading, where the impersonality of illeity is understood as a name for a feature of speech. In order to explore this fully, I would have to take a long detour, showing how Blanchot is suspicious of a certain Platonic tendency in Levinas's account of speech, elevating speech above writing, before following an important recent reading of Totality and Infinity that places emphasis upon fraternity as a model for understanding the relation to the Other. I would have to show how it is in terms of the relation to the child that one might understand the structure of what Levinas later calls the-other-in-the-same. 

Here, it will suffice to say that for Blanchot, the 'il' of 'illeity' can be understood to refer to another sense of the-other-in-the-same, and another kind of witnessing, and that the relation to the Other must be understood in terms of speech, and not the way the Other attends speech, accompanying and validating it as ethical by its silence presence.

What is crucial to the relation to the Other for Blanchot is that it commands and reawakens a new source of speech: a upsurge of creativity in the responding 'I' analogous, perhaps, to that which he claims to occur in literary creation in the response to the work. I can speak, addressing the Other, because I am claimed by a 'merciful surplus of strength' that might be understood as a kind of virtuosity (I am thinking of Virno's use of this word) not because of my eloquence but because of a kind of stammering or stuttering that is the condition of everything I say.

That is, I speak in two times, one which can be understood in terms of what I say – the contents of speech, its message – and the other as the continual surprise that I can say it, that I am drawn to speak by the-other-in-the-same. Here, this diachrony of speech depends on a doubling of the speaker – there is the one who can speak, who can make speech personal and the other who cannot help but speak as the 'il', the placeholder or dummy subject who gives issue to impersonal speech.

What sense, in this context, can God have for Blanchot? Why is this non-Jewish athetist able to reaffirm Jewish monotheism in The Infinite Conversation? Following Levinas, God never names an entity that was 'there' or present, considered in relation to the temporal order as it is conceived in terms of a synthesis of past moments. As such, God is never encountered as a unitary One, and Jewish monotheism must be understood to refer to a difference and a pluralism, to a diachrony that cannot be closed up into the linear order of time.

Blanchot's Messiah

Blanchot's 'God' – what he calls God - can be known only through the act of speaking. We must say the same of Blanchot's Messiah, who is revealed only in the performative of my saying as a response to the Other, that is, in the diachrony which sees the occurrence of one instant in two times. 

As such, the Messiah is always occulted, since the performative in question is not experienced by a conscious 'I'. Anyone might be the Messiah, but no one need know anything about it, since the Messiah lives only in a particular speech act, in and through the dispersal of the ego that occurs when the 'il' is called forward by the relation to the Other.

1. Appeals to the immediate should awaken our suspicion: isn't consciousness itself, as Hegel would say, the very organ of mediation? But perhaps the appeal to the immediate, far from answering to what is most obvious of all in contemporary capitalism, allows us to reflect upon what escapes consciousness in the very act of mediation – to rescue a worklessness (désoeuvrement) that precedes its mediating labour.

That, at least, is how I understand Blanchot's use of the notion of immediacy when he characterises the kind of speech evidenced during May 1968. Speech, he claims, was immediate during the Events; in the action committees and on the streets, the participants achieved a remarkable freedom to speak that was both collective and anonymous. Here was a freedom other than that of bourgeois individualism, a speech in response to the Other, free from particularity, that each participant became for their fellow protesters. As Blanchot remembers, differences in age, fame and social status seemed to matter little in the Events (as Sartre, he notes somewhat cattily, had to learn quickly). There were incessant debates in the committees and demonstrations, but there was also an extraordinary capacity to speak, a 'saying' that, until then, was unable to reveal itself.

The immediacy of speech, then, circumvents prior forms of mediation that, until the Events, held sway over language. I can only sketch them here, but May 1968 saw the prestige of the old nationalisms, the old religions fall away – though in truth, this was something already in process – and with them a certain relation to language and to existing political, legal and economic institutions. I have explored the significance of the Events for Blanchot, and his own part in them elsewhere. Here, I want simply to explore the notion of the immediate with the aim of understanding what Blanchot calls speech.

2. We might recall Hegel's chapter on 'sense certainty' from the Phenomenology of Spirit, in which he argues that what is present here and now, the immediate, is in fact already mediated. Any attempt to grasp the truth of the immediate requires one to render it in language, translating the singular into more general terms. Write at 10PM 'Now is night' on a slip of paper and look at next morning; the statement, obviously enough, is no longer true. The word 'now' that is supposed to grasp a singular moment, also means any now. The word is a universal; as soon as I express the real in language, I have lost its singularity.

For Hegel, however, one can only articulate the truth of the real in language. Language, in that sense is 'truer' than immediacy; it allows the immediate to become determinate for self-consciousness. For a thinker like Kierkegaard, however, as a recent book has shown us, language is not truer than immediacy, and the loss of the latter in the act of expressing it leads to the mistaking of 'reality as represented' for 'reality as reality', even as consciousness, for the most part, is unaware of this duplicity.

With Hegel, Kierkegaard agrees that determinate sense experience is always mediated; against him, however, Kierkegaard maintains that mediated reality is also duplicitous. Unlike Hegel, who maintains that reality is what exists for consciousness, for Kierkegaard, reality is what is presupposed by consciousness. We can thus make a distinction between an 'originary time' and time as represented.

3. Blanchot, who had an abiding interest in Kierkegaard, giving him as an example of one of those thinkers who, outside the academy, was able to develop a form of fragmentary speech, also distinguishes between originary time – which he calls the origin – and the time of beginning (The Space of Literature). In so doing, he does not want to celebrate an ineffable or non-linguistic immediacy, but rather to show how literature retains a moment of the origin (of the real) within language, even as it retreats from the conscious awareness of author and reader.

But how is this possible? The special virtue of the language of poetry as opposed, say, to that of the philosopher is that it is often supposed to attend to things in their immediacy, celebrating this tree, for example, or this heroic deed. The poet's virtuosity would lie in awakening the sense of the singular 'this', even as it is lost to other kinds of discourse (to that of biology, say, or history). Philosophy, by contrast, would rely on generalities, passing over the singular in favour of the universal.

Blanchot's argument is different. Although we might take the immediate to designate this tree or this patch of colour – what is given to us here and now as immediate for consciousness – he directs us to an immediacy that precedes the constituting work of consciousness. For Hegel, consciousness is mediation, confirming its work each time we speak in the first person. For Blanchot, by contrast, the immediate lays claim to each of us such that it precedes the positing of consciousness as it occurs through mediation.

Beneath or beyond any simple minded appeal to the immediate (whether as the indefiniteness of this tree or this battle, or as the supposed naturalness of poverty, exploitation and rivalrous relationships in contemporary capitalism), Blanchot points us to the irruption of the origin – to a non-personal experience wherein the locus of consciousness gives way to an anonymous 'it', the 'il', analogous to the 'dummy subject' of such phrases as 'it is raining'. The 'il', crucially, is impersonal, maintaining a relation to the 'I', to consciousness, while not being identical with it. (But I will not explore this notion at length here)

This dummy subject reveals itself, for Blanchot, in various ways. First of all, it can be found in a particular kind of affective states – he lists suffering, affliction, etc, exploring them both in his fictions and his more philosophical writings (The Infinite Conversation). Secondly, it is there in the encounter with a object that escapes its conventional use – here, Blanchot remembers the 'perverse, unusable' knick-knacks Breton finds at a flea-market, but there is also his famous example of the corpse (see discussion of the image in The Space of Literature).

Thirdly, Blanchot discovers the 'il' in the encounter with language, on the part of literary authors and readers of literature (see virtually any of his collections of criticism from The Work of Fire onwards). Blanchot finds in literature an encounter that suspends the intentionality of author and reader as they seek to animate a fictional world on the basis of what is presented in language. It reveals itself in what he calls the 'narrative voice' of a story, in a 'saying' that interrupts the reader's attempt to form what is read into a fully realised fictional world (of course, Blanchot also writes literature that lets this narrative voice resound).

Fourthly, and this is what interests me here, from the late 1950s onwards (after his return, that is, from the south of France, where he had spent ten years in solitary writing to a period of political intervention and, in his theoretical writings, a marked broadening of interests), Blanchot points to speech as another way in which the experience in question happens.

4. For Hegel, the real, being as such, reveals itself only in language, as the sayable. Blanchot argues that immediacy, although it does not escape language, reveals itself in the very specific linguistic act he calls speech. Like Kierkegaard, Blanchot argues that consciousness is always in untruth with respect to the immediate, since it loses its relation to the immediate as soon as it attempts to express it, but as he will also argue, speech attests to this relation, answering it and letting it resound in language.

This argument receives its most detailed elaboration in the first third of The Infinite Conversation where, in a series of long conversations between unnamed discussants, he engages with Levinas's Totality and Infinity. As is well known, Levinas focuses in Totality and Infinity on a particular kind of relation, the relation to the human Other, Autrui, which he claims obtains in a particular act of language, as speech. He characterises this relation as asymmetrical, insofar as one of its terms, the Other, is said to be higher than the other, the ego, and unilateral, insofar as the Other is said to face the ego and to call it to its responsibility.

For Levinas, this moment of facing, of expression grants the ego a stable and enduring ipseity, a selfhood. Prior to this moment, we have what can be called a proto-self, separate and selfish, concerned only to secure its nourishment in an uncertain environment. At the moment of expression, the self comes together in its response to the Other, which Levinas thinks as the linguistic act in question. Speech opens in the response of the ego to the Other's silent expression. It is in discourse, language, that I can come to myself as an ego.

What does this mean? I become a self only at the moment when I can say 'I' (or imply the first person position in my response to another) in response to the face of the Other. As such, I owe my egoity, my ipseity to the alterity of the Other which, with respect to the meditation which occurs, for Levinas, at a practical and conceptual level by the ego (he calls it the same), is immediate.

Whereas the philosophical tradition, according to Levinas, has privileged the mediating activity of consciousness, this activity is predicated upon a linguistic act of acknowledgement and hospitality that is upstream of anything the ego might want or not want to do. Consciousness cannot help but be affected by the Other such that its constitutive activity fails. That is to say, consciousness does not measure the form of the relation to the Other in advance, which is why Levinas says the Other reaches me as the immediate. (All this presumes a lengthy and complicated discussion with Heidegger which I will not revisit here. Suffice to say that the work of the same, meditation, is thought by Levinas as a particular kind of form that governs our relation to things, but which comes apart with respect to the relation to the Other.)

Here, speech is very different from the ideality that consciousness introduces in the form of language. As we have seen, language, to the extent that it depends upon universals, passes over the singularity of the immediately given. But for Levinas, speech, understood as the address to the Other, acknowledges this immediacy (that is, it responds to the singularity of the relation to the Other) by suspending the constitutive work of consciousness.

Speech, accordingly, is not voluntary, since it does not stem from the will (which is governed by the same autonomous demand that governs consciousness), though nor can it be called involuntary either, since consciousness is not present to speech such that it might struggle against it. Speech simply happens as the acknowledgement of the Other as it suspends the form of relation that Levinas calls the same. This is why Levinas uses formulations such a 'relation without relation' when writing about speech: what he wants to emphasise is the suspension of the constitutive work that makes reality the result of linguistic mediation.

5. There is, however, a danger implicit to Levinas's presentation of the Other to which Blanchot is very alert that the relation to the Other is accorded a status that merely reproduces the constitutive activity of consciousness, mirroring it in a different form. Rather than constitution, the work of mediation lying on the side of the ego, it would lie on the side of the Other in its relation to the ego.

Blanchot worries that the special nature of the relation to the Other is determined by Levinas in terms of a particular feature of the Other that grants it a kind of power or authority. Blanchot, by contrast, wants to emphasise that the relation to the Other implies that just as the identity of the ego is broken apart in the relation in question, so too is the Other. Neither term is allowed to rest in a simple self-identity.

We can understand Blanchot's argument as a way of placing emphasis upon the interhuman relation rather than upon the Other as a term of the relation. In this way, he guards against understanding the Other as a self of commensurable power as the ego. What matters for Blanchot is internal to the relation in question rather than drawing on a quality of either of its terms (either as the ego, a consciousness as the guarantor of mediation or on the Other as the equivalent of a more powerful ego).

Blanchot supplants Levinas's emphasis on the Other in the interhuman relationship with an emphasis on what he calls conversation, entretien. Drawing on an obscure passage in Totality and Infinity, Blanchot notes the reversability of the unilateral, asymmetrical and exclusive relation to the Other with respect to the ego. Since there is no special feature of the Other that explains the alterity of the ego's relation to the Other, the ego can, in turn, become the Other for this other human being. Even as I am exposed and obligated in my relation to you as the Other (as a generic human being, a man or woman without qualities) you can be exposed and obligated in your relation to me as the Other (as I, in turn, become generic for you).

This is not a reciprocal relation, since, each time, it remains dissymmetical and unilateral (that is to say, it suspends, each time, the constitutive work of consciousness). Nevertheless, it is also possible that, between two people, there will be a criss-crossing of relations, a series of reversals, which Blanchot will call a 'redoubling of irreprocity', a 'double dissymmetry' or a 'double signed infinity', but also, surprisingly, community: 

And then too, we ought to say the following: if the question "Who is autrui?" has no direct meaning, it is because it must be replaced by another: "What of the human 'community', when it must respond to this relation of strangeness between man and man – a relation without common measure, an exorbitant relation – that the experience of language leads one to sense?'

It is not Blanchot who speaks here, but one of the conversationalists he allows to discuss Totality and Infinity, who continue to this double dissymmetry without, however, bringing up the word community again. Nevertheless, however fleetingly it is used, it is meant to mark the oscillation wherein each term of a relation between human beings becomes in turn Other for the other.

6. As Blanchot emphasises, the happening of community is rare. We are, for the most part, bound by the societal forms that divide us according to class, wealth, gender, race, religion etc. But in the late 1950s, Blanchot was already looking towards the promise of the dissolution of those particularities – nationalisms, religions, ethnicities – that kept humanity, until recently, bound to specific territories on the earth.

A promise that looks towards events that can only happen briefly (instanteously), but that nevertheless overcome old kinds of enrootedness, the allegiance to great histories, to political leaders, to territories of all kinds, and above all to possession, to one's possessions and the desire to possess. The men and women of the street, this coming, perpetually coming form of humanity, have nothing in common but a few generic traits. But they assemble, the crowd, the people, at the moment when, according to Blanchot's image, the walls fall, and in which the freedom of speech, understood as the response to the Other as the 'unknown-familiar' reveals itself in the open.

This, indeed, is what happened for Blanchot during the Events. Speech, for him, marks a relation to the Other that can be called immediate, as it escapes the constituting work of consciousness, answering to that worklessness (désoeuvrement) which –sists (it does not subsist, it does not exist) in place of consciousness and its object. It addresses others in the crowd in view of the future it has brought to the brink of the present – that utopia of a humankind without particularity. I address you by way of this future that we bear in common, and you, addressing me as any other, and therefore as the Other, continue to affirm this movement of effervescence, speech, as it runs aflame through the crowd (but it is nothing other than the crowd).

When the 'I' becomes 'it' in responding to the Other, when the 'il' in the other person comes forward in turn, a kind of community occurs in which neither term, in its relation to the other, is able to maintain its ipseity. In calling it friendship, understood as a 'camaradarie without preliminaries', Blanchot is not thinking of a relationship founded upon shared interests, upon a symmetrical mutuality and reciprocity that would occur between two commensurate terms.

Who is the Other marching beside me? Anyone at all; no one in particular: I am not sure who I am addressing. And who am I who addresses the Other thus, upstream of conscious deliberation? Likewise no one, likewise a generic placeholder in place of a person that Blanchot marks as an 'il', an 'it'. The walls fall: speech marks the uncertainty as to who the speaker and the addressee might be, and in this way, as the relation is multiplied, a kind of break happens: the unknown future (Blanchot calls it the messianic) quivers through the crowd (but that quivering is also the crowd).

7. Whence the beautiful phrase we find in a handbill from the Events: 'Tomorrow it was May'. Tomorrow it was May; tomorrow awakened in the act of speech, in a speech act that cannot be brought back to the form of the self. Tomorrow, then, a tomorrow-in-today, as it breaks with the system of relations that maintain the stranglehold of the present, was the crowd that was formed of Others addressed and of the selves that addressed them.

The revolt of May 1968, for Blanchot, was first of all a revolt of speech; this is what the wall-writings and handbills confirm, answering as they do a capacity to say, to speak immediately that revealed itself in the action committees and demonstrations. But this is not an immediacy that places itself at my disposal – it is not revealed to a self that remains sure of its self and its capacities, including the capacity to be.

When Blanchot writes of the authorities, the men of power, discovering in the movement the carnivalesque redoubling of their own disarray, it is to mark the difference between constituted forms of political, legal and economic power and the powerlessness of the participants. But it is also to mark the impossibility of submitting the pre-voluntary opening of community to a determined political will.

The crowd, whom the action committees never merely represented, according to Blanchot, and who never permitted themselves to be organised, revealed another kind of politics, or, to draw on Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe's notion, the political as it remains the condition for any particular politics. But this other politics, this re-opening of the political in a kind of living question can never settle into an institutional form.

As soon as speech is channelled, mediated, it disappears. Community cannot tolerate organisation. Thus the people of the revolt, such as they are, can have no part in duration. They assemble, they disperse; what matters for the movement of May 1968 is simply to affirm the break, to maintain that suspension of ordinary relations that allows the question of the political to resound.

8. The objection must come very quickly: isn't this a revolution without revolution, a riskless communism (Blanchot calls it that) which suspends any relation to those real struggles in which the workers have been engaged? Certainly the May 1968 movement was vulnerable to established political institutions; demonstrations were banned, tanks were seen on sliproads near Paris – how, in the face of military might and police violence could it be expected to last?

But why nevertheless on the first days of the Events, when the movement caught everyone by surprise, when it spread like wildfire through the universities and factories, wasn't the Elysée stormed and the government overturned? Why didn't the students and workers capitalise on the panic of the authorities and the immense popular support they seemed to enjoy? Why didn't the Events lead to forms of political organisation that superseded the moribund French Communist Party and the trade unions? Why did the workers go back to the factories and students to the university? And why, above all, was the existing government, already in power for ten years, re-elected in the summer of the Events, as if nothing had happened?

If we allow that politics, thus far, has always existed in a moment of untruth or duplicity with respect to what Blanchot calls community (to immediacy), then how might this untruth be overcome? If it is implicit in any form of political representation, in which the relation to the Other (and the chance of its repetition) is forgotten by a Member of Parliament, the Trade Union head, or the leader of the French Communist Party, then what chance lies open for any politics? Must politics always betray the messianism, the communism (but what is at stake in using those words?) waits in potentia at the heart of all social relations?

1. He was, said Derrida, involved 'body and soul' in the Events. Michel Leiris, in his journals, laughed at him: what was he doing running along with the students? Couldn't he see it would lead nowhere? Levinas, his closest friend, wrote, without identifying him, of an eminent man of letters who 'participated in the May Events in a total but lucid manner'. 'Blanchot is not an ordinary man, a man whom you can meet in the street', says Levinas in an interview. But there he was on the streets, a demonstrator (Denis Hollier writes of his surprise at seeing him at an action committee, 'pale, but real …'): what was Blanchot's role during May 1968, which he later called 'the most significant political and perhaps philosophical event in the last 20 years'?

Early May 1968 saw the first occupations, expulsions, the first demonstrations. Blanchot was staying with the Antelmes in Paris, and it was with their joint friends Jean Schuster, Dionys Mascolo, Marguerite Duras – they had known each other for 10 years by this time, working together against French colonialism in Algeria, drafting the 'Manifesto of the 121' – and many others (Klossowski, Sartre, Sarraute, Lefebvre) that they signed a petition published in Le Monde supporting the students.

Blanchot was also present on the first night of the barricades, from the 10th to the 11th May, and participated in the great march of 13th. He was there at Stade Charléty to hear former prime minister Mendès-France offer his protection to the movement, in some measure legitimating it, without realising that it did not want or need his help, and at the protests at the Renault factory at Flin on the 10th June, which saw a young militant chased into the river by riot police and drown. And he was present at the end, marching after demonstrations had been outlawed and therefore more at risk of police violence than ever.

But above all, Blanchot was involved in the Students and Writers Action Committee, created on the 20th May, whose participants initially included Michel Butor and Jacques Roubaud, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Roy. There were 60 writers, journalists, students and television reporters present on the first day, though their numbers quickly dwindled. With Duras and Antelme, he remained at the committee until the end of August.

2. The Committee were responsible for many handbills, posters and bulletins, which were the result of a collective labour and meant as a collective enunciation. Above all, they were not to be read not as representing what happened at the Events, supplementing the accounts of May that were already being published, but to continue their movement.

The writing on the walls, the tracts distributed in the street, posters are 'disorderly words', say one of their texts (published, many years later – with his consent? – under Blanchot's name), words 'free of discourse' that, accompanying the rhythm of the marchers and their shouts belonged, simply, 'to the decision of the moment'; transitory, ephemeral, 'they appear, they disappear'.

What matters is not what they say – the form of signification they would maintain, the idea that something might be said about what is happening, but that something can be said. 'Written in insecurity, received under threat', they are present only to 'affirm the break' – whether their message is lost, forgotten or passed on.

What break? The break with the powers that be, hence with the notion of power, hence everywhere that power predominates. This obviously applies to the University, to the idea of knowledge, to the language relations to be found in teaching, in learning, perhaps to all language, etc., but it applies even more to our own conception of opposition to the powers that be, each time such opposition constitutes itself to become a party in power.

A break with the powers that be … We remember the well known incidents across France from February 1968 onwards, where students demanded freedom of speech and movement. There came the occupations (Nanterre by the so called 'Movement of the 22nd March' and the Sorbonne on the 13th May, after the suspension of courses there), the day of the national strike, the Théâtre de l'Odéon), teach-ins, the battles in the Latin Quarter between students and the police which saw paving stones and metal grilles wrenched from the street and barricades spontaneously thrown up.

Beyond the university, in a movement that was continuous with that of the student revolt, factories were occupied and strikes planned. By the 16th, says this useful document, 50 factories were occupied including the 6 main plants at Renault; the ports of Le Havre and Marseilles were closed; by the 17th, 200,000 workers were on strike all across France, and by the 18th, 2,000,000. Then there was a general strike of 10,000,000 people. Barricades, sit-downs, refusals to disperse, battles with the police, the tricoloeur set aflame … each time it was the whole of French capitalist society that was being brought into question.

3. Remembering the Events in 1983, Blanchot writes,

It was not even a question of overthrowing an old world; what mattered was to let a possibility manifest itself, the possibility – beyond any utilitarian gain of a being-together that gave back to all the right to equality in fraternity through a freedom of speech that elated everyone. Everybody had something to say, and, at times, to write (on the walls); what exactly, mattered little. Saying it was more important than what was said.

A being-together, a community, a communism … in which, as he says in another text, it became 'almost easy […] to forget all particularity, and impossible to distinguish between young and old, the unknown and the too well-known'. Despite the incessant disputes and differences, debates and controversies, Blanchot says, 'each person recognised himself in the anonymous words inscribed on the walls'; like the handbills and posters, the graffiti 'never declared themselves the words of an author, being of all and for all, in their contradictory formulation'. What was happening belonged to everyone.

It is to this kind of 'freedom of speech' that Blanchot looks as quite the opposite of the speech of the engaged intellectual – of the thinker who would speak on behalf of everyone else. The movement needed no political representation – whether through established channels like the French Communist Party (which repeatedly condemned the student left, even as it sought to associate itself with the movement) or the various trade unions (which sought, in the main, to use the Events merely to bolster their bargaining position), they need no one – no vanguard – to speak on their behalf.

In the action committees, Blanchot remembers in 1996, the street demonstrations, 'there were no friends, only comrades who immediately addressed each other without formality and accepted neither age differences nor the recognition due to prior celebrity'. Then the role of the action committees was merely to answer to and uphold the freedom of speech in the same manner as the collective, anonymous writings of the Students and Writers' Action Committee.

Freedom – from what? From conventional social structures, to be sure, that kept student and worker apart – and also the workers within an organisation, the shop steward from cheap immigrant labour. But also from the ordering of speech, of language, by the university, the system of knowledge, and, more generally, culture at large.

Here, I suppose, it should be acknowledged that the France remained at once powerfully conservative but also ready for change. Schools and universities remained rigidly conformist, factories undemocratic. But then, too, the new France of the consumer boom, which demanded long hours and commutes for its workers was equally intolerable. Capitalism was also a target for the movement, and in a manner far different than was permitted by existing political parties and trade unions.

Alongside conventional media and the whole system of publishing which reflected both old and new France, overseeing the transition into consumerism, handbills, bulletins and posters circulated in the streets. Alongside conventional politics, the committees allowed anyone allowed to speak, breaking with old hierarchies without, however, replacing them with a bourgeois individualism.

Speech was collective without being subordinated to a unitary source of power or value. But it was so insofar as it was drawn back into a capacity to speak that belonged to everyone. It was enough that anyone could speak, and that speaking, thereby, was withdrawn from the familiar channels in which language was organised.

4. What does this mean? In Grammar of the Multitude, Virno points us to the importance of what Heidegger called idle chatter as part of a more general attempt to rethink political praxis. As he notes, the Marxian analysis of labour power comes to complete itself in the wake of the Fordist mode of production. Marx's notion indicates 'the aggregate of those mental and physical capacities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being'. Under contemporary capitalism, with the transition from material to immaterial forms of employment, labour power includes the most generic of human aptitudes, says Virno, 'the totality of poietic, 'political', cognitive, emotional forces', thus encompassing every aspect of experience.

Considered for itself, idle talk resembles background noise, Virno argues; it is not tied to anything in specific, as a drill is to drilling or the roar of an engine to a motorbike. Open-ended and improvisational, operating without script, idle talk does not describe or represent the existing world so much as open beyond it – temporally, spatially – by breaking apart the perfect fit between production and execution to which labour power seems to lend itself. As idle talk, language vouchsafes another commons, another sense of being-in-common as it awakens those poietic, cognitive and emotional forces as yet uncaptured in contemporary models of capitalist production. But it does so, crucially, by refusing to speak in the first person, and it is here that it resonates with Blanchot's conception of speech.

5. Speech, for Blanchot, is primarily the capacity to speak, to say, but not simply to speak in one's own name. For him, like Virno, the value of idle speech is that it is generic, escaping the authentic self to which Heidegger contrasts it. When Blanchot writes of the crowd or the people, it is as an anonymous mass, precisely the kind of which Heidegger feared – Das Man, the 'they' or the 'One' encountered all at once, in which no one can lay claim to speech in the first person.

Here then is a freedom of speech that manifests itself in the 'immense common powerlessness' of the crowd – the way it escapes all kinds of organisation. A freedom that, for Blanchot, becomes possible only in the 'change of epoch' for whose signs he searches in many of his essays from the late 1950s onwards, where old nationalisms and racisms, old forms of enrootedness or attachments to place have begun to wither away. A speech that belongs to the man or the woman of the street, free from allegiance to a particular homeland or a people, and, as must be made clearer today, from a bourgeois separatism that dissolves any sense of the collective.

The crowd must remain, for Blanchot, disorganised and unorganisable. If the action committees of the Events, to be sure, took on some of the responsibilities of civil administration, but in no way formed a rival centre of government. They were only 'pretending to organise disorganisation while respecting the latter', says Blanchot; they did not distinguish themselves from the "anonymous and innumerable crowd, from the people spontaneously demonstrating"'. The committees did not represent the movement, articulating the interests of the men and women of the street, but allowed them to speak and thereby give voice to the generic power to speak, confirming a new way of being together, of being-in-common, speech, even in their vigorous debates.

Confronted by the crowd, the old powers did not know how to act; something new was happening, something altogether unexpected. Mendès-France, sympathising with the protesters, was still unaware that the movement was not a political force like any other (it was 'a movement that was only movement'). When, on the 19th May de Gaulle spoke on behalf of the men of power at the Élysée, 'La reform, oui; la chienlit, non' this was only a way of marking this ignorance. The word chienlit, which means a ragtag, a mess, from chie-en-lit, shits in bed, gestures feebly at what Blanchot found in the 'common powerlessness' of the crowd.

What did they want? They quickly rejected offers of an increase in the minimum wage and average salaries; they refused the offer of a referendum. The offer to release the students imprisoned at the beginning of the Events did not placate them. De Gaulle's fumbling address to the nation on French television on May 24th impressed no one. When, on the 29th, de Gaulle left France altogether, panic spread in government circles. The people on the streets were the 'carnivalesque redoubling […] of a command that no longer commanded anything, not even itself, contemplating, without seeing it, its own inexplicable ruin'. 

But for this same reason – its disarray, its lack of leadership, the sense that it belonged to everyone and no one, the movement was at the mercy of the same institutions whose structure it refused to reduplicate. On the 29th, de Gaulle, holing up in Germany with the French military, had no idea what to do. But by the next day, he returned to Paris, having decided to deploy the military if necessary, and called for a General Election. The revolutionary movement began to fade away even as the French Communist Party welcomed this new turn.

Addressing the nation once again on TV in June, de Gaulle threatened to introduce a state of emergency unless the ferment died down. On the 12th June, far left groups were banned and subjected to intense harassment, and the student union called for a stop to demonstrations. On the 16th, as the result of a massive police effort, the Sorbonne was retaken and the police infiltrated schools and universities. Workers returned to work, and by the end of June, the Gaullists were voted back to govern with a respectable majority.

5. What, then, had happened? The revolution failed. This, on Blanchot's account, should not surprise us. A movement that exhibits an 'absence of reaction' to already constituted powers leaves it vulnerable to those powers. Historians tell us that the Events, nevertheless, saw the transformation of French society – this is the generation of 1968 Sarkozy affects to despise. The revolution failed – but did it fail?

For Blanchot, writing in the 1980s, with Mitterand's government in power, what mattered in the Events was speech – not simply the fact that one could speak, that anyone was allowed to speak, but that speech was directed towards others, fellow marchers, fellow strikers, in a form of 'friendship, a 'camaraderie without preliminaries' without precedent. Freedom is given in the relation friendship would name, insofar as one can address the other anonymously, impersonally, speaking as no one in particular to no one in particular in the turbulence of the crowd.

What, indeed, was the crowd but this field of relations, in which freedom belonged not to the individual who would possess speech, laying claim to it in the first person, but to the speaker who is borne by friendship and camaraderie? Did it fail – or was this success success enough? Is the revolution given only in speech or does the gap between camaraderie and politics open too widely?

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 the Revue? 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’s The 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 Revue to 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.

In enjoyment, Levinas explains, and as I attempted to unfold previously, the ego is produced as the result of an involution of the cosmic womb of the elements. Living from the various media or milieus of the elemental – on light, air, water and food – the ego is able to maintain itself over time, although it is always exposed to the uncertainty implicit in its dependency on what lies outside of it. The fruit may wither on the vine, the river dry up – the ego can never be sure of its future. Fortunately, there opens the phenomenon that Levinas calls dwelling – through the setting up of an ‘extraterritoriality’ set back from the immediacy of elemental life. The ego continues to join what it receives from the element, but is now able to deepen a movement of interiorisation, consolidating its independent identity. Such a movement comes together, in dwelling, with a movement of labour and acquisition, Levinas argues; dwelling is the node wherein the ego sets itself back from the world in a home, even as it maintains an opening to the element. But dwelling cannot be reduced to the phenomenon of the possession of a home – it expresses, rather, that position which allows the capacity to possess. A capacity that, Levinas argues in some obscure and troubling pages, is dependent on an act of welcoming.

The ego can come to dwell in the home because it is made welcome there, says Levinas, by a feminine other – to ‘the gentleness or the warmth of intimacy’. Like the goddess Hestia, who remains in the hearth, the feminine extends an invitation to the ego into the privacy of dwelling, in the interior space that will become a home and permit of inhabitation. Compared to the ‘timeless and carefree’ paradise of enjoyment (although always menaced by the ‘concern for the morrow’), we find instead ‘a perpetual postponement of the expiration in which life risks foundering’. Levinas argues the ‘very dimension of time’ opens in dwelling, through that act of welcoming that separates the ego from the immediacy of the element. The welcome of the feminine permits a collection and consolidation of egoic existence. The dimension of labour, which in turn allows the ego to possess the items it brings into the home, is dependent upon the initial invitation the femininely coded space of intimacy extends to the ego.

Levinas tells us such intimacy is not to be confused with the actual physical presence of a woman. Femininity would simply provide an appropriate metaphor for a private space. Nevertheless, this is not an innocent metaphor, but confirms a whole history of thought wherein the feminine is made to stand for a ground that absents itself in order to allow the existence of a self which is always coded as masculine. Levinas, to be sure, wants to break with ideas of a nourishing, maternal sense of the earth, of the primordial matrix at the source of the world in pagan cosmogonies. The cosmic womb of the element that Levinas seems to reference in his account of enjoyment can easily become opaque and unnourishing matter. Levinas’s feminine is, by contrast, discreet, belonging to a hidden fold in the earth – but this merely perpetuates the cliche of a benign and self-abnegating maternal presence, enabling others without wanting anything for itself.

But what does it enable? The welcome of intimacy grants the possibility of having time – of a deferral of the ‘concern for the morrow’ which threatened the hedonism of enjoyment. It permits labour to transform the element, letting the hand (for Levinas, the organ of work) grope towards what it can then apprehend as things. I am able to begin what he calls the ‘Odyssean journey … where the adventure pursued in the world is but an accident of a return’: what matters is the movement that consolidates the identity of the ego.

The pages on dwelling, dense and troubling are difficult enough. But no sooner than he has articulated its structure, Levinas imposes another on top of it. The ego, he argues, is exposed to the alterity of the Other [Autrui] – to that relation that is experience as the good, as responsibility at the same moment it has come to dwell. I will not rehearse Levinas’s well known account of the opening of the ethical here. But this opening – a welcoming of the Other – occurs simultaneously with the welcome that feminine intimacy bestows. From the first, the dwelling is not securely possessed by the ego, but turned towards the Other to whom the ego is engaged in responsibility. This is why Levinas can write, ‘The chosen home is the very opposite of a root. It indicates a disengagement, a wandering [errance] which has made it possible, which is not a less with respect to installation, but the surplus of the relationship with the Other, metaphysics’.

The home, then, is not the basis of subjective identity – the root it sends down into the earth – even though feminine intimacy is said to grant the possibility of an increased independence from the element. For that independence is, seemingly simultaneously, turned over to the Other who, it must be understood, cannot be identified with the intimacy with the feminine. The Other is not encountered in the home, but as coming from outside of it – the alterity of the Other is in no way the indefiniteness of the element, but the infinity of a relation that contests any attempt on the part of the ego to close itself up. Dwelling, says Levinas, is the node that joins the movement of interiorisation to the movement of labour and possession; I am able to commence an Odyssean journey. But this journey is subject to a detour from the first – I am never allowed, it seems, to journey back to myself, since the Other before me – anyone at all – disengages me from my identity and deracinates my home (I wander from my home in my home, the interior having been unfolded and exposed to the outside. In it and outside of it, the home, now, is entirely exposed, entirely open …)

‘No human or interhuman relationship can be enacted outside of an economy; no face can be approached with empty hands and closed home’. The circulation which seems to be permitted by a domestic space (Levinas calls this economy) is broken by the relation to the Other. The space into which I am welcomed becomes immediately a space of hospitality. Note that hospitality bears upon what my dwelling has allowed me to make into a possession – it is a giving of what I have wrested from the element. Hospitality has a material content. As Blanchot writes in another context, reflecting, no doubt, upon his reading of Levinas:

Materialism: ‘my own’ would perhaps be of little account, since it is appropriation or egoism; but the materialism of others – their hunger, their thirst, their desire – is the truth of materialism, its importance.

I am never allowed to tend complacently to my own hunger, my own thirst; my desires are, from this point no longer my own, since they come from without. Although I may indeed decide to follow only those desires I take to be mine, this is a movement of reaction. Appropriation and egoism have already been challenged; the hunger of the Other – his thirst, his desire – has already laid claim to me in dwelling.

Great is hungering – this phrase, which Blanchot quotes from Levinas, and which I quoted in a previous post finds another significance: great is the hungering of the Other …

Blanchot again:

If I cannot welcome the Other by answering the summons which his approach exerts to the point of exhausting me utterly, it is surely through awkward weakness alone (through the wretched ‘after all, despite everything’, and through my portion of derision and folly) that I am called upon to enter into this separate, this other relation. I am called to enter it with my selfhood gangrened and eaten away, altogether alienated (thus it is among lepers and beggars beneath the Roman ramparts that the Jews of the first centuries expected to discover the Messiah.)

The relation to the Other implicates me as I exposed in a new sense – not, now, to the uncertainty of the element, but to the infinity of a relation that separates me from the root that my home might otherwise become. It is not that my home is open to the Messiah for Blanchot (explaining Levinas), as though it were sufficient to leave a place within my dwelling for him that he might come. I myself am the Messiah who would welcome the Other in my home. I myself – and only as my egoity, my selfhood is eaten away to nearly nothing. Must I become hungry in order to feed the Other in turn? But hunger, now has a new significance. My hunger is no longer mine, it is not my first concern …

When one commentator says, The Messiah is perhaps I, he is not exalting himself. Anyone might be the Messiah – must be he, is not he. For it would be wrong to speak of the Messiah in Hegelian language – ‘the absolute intimacy of absolute exteriority’ – all the more so because the coming of the Messiah does not yet signify the end of history, the suspension of time.

It announces a time more future, as the following mysterious text conveys, than any prophesy could ever foretell: "All prophets – there is no exception – have prophesised only for the messianic time [l’epokhe?]. As for future time, what eye has seen it except Yours, Lord, who will act for him who is faithful to you and keeps waiting". (Levinas and Scholem)

The coming of the Messiah – the opening of my dwelling to the Other – belongs to the time prophesised by the prophets, Blanchot suggests (following Levinas, following Scholem): what matters is not the time I have, but that which I can now give to the Other. But this formulation gets things the wrong way round: it is the Other who brings the gift of time as it arrives from outside the closed economy of the ego. Or rather, it is the Other who gives sense to the time that dwelling has allowed me, orienting it in a particular direction.

With the Other, Levinas explains comes the condition of language, of reason – of the ability to grasp cognitively what the hand only groped towards (I do not have the space to discuss these topics here). Labour, says Levinas, is only able to shape the indefiniteness of matter, it is not able to make it renounce its anonymity. But my address to the Other, acknowledging his identity (the Other is a he, for Levinas), opens the dimension of language that allows for such a grasping. I no longer feel my way into the future, groping uncertainly; to think is to change the quality of the time that I have. But of course, my time is no longer mine; it belongs, Levinas says, to the Other – just as it must be judged according to another relation that opens in the relation to the Other.

He points here to the relation to other Others – to those alongside to the Other to whom we open our home. From the exclusivity of the ethical relation, we pass to the domain of politics, of judgement: we must now measure up carefully what we are to do and to whom we should give our time (even as, according to Levinas, time is given to us by the Other). The Messiah gives way in us to the judge who lives in a world of competing claims. I must decide what to do with the time that has been given me. And the moment I am brought before this decision – which is to say immediately, all at once – I am no longer the Messiah – or the Messiah is not the only one I am. Who am I to feed – this Other? this person standing before me? But what about the other Others – what about the ones who are genuinely starving? How am I to weigh up their demands upon me?

Great is the hungering of others in the world around me! Great is the whole burden of human suffering as it implicates me!

The demand of justice for always greater justice: in me, outside of me and in justice itself, thus also in the knowledge and exercise of justice. All of which presupposes what may be called the tragic imbroglio of the other and others; whence the intervention of the social and the political, under guarantee of the law, in the service of all that is far (first of all) and of all that is near – whence perhaps the repetition of the word peace, that this last word may be enriched by this echoing of itself in an incomparable repetition.

The long road of justice is a hard one. Like the journeying of Abraham, who departed alone, travelling towards all – from particularity to universality – under threat from the night and with all the hopes of the day.

I quote from a newly translated essay by Blanchot, ‘Peace, peace to the far and to the near’, without justifying here why his words can stand in for those of Levinas. The Messiah (who Blanchot evoked in a previous paragraph) gives way to the wanderer Abraham, perpetually en route from the ethical to the social and the political – from the particularity of the relation to the Other to the universality of the relation to the other Others. The latter, since there will always be hunger, and I can never do enough, belongs to a tragic imbroglio – a word that belongs to the other people Blanchot mentions in this essay – to the Greeks who have passed down to us ‘the logos, philosophy, beauty, and a certain idea of democracy’. Tragic because there are all too many … but hopeful, too, since there is always a surplus over the universal, over our inheritance from the Greeks: a particularity that, says Levinas, says Blanchot, lays claim to us as the ethical.

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. 

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 at its 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 beyond Death 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.

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 of Death 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 the récits 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 the récits 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.

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

The 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 as homo 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’ – our place?

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 …

Hypermnesis

The French literary genre called the récit typically bears upon an event that happened in the past, meditating upon its significance, a roman [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, Ellis notices, 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 a Bildungsroman, 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 récit encompasses a kind of theorising, that theory is itself, in some important way, a kind of fiction (perhaps that’s what Deleuze’s Logic 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 the récit 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 before that 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 impossible récit, 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 [from subir, 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 …).

Swimming in the Real

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

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

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

After the Fact

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

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

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

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

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

The Idyllic Law

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crises of History

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

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

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

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

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

Saying Sense

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

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

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

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

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

Mourning and Melancholy

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

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

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

The Re-ject

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 of Death 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 the récits 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 the récits 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.

How to write on Blanchot? Should one write on his work at all? If so, should this be the privilege of the specialist in literature, in philosophy, or in French cultural history?

Doing takes precedence over being, he reflects; one is never yet a writer – or one is so only by virtue of the writing. And yet what is produced – the work of words – is bound by a prohibition against that reading that would allow the writer to know what he has written. It is by work that the writer is produced and substantialised, that same work, once brought into existence, which dismisses him as its producer; the author is only that actor ‘who is born and dies each evening […] killed by the performance that makes him visible.’

Before the work, the writer is not yet a writer; after it, no longer one; his life is only that ‘interrupted becoming’ that is given in the experience of writing itself. But what of this experience? Is it in this we might find the secret of writing? But by creating characters, by making his text as a performance that would catch up the whole of his life, the writer has already shifted from the ‘I’ to the ‘he’ (that is to say, the ‘it’): the voice of narrative that does not issue from any source, not even the cool objectivity of the narrator of Madame Bovary.

Or rather, the narrative makes itself out of what is implied by the writer’s relation to language insofar as it is not exclusively instrumental – as it tears itself from refering to a real world, or even to a fantastic world the creation of which would still presume the mastery of a unified author, present to himself and authoritative.

Language relates to itself in the literary work – that is, the author who would shape language, finishing a book, is also used by language, insofar as words, turns of phrase, and finally the presence of language as it can no longer be made to make sense as a system of signs – sonorousness and rhythm, affect – have themselves a peculiar authority and strange fascination: that they draw the writer towards them only to wreck the vessel of the book, even as, at the same time, they do not prevent this vessel from arriving at its destination.

Sense happens, but something happens by way of sense – a kind of detour, an escape that, without breaking the universe of sense apart once and for all, nevertheless suspends its work, and suspends the intention of that author who would place language at his command.

Is writing, then, collaborative – the work of language and the work of the author? In a sense, and so long as the author is not understood as the sculptor who simply imposes form on bare matter. Matter – in this case, the presence of language, the double of sense – affirms itself against the maker of forms; the work enacts a kind of combat, where the angel of sense meets the devilish hordes of nonsense.

And now the maker is himself shown to be made; the work by which he would manifest himself as author is also a work against the one he is. The work also lets language speak of itself, giving voice to language in that narrative voice which no longer belongs to any unifying narrator. Thus, the act of writing likewise allows no author to be produced once and for all; its work is also an unworking – of the instrumental account of language, and of the conception of the author as a user of instruments.

Before the work, the writer is nothing yet. And after it – a writer no more. And during the work? The writer is also one who does not write, and feels the murmuring resistance of language. Who cannot link language to the act of his enunciation as writer. Then language, as Foucault comments, belongs to the OUTSIDE, to no previously constituted interiority. The point of enunication is no longer the ‘I’, the writer, but the murmuring of language that has abandoned subject and substantive. Abandoned them, and evacuated the form of the author, just as it will be made in the tales to evacuate the form of the speaker.

Language speaks. Language gives itself to be experienced, but now in the absence of writer and speaker, and of reader and listener, for it is also the presence of language which addresses them, too. By way of signs, of signification, language is more than signs or signification. And though it is so in many ways, it is literature that knows itself (in some writers) to be the experience of this surplus, which means also the questioning of the authorial self, to the extent that the author is the desert across which the question ‘who?’ resounds without answer.

Then who is Blanchot, as theorist of this account of language, of literature, but also as the practioner of this same experience of language, of literature? Who is this theorist-practitioner, this practitioner-theorist whose fictional writings cannot be dissevered from his literary-critical and philosophical ones?

There is the Blanchot buried with his sister-in-law in the family tomb in Paris. And then there is the Blanchot peculiarly alive in his work – that ghostly writer almost entirely enfolded by the experience of writing, and who reaches us only when we, too, are enfolded by the experience of reading (by reading his work and by reading with him). The ghost who can meet us only when we, too, become ghosts, folds in that great expanse that language becomes when it issues OUTSIDE. 

We must think the two Blanchot’s together, just as he asks us to think together the Ulysses who completes his journey to Ithaca and that other, drowned Ulysses on the bottom of the sea. As he asks us to think what a relation to language as it is instrumental, giving itself to our will, and as it is experienced (in this new, special sense of the term – as Erlebnis, perhaps, rather than Erfahrung). The one and the other – each time the ne uter whose play cannot be reduced – even by Heidegger, who – complex argument – presumes the human being in its relation is in some sense that locus of this play.

Like Levinas, Blanchot gives another account of the genesis of human existence and the relation to being, such that it is possible for him to speak as Heidegger cannot of dying as the impossibility of possibility, indicating thereby another name for that ‘intermittent becoming’ to which the writer, for him is linked.

No longer, then, is possibility – understood ultimately in terms of what the human being is able to do – the measure of impossibility, deciding what can or cannot be thought. The possible – the ability to be able – is now thought to arise out of the impossible, to be emergent rather than given in advance. The given – the es gibt – is no longer thought in terms of what is given to a human being; the given is now the il y a that streams without subjects, without substantives, and from which subjects and substantives emerge. Isn’t it this difficult thought that Deleuze leads us to think with his account of pre-personal syntheses?

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. Or that reinvents the idea of relation, even as it becomes necessary to use such strange formulations as relation without relation.

How to write about Blanchot? As a philosopher? As a reader of literature? By tacking between the two, being neither one nor the other? By reinventing philosophy and literature, I would say, letting each become other to themselves, and perhaps in the way Blanchot claims happened between his work and that of Levinas. Not, now, in the name of an experience that might only be reached by mystical intuition, but by being overwhelmed by the claim of language, of being drowned like Blanchot’s ‘other’ Ulysses, and then rising, like Blanchot’s Ulysses-Homer to write the Odyssey as a story of his adventures. Of being drowned and surviving. Of dying and surviving dying, in that ‘intermittent becoming’ that is also an act of writing.

Once again. Another time. He is not a mystic, writing of a transcendent beyond. It is about matter he writes, and by way of matter, materiality – language. By unfolding language such that it cannot be measured by the position presumed by the personal pronoun – neither the ‘I’ nor the ‘you’ (as is presumed by certain dialogical thinkers).

He does not belong exclusively to literary writers or to critics of literature unless the OUTSIDE is understood as the ex-plication of language, that is, by way of some appreciation of the way Blanchot allies himself with some thinkers (Levinas on the il y a) or subtly distinguishing himself from others (Heidegger on language and being).

Blanchot’s work is also part of philosophical history. But even then it is a response to language that calls for a transformation of language, that carries him, and all of philosophy, into an experience of literature (and the other experiences of language that become important to him in his work). It is necessary to read him as a writer of fiction. But also as the one who carries out those ‘literary acts’ that encounter Levinas’s account of the relation of the Other. Of the essayist for whom the everyday is of paramount importance, and who writes, too, of gossip and rumour as presenting us with an experience of the OUTSIDE.

And what of his political interventions? His work is not an allegory of his adventure as a journalist on the Right in his early years; writing Thomas the Obscure ‘at night’ was an experience from which it took him some while to draw the consequences. But his later political activity on the Left is not the incidental supplement to his ‘activity’ as a writer.

The interhuman relation is also a relation to the OUTSIDE argues Blanchot with great patience. And to that extent, it offers us an experience of community, of a doubly dissymmetrical relation whose each term becomes Other. An experience of communism, too – albeit an uncommon communism, and one that exists alongside Marxism (alongside – or is it rather that from which the possibility of Marxism emerges?).

A kind of politics, then – and perhaps a kind of ethics, too. That means his work cannot be the exclusive focus of ‘Blanchot Studies’, however important it is to conduct that scholarly work that will allow his place as a thinker to become clearer. Some thinkers are rich enough not only to be contextualised by an account of their times, but to contextualise this account in turn (philosophers). Away with all historicisms … not, to re-emphasise, the patient, scholarly work that would reveal his place among French letters, but with the idea that this might be sufficient as a response to his work.

A plurality of approaches. Philosophical, literary critical, historical, all this. Of approaches – and not the romanticism that would claim Blanchot’s work cannot be written about. For there is a way of writing for others, Blanchot’s scholars, but also thinkers of all kinds, that permits of a kind of community of readers and writers, where the name ‘Blanchot’ is the index not of a particular individual, buried in a family grave, but of a watcher over the OUTSIDE whose vigilance (the vigilance of his work) we must, in turn, watch over, resisting historicism and psychologism, the fetishisation of his early politics, or the romantic appeal to the essential otherness of his work.

The Sphinx Within the Sphinx

The problem with symbolic art, says Hegel, is that its materiality is not adequate to the spiritual content it would attempt to express. But from a Blanchotian perspective, it is for this same reason that symbolic art is interesting, insofar as it points beyond itself not to the Idea that it would reveal via the work’s sensuousness, but, as it were, in the other direction: now it is that same sensuousness which affirms itself in its materiality – that is, as a universal empty of content.

From the classical art of the Greeks, where the work’s beauty answers to the life and practices of the community (Sittlichkeit); where message has achieved exemplary harmony with medium (the Idea being immanent in the Ideal), back to Egyptian art which presents in its opaque materiality what cannot be rendered formally; from philosophy, understood as the highest form of Absolute Spirit, through religion and to art, and then to the uncertain birth of art as it struggles to free itself from symbolisation: it is a materiality that struggles against form and which fascinates because of this struggle with which Blanchot is concerned.

The Sphinx is Hegel’s example of symbolic art. What Blanchot is after, as it were, is the Sphinx inside the Sphinx: a concrete universal – a universal concretised in matter that is voided entirely of what it might represent; a riddle lost in a riddle, that Oedipus does not solve when he answers ‘man’ to the Sphinx. This ‘other’ Sphinx attempts to struggle free of what Hegel supposed it to be attempting to represent, burrowing into the darkness of which it is made. It struggles – but this is not a flight into abstraction.

As with Bacon’s paintings, it struggles by means of what it might be supposed to represent; as it portrays the human, it also allows the human to become an adjective. The sculpture, the painting, wander in the corridors of matter, turning themselves from that light which would read them in terms of the form that is about to emerge. The form is blurred, and that is the point. Blurred – suspended – arresting the viewer’s gaze and drawing it into its darkness.

Do they put out our eyes? Rather, they draw them to what they cannot see, as if the whole of the eye were turned around and we gazed into the darkness of our heads. Or that we saw from our blindspot, blackness flooding outward from our pupils; in some sense, it is the condition of seeing that they allow us to see. The condition – but only if it is likewise an uncondition, revealing insofar as it conceals, losing light in darkness, all the way to the infinite.

The Negative Absolute

For Hegel, the Absolute is to be understood as the conceptual system which is contained by the phenomenal world as it develops and grants itself to human knowledge. Then the Absolute must be thought in its relation to the world, as well as the knowledge the human being has of this relation.

But with Blanchot, the Absolute is lost in the negative absolute, which is in no way to be understood as its dialectisable correlate. The phenomenal world is doubled; it becomes its own image. The absolute, now, is not the empty beyond Hegel criticised in the work of his precedessors; it is still given as an experience of the world, but of the world turned from the work, work turned aside from work and turned from the human being who would experience it. And turning the human being likewise aside. The ‘il’, the ‘it’, names the locus of this experience – the human being is doubled up, and, as double, each of us is joined to the work (no longer the determinable thing, the painting, the sculpture) as the double of ourselves. Joined at the level of a body without determination, as a life rather than the individuated life that was formerly enjoyed.

The work, then, as opposed to the painting, the sculpture. The stuff of which they are made – but not simply marble or paint. Matter as it struggles with form; Heidegger’s earth; lost substance, the absolute so negative it flees away from the light, drawing our gaze with it, and putting out our eyes. The Sphinx lost in the Sphinx, Bacon’s figures lost in their materiality, in the stuff of which they are made. And, too, showing us how our bland everyday might likewise we doubled – that the image of the world, as it falls outside what is recognisable or useful, comes forward in its mysterious density.

Coming forward, it permits of no disinterest; the viewer is implicated in what unfolds as the work and it means nothing without her. The work is a relation and not a thing; and the viewer is fascinated to the extent that it conveys to her not the living dynamism of what is ordinarily missed in the busyness of our lives, but to a dynamism of dying, of impersonal life – a negation of living immediacy that is never quite resolved, never lifted to a higher level.

Then dialectical movement is in some way stalled; glimmering darkly beneath the fnished work of art is what Blanchot calls the work, which draws the viewer’s gaze towards it all the way to fascination. With this word, Blanchot evokes the call of the singularity of the work, of the way in which it joins, in the viewer’s experience the excess of materiality over the binarism of matter and form, of the negative absolute as it flees from Idea and Ideal.

If Blanchot’s focus is on literature, it is literature become the lowest of arts – a literature made scarcely of words, but of words become things, like the great blocks in the desert. Now all of language is a riddle, and one which cannot be solved as Oedipus does by pointing to himself (the answer: ‘man’). The book is ruined in the work. Or the work is the ruin of the book, the desert that eats away the monument; the patience of blasting winds. And Absolute Spirit finds itself made continually to plunge into the past, to its earliest phases. All the way to when the first human beings appeared in the world, and, as they did so, bringing it to double itself, to wander in its own corridors.

The Preliminary Flood

No wonder, then, that the writer attempts to substantialise herself with reference to her books, to what she has made. She takes refuge in the finished even as the future opens uncertainly before her. It is never as an author that she can meet the work. For the work is the sacrifice of authorship, of all authority; it is postcultural, but only as it belongs to a time before culture – to the past as interruption, to the preliminary flood that is always about to return.

For the writer as writer, on the other hand, her position is never established; the books she has written are not yet the work. who is she? No one at all, if identity is to be understand in terms of what can be achieved. And the writer, if this names the one who holds the place of ‘no one’, of the ‘il’, the it, as this names the relation to the work in its worklessness, that is, as it cannot be produced or brought to the light.

Then the writer is linked to a past in which she, as the ‘il’ undergoes the experience of fascination in which she becomes wholly a writer. A past, then, that does not belong to the linear succession of time. A past that returns as the ‘to come’ which never arrives in time. A past, and a future which fall outside what can be directly narrated. This is what returns in the symbol and in the experience of writing as it is engaged by a materiality that fascinates.

The indefinite and the opaque; the concrete universe or the particular made abstract; the bad infinite of sensuousness; the doubling of the world: these are all names for what is experienced by the writer in her relation to the work. A relation that is without relation in the sense that its terms are each turned from themselves, the ‘I’ to the ‘il’, the finished book to the incompleteable work.

Existing wholly as writer, fascinated, the writer does not write a line. Only as she is drawn towards authorship, as she re-emerges into the light, do words appear on the page. Activity is also required if a book is to substitute itself for the work; fascination does not claim the author altogether. The writer, here, is a name for the ‘il’, the author for the ‘I’; the work which fascinates can never be realised in a completable book. But this means the writer as writer can never be done with desire. Writing is a task that is infinite. Fascination always returns to plunge the author into the uncertainty of the work.

The Work is the Measure

The same experience for the reader, to whom the work reaches through the book. But what kind of reader is this? The one drawn to reread a book without knowing why. To be held into the work. To become the double of all readers; to be read, in turn, by the book. And the one who refuses to let go of reading in the hermeneutic move – to demand that account be rendered, to ask the question ‘why?’ of the work, or ‘what?’ without letting them resound without answer.

The work is the measure, and it measures through the book, but by way of the book. By way of nothing other than its sentences, its paragraphs. By nothing other than character, than dialogue, than plot. But only as each is drawn to let speak the voice of the work, a narrative voice that cannot be reduced to the details of a story. For there is a hidden recit in even the most imposing novel. The work would speak of itself. The work, and by way of what speaks in the book. This is what fascinates. It is what goes out to meet the reader as the measure of reading. The rising waters of the flood; the annihilation of the world.

Language speaks of itself as the work. Matter speaks in the sculpture, the painting, the piece of music. Of itself, and only itself, without content. Language and matter-form are doubled. That there is language; that there is matter and form – this is what resurges in the work.

Discretion

Can it mean anything to speak of the authenticity of the writer (of the writer/author)? What does it mean to live in conformity with writing? Perhaps the reserve of the work, its withdrawal or discretion might be doubled in her own reserve, her own discretion. She might resist interviews and publicity photographs; she might prevent herself being caught in the scholarly industry, and resist offering her assent to particular interpretations of her work. There must be some kind of withdrawal, some disquiet about emerging as the author – or of privileging the author in the conjunction writer/author that she ‘is’.

I think of Blanchot here, of course; but isn’t something similar marked in Palace Brothers/Palace Music/Palace Sountracks – the very change of name resisting the stablisation of any particular authorial identity? And what about Smog, that become (Smog) and then plain Bill Callahan? Above all, in the realm of music, Jandek, Jandek above all …

The writer is also a reader. What might it mean to live in conforming with the doubling of reading (of the reader of the book/the reader of the work) in what Blanchot would call its neutrality (that is, insofar as this doubling cannot be undone, ne uter: neither one nor the other)? Another kind of withdrawal, another discretion. No longer the demand ‘why?’ or ‘what?” no longer the attempt to render account. No longer the presumption that hermeneutics is a tool rather than a moment in which the book offers itself to meaning even as it plunges, in the same moment, into the work.

Watching Corwood on Jandek, anger at the journalist who presumed to track him down. On a hot afternoon in Houston, she confronts him (that is the word: confront) asking him if he is Jandek. He won’t speak of it, he says. He tests her: how does she know his music? She tells him she saw his records in a certain record store. He nods. Yes, he knows the store. And then asks her if she drinks beer, and they go to a bar, and he speaks of everything but Jandek: how beautiful! everything but.

Allergies and food, movies, his job … but he will not speak of Jandek. And she, the journalist, the one attempting to render account is looking only for this. Long silences when she asks. He won’t speak. Let the work speak instead. The work through the records. But the journalist is deaf to the work. She finds his disappearance much more interesting than what he has done. Without realising that disappearance – the refusal to play live (until recently), to be interviewed, to give information about himself – belongs to the work and to the movement of the work.

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 in Waiting 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.  

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 its tone. 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 Beyond meditates 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.

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 young child; 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 the impersonal 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.

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?

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’s récits 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 Disaster where 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 this time, 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 the a 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 in The 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?

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 his récit, 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 récit consists 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.

An idea can also have a kind of life. An idea – escaping, now, the psychologism or the historicism that would confine it to a peculiarities of a life, or to an historical context – and that even contextualises those contexts in turn: an idea from which you live, and to which you owe duty.

Isn’t this the way to read the biographical data Blanchot allowed to printed on his books? ‘Maurice Blanchot, novelist and critic was born in 1907. His life is entirely devoted to literature and to the silence unique to it.’ Isn’t this the first way in which one should understand his life? But I suppose the idea that contextualises a life must also be contextualised: it is necessary, too, to trace its origins, even if, as it comes to itself, it slips back before it and runs ahead of it: even if, as idea, it begins to live its own life and to impose its own imperatives.

Blanchot himself gives the clue in the little text Les Recontres, where he sets a few names aside one another: Levinas, Bataille, Char, Antelme, in terms of the friendship with whom the course of the idea might be understood. This is not to say the idea is unoriginal, or that it was formed in collaboration: it is more complex than that, for what drew him to each of these men was also the idea, even as it sought to give form to itself, to live.

With Levinas, the reading of Heidegger, and the negotation of his thought. With Bataille, ideas of communication, transgression and experience: each friendship must be understood in the context of the destiny of an idea. Imagine that: isn’t it what it means to live deliberately: to be caught by an idea, to be claimed by it, and to let it lead you into friendships and perhaps through them, as Breton discarded certain Surrealists from the fray. The idea can exhaust a friendship. Move on, move away. It must burn between us, the third, or we are nothing.

Of course, with Blanchot, it is still more complex, for the third is the exploration of the conditions of the genesis of the idea in friendship. Then it is friendship itself that is at issue in his friendships; it is the third term. Just as it is community that is at stake whenever Blanchot allows enters into political life. And it is literature – writing – that is the third term whenever he writes. Each time an experience – each time a kind of test that friendship, community and writing must endure.

Does he live for an idea? His life is not his life because of that idea. It is more than him – or less. And to its demand he responds wholly, making a gift of his life, giving his life to silence. But a gift that is not quite a self-sacrifice – that isn’t only the result of a deliberate will. What effort did it cost him not to be photographed or interviewed, or not to meet researchers interested in his work? Perhaps very little. Perhaps it barely bothered him. Nevertheless, each time, it was the conditions of his work that mattered. His work, his life – the gift he was given: the idea. The gift he could give: his life – but only as it had already been caught and implicated by the idea.

Who doesn’t want to live for an idea? To blaze with certainty? I am only certain in the mornings: then, for an hour or so, I have a fanatic’s zeal. It is beautiful, even if in the rest of the day I am a  husk. Could I say I was in the grip of an idea? – that an idea had reached me? Later, on, as the day tilts towards evening, I will say: I’ve never had an idea, not one. Slightly earlier, in the afternoon, I might say: its was his idea, not mine. And earlier than that?

Is there really a kind of research that is literary, or at least writerly, where it matters not only what is said, but that it is said, and in a particular way? In The Unnameable, Beckett allows him to name narrators of his previous books, and not only in the Trilogy, as if he had always been following a single path: Malone, Molloy, Moran, but also Watt. And Blanchot’s récits seem to recall one another, and to follow on from one another, in a single trajectory. What is being sought, and by what means? Or rather, what seeks itself, and by way of what kind of sacrifice?

To wake in the morning carried by what was begun the morning before; to rely on writing, to lean back on it: isn’t this the dream? And to have spent the previous evening enjoying the glow of what had been written before, as though, after an adventurous youth and prosperous middle age, there was time to dwell in the satisfaction of what had been achieved. Or that the evening was also a time of work, and this a way to combat tiredness: to open morning in the evening, or at least to experience as promise what is ordinarily a gradual shutting down, a kind of coming to death. A morning that remembers itself in the real morning to come; rebirth both times – to be born again in both cases, living again through writing what was once lived in life.

The gods thought the ascetic Shiva was still too inexperienced to have renounced the world. Had he really tasted the life of a householder? Did he know the joys of marriage and fatherhood? so Shiva let himself be born into a human body; he lived, married, rose children and then, in time, died like any other mortal. But a whole life on earth is an eyeblink in heaven; and when he opened his eyes, the other gods bowed in veneration and went away. Truly Shiva was above temptation; truly he had come to the end of life, and lived beyond it. Then he closed his eyes again in meditation, already dead to life, already living beyond life.

Then is writing like Shiva, closed eyed and meditating on itself, only on itself, even as this ‘itself’ comes apart, even as it disperses itself to the farthest corners of the universe? All that remains is desire, a kind of impersonal movement that gathers itself from the disparate. So will writing, like the universe, move on. But writing is not life, but a kind of death, wherein everything that was lived returns again, but in a new form, and as though under glass. Yes, writing is always the subject of writing – and its object, too. As though writing only sought to return to itself, to that dispersal in which it is lost anew, even though, as its condition, it first has to construct an effigy in the form of a narrative, a kind of wicker man it then has to set aflame.

That is why I prefer to all others narratives that come close to the condition of writing – their own condition, but simultaneously, their own uncondition, since it disperses what narrative would hold apart, and disperses it as it is held together. A writing, then, that places form at stake, and whose content is always voided. How is that such narratives have always seemed to have begun before, to have attempted to tell themselves a thousand times? And that their narration is an attempt not only to reach us, but to reach themselves, to join the past they would recount to the future that will let them live? Cursed narratives, or narratives which seek to undo, by narrative, the narrative curse: how will they shake themselves from the linearity on which they seem to depend?

I once saw, on a tropical island (X.’s island), a wave roar up that held in its cross section large fish, facing in a single direction, suspended for an eternal moment before the wave broke. How to keep before it breaks such a form in a writing that takes itself as its own theme? The green wave broke, that is true, and the fish shimmered back out to another wave – I suppose they were big enough, strong enough, to hold themselves thus: but how to find a topic that would also survive the irregular waves that pass through narrative, and hold itself there, a form quivering in the formless?

Perhaps it is not strength that should be sought, nor size, but a kind of filigree delicacy: a net whose filaments would let the wave pass. Is this what happens in the second half of Blanchot’s Death Sentence, where a series of events are recounted that seem to reverberate as though shaken equally by the return of the ‘push’ of narrative, of writing’s return to itself? A series of events, of unimportant events, but important for that they concentrate what would otherwise be lost by that return. Did it take strength to write them? Or, as I imagine, a kind of sublime carelessness, a detached insouciance that let each event crystallise from the others, making a shimmering lattice, event linked loosely but surely linked to event?

Such a narrative is not written from divine caprice. Its lightness is the price of its engagement; what happens can only do so when seen, as it were, from the corner of the eye. And isn’t this the miracle, that separates Death Sentence from the last of Blanchot’s novels published in the same year, the turgid The Most High?

I will read neither narrative here, remembering, instead, what Thomas Carl Wall wrote about the former:

What the narrator recounts, and would like to end, are those things that distracted him: his seeing someone again whom he had forgotten even existed, his multiple dwellings, his strange and unpredictable moods (neither of which he takes very seriously), odd encounters with neighbours, comings and goings in and out of the rooms he and others enter enter by mistake […]

None of these things had anything to do with his important and consequential work as a journalist at the time of the Munich crisis[….] While the events of the war years are dead, these inconsequential happenings have managed to live on and remain undead and unrecorded by virtue of their insignificance.

They are of secondary, inessential, non-primary importance […] They are what happens when nothing happens, just as writing only happens when nothing happens.

Nothing happens. There is a kind of urgency to Blanchot’s telling, it is true, but there is also a lightness, even a neglect – I have already called it an insouciance – that seems to have lifted what is written from itself. But still, this is not the light, creative joy of the deity who creates one world and can then dance away to create another. The lightness in the details, that bears them, is not arbitrary.

There is effort here – a narrative effort, even as it becomes possible only in a kind of gliding, where disparate events seem to bring themselves together into something resembling a plot. An effort, perhaps, to let the narrative be engaged by what it will henceforward take on as its own necessity: the task of narrating what undoes the narrative, and breaks it apart. And yet the narrative holds; the wave rushes through the net.

Not a girl and a gun, but a man, a room – that’s how a story might begin. And end. As though that were the most important thing of all: a man on his own, in a room. As though it were through solitude that you reach the essential. Ridiculous, exclusionary myth, and besides, a man is not alone as soon as there is writing, and this is what men in films, in books, tend to do on their own, when they’re looking for the essential: they write.

Is this what is dramatised (is that the word?) in Blanchot’s The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me?

The opening lines: ‘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 exhausted your resources yet. 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 he 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.

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

How tempting to put on the seven league boots of the philosopher and take great leaps across the text, say, for example: 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 what endures in his place when he is claimed by the fascination with which writing is bound up, for Blanchot.

To say: yes, he is its condition of possibility, but 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: in the case, the condition, the uncondition of narrative, that which gives and withholds the possibility of telling.

And in this case, this ‘he’ is personified, he is granted a personality, even though, surely, he can be no more than the hinge of a relation, the way in which narrative relates to itself. A hinge – a figure – that detour narrative has to take in order to reach itself. He is no more than that, narrative’s proxy, the one who must be posited by narrative if it is to have a life.

These formulations are easily written – what is more pleasant than to feel you’ve leapt across the text, that in one leap, you’ve reached its end, having understood what took place there. Another temptation is to read this récit alongside others. Think, for example, of the passage a third or so into the récit:

"I spoke of you as a companion. Isn’t that a thoughtless word?"

"I might be your companion? Whom did you say that to

"To myself, while I was reflecting."

"I don’t think I’m behind that word, I think you shouldn’t use it."

And so on. But Thomas of Thomas the Obscure also has a companion, doesn’t he? And isn’t it possible to lay the récits in a single line, to claim there is a movement of literary research that bears Blanchot from one tale to another? Perhaps. But the strangeness remains; the work of reading is, with this text, forever peculiar. Perhaps it’s only possible to approach such a text crabwise, with a specific question in mind.

This one, for example: how is it the companion can speak? How is it he has a personality assigned to him? Perhaps because he is also part of the narrator; he lives from his life, he draws from his strength like a parasitic twin. Or, then, like a time-shadow cast not by the light in front of an opaque object, but what throws its shadow ahead of itself, reaching the future from a past that never existed.

You and the companion are not contemporaries; he haunts you from a time you cannot inhabit. But he haunts you from ‘within’ you; he is only you, or part of you – as if Jesse had survived within Elvis, or Philip K. Dick’s sister within him. ‘Within’ you, but rather that in you that is absorbed by dying, fascinated by it, turning its face to the past in which dying already occurred.

This is what most narratives fail to uncover, and it is what the field of narratology fails to acknowledge: time unjoins itself, it is already division, difference, being inhabited by its own absence. At once, we are each able to be able, and each of us unable; at once, possibility is higher than actuality, and we live the present by way of what will happen in the future, and impossibility is higher than possibility, and it is the past that returns in the future: our prior death, our incessant dying: what sober phenomenology can be made out of this? What philosophy?

Comparing Blanchot to Levinas, Bataille claims the former cries the ‘there is’; for the latter, it is only an object of discussion. How, then, to respond to Blanchot? To cry in turn? And might blogging occupy that shadowy place in which discourse and cry become indiscernible? But then why does Deleuze, alert to all the questions I have raised, feel able to write about death and dying, Chronos and Aion, in The Logic of Sense? And shouldn’t one ask what becomes of what resembles a work of philosophy by Derrida in which the récit is in question (Counterfeit Money)? But I’ve leap far beyond the book, and the reading of the book, and so many of its mysteries remain unexplored.

I sought, this time, to approach it: isn’t this what I want to say? ‘I couldn’t go any farther’: isn’t it this? ‘I’ve had enough; I’m at the end of my strength.’ And then the book, patient of my approaches, laughing at them, soliciting them, says, ‘But you’re not.’

Somewhere, Deleuze says he dreams of accounts of thinkers which emphasise only their most fundamental concepts. But how difficult to find your way to that simplicity! Nevertheless, I will risk simplification by claiming that Blanchot’s thought, his writing, his life, is concerned with a problem concerning the notion of relation.

A problem that he pursues through his novels and récits, his literary criticism and his more cultural-theoretical and philosophical works. A problem, too (‘let us enter into this relation’) that makes itself felt in the fragmentary works and in the late works – the letters, occasional writings and other miscellany of Blanchot’s old age. And it is as pressing, too, in his political interventions.

Relation, then. Relation – an untustworthy Latinate term, that Heidegger, for example, cannot bring himself to use. A word from a degraded lexicon, which has already carved up the world into subject and object – themselves determinations of the Greek hypokeimenon, which meant, with Aristotle, so much more, and, according to the history Heidegger traces in ‘Age of the World Picture’ was translated subject (that which is thrown under) before subject swapped places with what was called object and came to name, after Descartes, the human being as the measure of all things.

Then the problem of understanding the relation between subject and object – the great epistemological problem – does not reach into the more complex whole Heidegger calls being-in-the-world; no surprise that it is an investigation of Aristotle that led to the composition of Being and Time: that it is the Greeks who constitute a bulwark against the incursion of the Latins. So Heidegger would come to draw more and more on the Greeks to make sense of the present. Recall his comments from the Heraclitus lectures of 1943: there’s no such thing as Greek religion. Religion – ugly, latecoming term; and couldn’t one also say that for Heidegger, as for the Greeks, that there is no such thing as relation?

I begin with Heidegger remembering the intellectual shock reading Being and Time was for the young Blanchot. But I think it may also be important to remember Rosenszweig too, not because his account of the relation between God and the human being, the relation of address, was a direct influence on Blanchot, but because it was The Star of Redemption that Levinas, who read Being and Time alongside Blanchot, encountered with such excitement.

Recall the preface of Totality and Infinity: the influence of Rosenszweig is omnipresent in Levinas’s great work. The address of one human being to another – the silence of the Other face to face with the ‘I’ repeats the address of God to the human being for Rosensweig. What matters is that this address is a relationship which keeps its terms apart: there is no fusion, subject does not become object; the Other is not assimilable to the Same.

This is what is meant by the appeal to height. The Other is, like God, the Most High, because the address reaches the ‘I’ from without. Whence the recourse to the extraordinary formulation, rapport sans rapport, a relation without relation, that is not mediated. Significant that it is upon this relation that Blanchot focuses, altering its sense, in his long discussion of Totality and Infinity in The Infinite Conversation.

Blanchot’s other great friend, Bataille, was also vitally concerned with the notion of relation. Subject and object do not fuse in what Bataille calls experience – this is what is distinctive about his atheological mysticism: the terms of the relation are kept apart, although it must also be said that they scarcely subsist as terms. The subject in glissement has come apart from itself as term; its sliding belongs to a movement which cannot be completed; the object will not be reached. rather, it reaches the ‘I’ of experience what draws it into its errancy, its sliding.

Nothing is mediated – extraordinary that atheological mysticism has this in common with Blanchot’s characterisation of Jewish mysticism. No mediation – and no confusion of terms. But when they meet in December 1940, Bataille having already begun to assemble the fragments that will comprise Guilty, Inner Experience and other works, Blanchot has already completed a manuscript which contains his own very distinctive account of relation. Thomas the Obscure, the novel with which he struggled for a number of years, writing it at night whilst working as a journalist by day, was published in 1941.

It cannot be emphasised enough that the central notions of Blanchot’s thought arrived more or less intact with the publication of that novel. Friendship, relation, the ‘other’ night, the ‘other’ death: it is all there, all at once, and this is remarkable. And it is all there in a work of fiction – this is something that requires lengthy meditation. Of what would literary research consist? What does it mean to think by literary writing?

In the years in which he wrote Thomas, Blanchot had drifted apart from Levinas – it took the advent of the war to bring them closer together, Blanchot taking Levinas’s wife and daughter to the safety of a monastery. Nevertheless, reading the short tales Blanchot wrote in this period, it is striking how close they were to Levinas’s early On Escape, and to the seminal Existence and Existents, begun in the work camp where Levinas was kept prisoner.

What was it that passed between Blanchot and Levinas when they studied together, when they read Being and Time together, and when Blanchot introduced his friends to contemporary literature? I have a photograph taken of the two young friends in my office, and wonder still how was it they came up with such extraordinarily rich notions.

But note, once again, that Blanchot introduced his ideas in his fiction – there first of all. In a letter written to a German critic in the 1970s, Blanchot emphasises that was in his fiction that his ideas came to him. Writing fiction taught him; he learnt by writing: then his literary criticism, his philosophical writings must be explored, as Michael Holland has advocated, from the perspective of his fiction (would that I had done this!). Bataille, comparing Levinas and Blanchot’s account of the il y a, the ‘there is’, argues that the latter cries what the former only discusses.

Thomas has a double, a companion, who undergoes experiences in his place. And Thomas will also speak – presumably allowing his name to name this obscure companion – of undergoing an experience in place of any and all human beings. Dying – the infinite movement towards the end: Thomas, or the ‘other’ Thomas, is the locus of this experience.

He dies in our place, each of us. He is there where we are not. Scarcely a locus, then, but a kind of nothingness. Scarcely an experience, but an event none can endure. Nevertheless, Thomas is also us; the ‘other’ Thomas is also Thomas, being bound to him by a relation that is distinct from that which secures for us a world, and a place in the world. 

Security, place – these depend upon the power and the possibility particular to human existence; here Blanchot is like Heidegger and Hegel in presuming it is in action that one discovers human existence – that opening to the world that is also an opening of the world, its blooming forward for one who is always outside him- or herself, always ecstatic.

Being in the world, as Heidegger calls it, underlies any particular account of the relation between subject and object. Relation, then, is built into the human being from the start – the human being, as existing, is always outside itself, always in the world – the very notions of interiority and exteriority have to be rethought. Then all scepticisms have been overcome; epistemology has to be set back into an encompassing ontology, whose method is that phenomenological unfolding of the existence proper to human beings Heidegger unfolds in Being and Time.

Presumably, the word relation, for him, would belong to the epistomenological endeavour that is now displaced from its primacy for philosophy. If ontology is now called fundamental, it is orientated towards breaking through to what matters most for philosophical reflection, but also for human life: the being of beings.

Perhaps it was this that so shocked the young readers of Being and Time: our world was as though doubled: on the one hand, our pragmatic engagement with the world, overcoming the intellectualism that had understood our relation to things on the basis of theory. On the other, being as it was given in the absence of the pragmatic, in that fundamental mood in which the world presented itself divested of my interest – bare, naked, detached from my powers, my possibility, it was the sense of finitude that accompanied what Heidegger called the nothing.

Being, the nothing: these words, in their near equivalency announce what is vouchsafed to the human being who is aware that he or she will die. And in this awareness, already the sense that the world is given to us twice over: there is what we can do, and what reaches us by way of what we cannot do. There is the measaure of power, the ability to be able (Sein-konnen), and then what measures that measure.

Being and Time, above all, is not a pragmatism; phenomenology leads all the way to what is most concealed; ontology bears upon what is fundamental to all ontology. And the human being, Dasein, is led to that point where it is divested of its powers, its possibilities. Higher than actuality, says Heidegger, reversing Aristotle, is possibility; but higher than possibility – challenging it, contesting it, is the impossibility of possibility, that is, death.

But Heidegger will allow for a kind of retrieval to occur, for the confrontation with mortality to allow the human being to retrieve itself as itself, to attain its propriety, its authenticity. Thus the impossible has become, in a sense, possible; death is now something that admits of a kind of relation – a being towards death, as the English translation has it; a being for death. I will die – but meanwhile, there is the world that is given to the one who experiences the chance of this death. The one, now, who lives resolutely towards death, who does not seek to evade it.

Blanchot does not permit this chance. No authentic existence for Thomas, whose existence is more precarious. Thomas dies in our place – but the notion of dying is now, as for Levinas, as for Bataille, divested of it sense as the end of life. Dying reaches us, or intimates itself, in the most ordinary suffering, says Levinas, writing in a work camp. Dying is experience, atheological mysticism, writes Bataille, who takes long bicycle rides in this period, in the countryside of occupied France. Dying, as Blanchot seems to conceive it, is just that powerlessness, that impossibility, that comes to overwhelm the human being. And now Thomas is there, the ‘other’ Thomas, in our place. The companion endures what we cannot.

In a sense, Blanchot’s conception of dying needs less context than I have given here. Think of Hegel: the subject posits itself in what differs itself – that is, as object, before it retrieves itself as subject. That is, it posits itself in self-alienation as an object before it retrieves itself, and alienation and objectivity, at least for the moment are annulled. New alienations arise; and hence the new need to throw itself out of itself and draw itself back in order to overcome diremption.

A process that Hegel will allow can be compared to death, negation, and to life, sublation. One lives by dying; life involves death, absence, negativity: isn’t it the sense of a diremption that cannot be overcome to which Blanchot is pointing? A diremption, now, that involves the substitution of the first person ‘I’ for the third person ‘it’ as the locus (if that is the word) of experience. The ‘other’ Thomas is a dying that cannot be overcome.

But it is here that Heidegger can offer assistance. Doesn’t he write of suspension in What is Metaphysics?: isn’t Dasein no longer itself at the moment when it comes before the nothing? Bare, disinterested – but then Dasein, like Hegel’s subject, can nevertheless return to itself – it can draw this experience of finitude back into its life, and live from it. Such is authentic existence. The ‘other’ Thomas cannot be re-integrated into our ordinary lives. But how, in this case, is this dying Thomas, this ‘it’ joined to each of us? What is the relation between the first and third person, between Thomas and the ‘other’ Thomas?

Blanchot cries the ‘il y a‘, the ‘there is’, according to Bataille; Levinas only writes it. Perhaps one could make a similar point of Heidegger’s Being and Time – it does not let cry the experience of anxiety, as does, for example, Bataille’s Inner Experience (anguish, though, is not equivalent to anxiety …) The cry is not extra-linguistic, as though there were an experience simply outside language, but must pass through language itself. Isn’t this what literature, or at least Blanchot’s fiction, would achieve?

Blanchot takes fom Hegel the centrality of language (the linguistic turn – in 1807!). No experience is immediate, but is always linguistically mediated. Then the paradigm of the movement of the subject into its self-alienation is always also a linguistic alienation. Is there a kind of writing, a speech, that cannot be reclaimed by the subject? A language in glissement, language wandering, language ‘itself’, unbound from the powers and possibilities of human existence. This is the ‘other’ ecstasis – the one that draws author and reader into relation with what cannot be brought back to the world.

(Who writes? Who reads? Locus of language as it relates to itself. Locus of a relation that lives its tautology in the life of the writer, of the reader. Language itself; the same: you write, you read as a node of its self-relation, its auto-affection. It returns to itself; it streams through you, returning to itself through your life, and by voiding your life. Are you alive? It lives in your place. Lives by your dying; lives as you becomes the voided figure, no one at all, anyone at all, who writes, who reads without being able to.

It began with what you could not do, with incapacity. Began with the ‘other’ ecstasis, as language pressed back against you, who would use it to speak your mind. Errant speech, detour: now the path that searches for itself in your wake. Now the method that crosses itself out, language out over eighty thousand fathoms, language seeking itself and returning to itself, and through you, through what you write.

You had an idea – no, an idea obsessed you, claimed you and overtook you. Until to live forward was to live what sought to return to yourself through your life, through the sacrifice of your life. To die – for nothing. Dying – for nothing. The great arc of which you are part; the return that draws darkness around you and asks you to begin what you are incapable of beginning. And then it calls on another ‘in’ you; the companion comes forward to begin in your place.

He is here, and I am not. He is there, on the other side of the mirror. My weakness is his strength; higher than possibility is his impossibility. How does he survive there, where it is impossible to begin? Dispersed one, silent one, he comes close only when my hands drop by my sides, when I can do nothing. He is there – but is he there? By what relation is he drawn to me? By what suspending of relation?

I think I can only write of him. But I cannot write. And isn’t that the test of writing: to begin with what you cannot do. To write as writing fails.)

But is this ‘other’ ecstasis solely the preserve of literature? Is it only in literature that language wanders? Is Inner Experience literarature? Is Thus Spoke Zarathustra? What kind of boundary can be drawn between philosophy and literature, between the theoretical and the literary? Can Totality and Infinity be read as literature? Can The Star of Redemption? What work of philosophy can tolerate the alienation of writing – the written marks that may well outlive me – such that they cannot be reclaimed by their author? What philosopher can tolerate a writing that cannot be reclaimed? I don’t know how to answer these questions, except to say that with Bataille, as with Nietzsche, there is certainly an author who does not seek to draw back what he writes in his own name.

What might literary research mean? What path of inquiry might be specific to literature? What can be sought by literature, and discovered by it? Is it more appropriate to think of a literary research – a research that proceeds through an experience of language, via language ‘itself’ rather than literature per se? What is at issue when the word writing, bare and simple, is allowed to accompany the word literature for Blanchot in the 1960s? Difficult questions, but pressing all the same.

I think relation is this the red thread that runs through Blanchot’s work. That allows it to achieve its extraordinary effects. Let me say straightaway that I have only sketched what an exploration of relation here; I’ve said nothing. But couldn’t I also say that it was that notion of relation that has obsessed me here at the blog for some time, and that has allowed me to achieve what paltry effects of which this writing has been capable?

I wonder (another tangent) whether it is possible to narrate the life of an idea – or that a life might be understood in terms of an idea. Do not seek to account for Blanchot’s thought in terms of the times in which he lived, its upheavals, its challenges. Perhaps it is the notion of relation (is it a relation?), of literary research (is it a method of exploring relation? – a method: but that’s the wrong word) that lives in his place. But how to write of what is found by that seeking, my that movement of writing? How to write of what is found by writing, so that it becomes a cry and not a discourse?

Article at Atopia.

The Wake

Set the controls for the heart of Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure (new version). A few rough and laborious notes to accompany a reading of the penultimate chapter of his novel. These follow on from a previous post.

Thomas finds Anne perfect in death, her eyes closed, her mouth unsmiling. No trace of life; she does not appear to sleep. She only resembles the one she was; death has unleashed a strange mimetic power. In one sense, the corpse is not Anne; it does not resemble the one she was in life. But in another, it has allowed Anne to resemble something that is not-Anne; it is as though death becomes real through her, and as it does so, her body seems to become larger, occupying more space in the room. The corpse absorbs the gaze of everyone around it.

Soon Thomas is left alone with the body. Night has come; he is surrounded by stars.

The totality of things wrapped about me and I prepared myself for the agony with the exalted consciousness that I was unable to die.

Where death is, you are not. And where you are, death cannot be. To Thomas it has been revealed that he cannot die; he seems to have partaken of Anne’s nothingness to have been touched by her corpse such that he himself dies. A death, of course, that has been enacted many times in the earlier chapters of the novel.

But, at that instant, what she alone had perceived up until then appeared manifest to everyone: I revealed to them, in me, the strangeness of their condition and the shame of an endless existence.

Who is this ‘everyone’? Thomas, after all, is alone. To whom can he reveal anything? He seems to imagine a whole crowd around him. Thomas is imaging the others for whom his strange immortality is manifest.

Of course I could die, but death shone perfidiously for me as the death of death, so that, becoming the eternal man taking the place of the moribund, this man without crime, without any reason for dying who is every man who dies, I would die, a dead person so alien to death that I would spend my supreme moment in a time when it was already impossible to die and yet I would live all the hours of my life in the hour in which I could no longer live them.

The death of death, but not its cancellation; the unlimiting of the limit; death become dying, an interminable dying. Thomas takes the place of the always guiltless dying – who die through no fault of their own, and must endure the impossibility of ever bringing death to an end. This experience will henceforward bear his life, even if he cannot be said to undergo it in the first person.

Thomas is dead – but that ‘is’ indicates a self-relation that has slipped out of phase with itself. A relation now, we learn at the threshold of the soliloquy, that Thomas stands in for each of us. Then Thomas is not only a character in a novel – he is not Mr Valdemar or the hunter Gracchus, but is each of us, all of us, substitute who undergoes what we cannot endure by ourselves.

What is Blanchot’s novel? A philosophical tract? A work of sung philosophy like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? Or a fiction in which philosophy, like Thomas, is made to struggle with its obscure double?

Continue reading “‘I Think Therefore I am Not’”

A few notes on one of the chapters of Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure (new version).

Anne is found one day, stretched out on a bench in the garden, already lapsing towards unconsciousness. She is ill; she’s dying, which she at first experiences as a kind of sweetness. She sleeps; the night holds no terrors.

The silence flowed, and the solitude full of friendship, the night full of hope …

Illness seems to be a kind of rest, the sweetness of sleep; Anne will return to the world. In these early stages, illness seems beneficient; she feels its friendship. But then her real illness begins.

… around her, many things were changing, and a desolate climate surrounded her, as if gloomy spirits sought to draw her toward inhuman feelings. Slowly, by a pitiless protocol, they took from her the tenderness and friendship of the world.

Anne rests in a room barely reached by the sun. Her mother sits beside her in an armchair. Hours pass in silence. When Anne attempts to speak to her mother, asking if she had been swimming, her mother tells her to be quiet. Anne must not talk; she’ll tire herself.

Obviously, there were no confidences to be shared with a person about to die, no possible relationship between her and those who are enjoying themselves, those who are alive.

She has been removed from the world, and from those relations with others that pass by way of the world.

Yet, surrounded by hardness, watched by her friends who tested her with an air of innocence, saying, ‘We can’t come tomorrow, excuse us,’ and who then, after she had answered in true friendship, ‘That’s not important, don’t take any trouble’, thought, ‘How insensitive she is becoming; she no longer cares about anything'[….] Soon they would be saying, ‘She’s no longer herself, it would be better if she died’, and then: ‘What a deliverance for her if she died!’

Her composure is unwelcome; she realises she must show a face of suffering, and present her visitors with ‘closed eyes’ and ‘pinched lips’. Only in this way will she assume take on the role for her friends, for her mother, of a dying patient. To speak to those around her in friendship only makes her appear insensitive; if she is to retain their support, then it must not appear that she’s other than herself. She is dying; she must play the role of the dying all the way up to dying. Only in that way will death seem not simply a deliverance.

Then this means she still wants to live – or at least not to be thought to deserve death as a blessed relief. It seems she wants the solitude of her new isolation, her separation from the world, feeling her way into its absence, and responding to its demands.

Continue reading “Let Us Sleep”