Category: Blanchot

There is a moment in the thought of many thinkers when a local insight is transformed into a more general one, and this creative transposition permits a transformation of a whole cluster of inherited philosophical ideas and problems. At what point did Blanchot transpose what he had developed in his reflections on literature to the interhuman relation? Perhaps as early as his first novel, Thomas the Obscure, for example, in the scene of Anne’s death, where she is aware of the significance (the non-significance) of her death for those around her.

This scene is already a presentation of what Blanchot would come to call community, in, for example The Unavowable Community, published nearly 50 years later. But this remains a fictional treatment of a topic that takes time to emerge in Blanchot’s theoretical work proper. It is not until much later, and in particular in the years following 1958, that he writes explicitly of the interhuman relation, and in a way very close to his account of the relation of both author and reader to the literary work.

What he lets himself call responsibility in some of his fictional work, referring to the relation in question, is carried over into what Blanchot would be reluctant to call the ethical and the political sphere. (But the story I am telling is too simple, passing over as it does the relationship between the composition of Thomas the Obscure and Blanchot’s period as a journalist of the extreme right, and passing over those essays in which Blanchot begins to reflect on the relation to the Other, notably in his reflections on Mascolo’s Communism in 1953).

But even this is not simply accomplished. In the notes he circulated concerned with his plan for an international review, he merely says the relationship between literary responsibility and Marxism is one to be ‘wrestled with’. But those are private notes, intended for circulation among the writers who were interested in the same project. In essays in the same period, and particularly in the lengthy negotation of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity reprinted in The Infinite Conversation, a kind of turn becomes explicit, and the question of the relation to the Other moves to the centre of Blanchot’s explicitly theoretical reflections.

The Passion of Determination

It is worth recalling some of the basics of Blanchot’s account of literature, as outlined in The Space of Literature in order to set this turn into context. To write, for one compelled to write, and write fiction, involves a struggle to determine, to round off a finished piece. The writer must form a story, or a poem; but this process of formation foregrounds the material aspect of the artwork in a particular way.

Matter does not disappear into form, nor indeed does it exist in an exemplary harmony with respect to it; rather, it is foregrounded, particularly in the modern work of art, until it overspills the formal determination granted to it by the author. The specifically modern artist, for whom the gods are dead, or at least absent, struggles with determination. This is what happened, on Blanchot’s account, to Holderlin; it was his greatness to hold himself into what has no contour, and to bring it into a poem.

For Blanchot, the poem, the fiction (récit) has, as its topic, exactly the passion of determination, in which the material aspect of the work of art looms forward in its indeterminability. It looms; it cannot be contained, but the way it does so for the readers of the literary work (but also, at least in Blanchot’s earlier writing, for the audience of other kinds of artistic work) doubles what has already occurred with respect to the author.

Nihilism

To write is to struggle, and this struggle tears apart the life of author as well as leaves its crack in the finished work of art itself. The influence of Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, delivered in the mid 30s, but not published until 1950, is clear; passages in Blanchot directly paraphrase Heidegger. But there are other influences; Bataille is paraphrased in the section on reading in The Space of Literature, and Levinas is a constant reference.

This does not mean Blanchot is derivative; the notions he draws from Bataille were ones he helped to formulate (recall Bataille’s description of their conversations in Inner Experience); and Levinas, it is clear, learnt a great deal about art from his friend’s essays and fictions. Finally, paraphrasing Heidegger’s essay is a way Blanchot can clarify his own position, which he arrived at all on his own some years earlier.

Occasionally (and I will provide citations on another occasion), the word responsibility appears in Blanchot récits, referring to the vicissitudes of its characters as they redouble that of Blanchot’s own authorship. This over and again in his fiction: the encounter with materiality, with the indeterminable, is staged in terms of the experiences of the characters, who, though not necessarily writers, are still brought into a condition analogous to that of the Blanchotian author.

This can lead the reader to wonder whether the récits are simply allegories of their own happening, repeating in what remains of plot and characterisation, the struggles Blanchot describes so eloquently and mysteriously in The Space of Literature. ‘No one here wants to be part of a récit’, says Claudia in When the Time Comes (this is repeated, as I remember, in Waiting, Forgetting). ‘No more récits, ever again’, says the narrator of The Madness of the Day.

And perhaps this is how they are meant, these récits, as though they were exhibiting an awareness singular to the modern work of art that knows its desolation, its abandoment. No récits – or rather, no récits that do not foreground the absence of possible stories, or the fact that all stories must bear upon the same absence.

Is this nihilism, then – a nihilistic storytelling, which can only narrate the impossibility of fictions, as though humanity had finally sobered up, and with these, Blanchot’s récits? Has Blanchot uncovered the condition of all storytelling and laid it bare at last in its nudity, its barrenness? Or does the ‘nothing’, the absence at the heart of the récit bring its author and its reader into contact with what is indeed terrible and terrifying, but also in some way liberating, as though the nudity of the récit had rendered the world, which is always too close to us, distant enough for us to discern what will never let itself be determined?

In the early theoretical writings, this seems enough; it is a kind of critique, Levinas says, of a whole tradition that links art to truth, up to and encompassing, Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. A kind of reversal occurs, where Blanchot’s fictions and critical practice show that literature and the work of art outbid any attempt to reclaim them in the name of truth, or of the institution of a people.

Critique

If the notion and practice of Blanchotian literature presents something like a critique of the cultural value accorded to the artwork, it still needs to be supplemented with an ethical philosophy, Levinas implictly claims. Blanchot disagrees, wanting to discover, as early as the essay on Mascolo, an ethial charge that is implicit in that same critique.

For the work of art, in revealing a relation to the indeterminable, seems in some way to prefigure an account of the relation to the Other, to the human Other, that is also indeterminable. Nothing is more other than the human Other, Blanchot will say on several occasions. A puzzling claim for readers of his work. How to read it? How to understand it, not simply as a break with what he’d previously thought, but as a way of repeating it anew?

It may seem Blanchot is making a claim similar to that of Levinas: the Other cannot be determined because the Other does not belong to ontology, that is, to what Heidegger would call the understanding-of-being. To write schematically, and without explaining these difficult ideas: the Other is ‘higher’ than I am; my relationship to the Other is, as Levinas says, asymmetrical because of this height. I come to myself precisely as I am awoken by the relation in question – I can speak in my own name, I can use language, only because I was first exposed to the silent presence of the Other.

All this is familiar in Levinas’s work. Let me move quickly: for Blanchot, although borrowing many of Levinas’s formulations, the presence of the Other is not what matters for itself so much as as a way of experiencing the indeterminability of language. That is, it is given as a kind of relay, as that direction from which a kind of speech would come.

For Levinas, such speech is thought as the silence of the Other, a mute address. For Blanchot, although there is a way in which the encounter with the Other suspends our familiar relations with the world, and can, in this sense, be called silent, this silence is bound to a kind of rumbling or thundering: it is at one with the material aspect of language foregrounded in the literary work of art.

Crucially, for Blanchot, speech is not bestowed by the silent presence of the Other. The Other has no authority; if the Other is ‘higher’ than me, it is only because of the thundering silence to which the Other gives issue, which I am always struggling to determine. For the most part, I am succesful; but there are moments when, Blanchot claims, this struggle becomes more difficult, and moves into visibility.

For Levinas, this is also the case; what differs, I think, in their work, is what both call the Other’s presence: for Blanchot, this presence is to be thought in terms of the thundering silence of speech; for Levinas as the silence presence of the Other that precedes speech. True, a kind of silence is at issue for both thinkers, but there is a difference in the status it is accorded in relation to language.

What matters for both thinkers is not what is said, but that it is said. Levinas captures this distinction in his later contrast between the saying, the address of the Other, which all language, whether spoken or written, is claimed to bear in Otherwise Than Being, and the said, which is to say, language in its ordinary understanding as that which conveys information. Blanchot borrows Levinas’s formulation to make a contrast between the language of the indeterminable, that is, the narrative voice that returns at the heart of the récit, and, once again, language understood as a tool, as a way of accomplishing communication.

This distinction can be made in many forms: for Blanchot, what is important is the fact of communication, that is, communicativity, not the communication itself (though Blanchot, following Bataille, will still use the word, communication). Or, once again, what matters is the ‘that there is language’, rather than what is said by means of a particular use of language.

Blanchot and Levinas share an emphasis on the importance of relation, and of the relation to the Other. Both think this relation in terms of the opening of language. But Blanchot, unlike Levinas, will allow this relation (which both qualify as being ‘without relation’, for reasons I will return to on another occasion) to resonate with that encountered by both author and reader as the work.

Obviously enough, a person can respond to you in a way a book, at least, cannot (though this would have to be rethought in the case of new media). As such, although Blanchot will use the same terms of literature and the relation to the Other, writing of dissymmetry (his version of Levinas’s asymmetry), height, the Other and so on, he must take into account the kind of interactivity at issue in the relation to the Other. 

How can he do this if he is to retain, as he wants to do, the sense of dissymmetry that he adapts from Levinas’s meditations on the Other? If he does not want to think the equality of human beings in terms of the symmetry, reciprocity or mutuality, how is he to retain the sense of the ‘height’ of the Other? By claiming that the unilateral and dissymetrical relation to the Other might be redoubled as the Other relates to me as the Other.

Double Dissymmetry

It is as though two books were taking turns to read one another in turn; each reads, then pausing to be read, and then reading again: this alternation is something like what Blanchot presents as the doubly dissymmetrical relation between two human individuals. Each becomes the Other in turn; the passion of determination is always switching sides.

This passage is prefigured by Levinas’s brief discussion of double asymmetry. Unlike Levinas, however, Blanchot will not introduce a notion of the ‘third’ in order to move from the ethical (the face to face) to the political (the dimension of justice and law). Community, for Blanchot, is to be thought in terms of the perpetual movement between the ‘I’ and the Other. The ethical and the political must be thought together (even if Blanchot will not talk of ethics or politics with respect to the experience in question).

I can become the Other for you, just as you can for me. By relating to you as the Other, I am already transformed, being in the same difficult position as Holderlin before the indeterminable reserve that he was able, according to Blanchot, to bring to writing. When I become Other for you, however, nothing need change for me; what matters is only that relation in which I am, as Blanchot writes, ‘close to death, close to the night’, for the other person.

Both of us, indeed, are ‘close to the night’; both of us, and by way of one another, share an experience that cannot be determined. But we share it as we each, in turn, ‘othered’ by the relation to the Other (that is, we undergo what Blanchot calls the terror of what cannot be determined in that relation), and as we become Other for the other person in turn.

(Blanchot will on occasion allow a kind of awareness on my part when I become Other. Anne, in Thomas the Obscure, is already aware of what her gift of death might mean for those around her. This is also the case for the dying J. of Death Sentence. I will return to this.)

Communism, Community

The notion of community is not explored at length in the reflection on Levinas. Indeed, it seems to fall away into the massive body of The Infinite Conversation, only resurfacing at long intervals. This is, frustrating for those who read this book in order to attempt to make sense of what Blanchot, in its preface, calls ‘the advent of communism’.

What is the relationship between community and communism for Blanchot?

(The phrase, ‘political responsibility’ should be used with caution, however, since Blanchot reserves this, at least in his notes on the International Review, for a reference to Marxism with which he wants to maintain a critical relation:

… there is an irreducible difference or even a clash between political responsibility, which is at once global and concrete (accepting Marxism as definitive of truth and the dialectic as a method of discovering it) and literary responsibility (which is a response to a demand that can take shape only in and through literature).

I will pass over this difference here, noting only that it was anticipated in the essay on Mascolo, and closely parallel the distinction Blanchot always wants to make between the two ‘slopes’ of literature.)

It is true, as Jean-Luc Nancy writes in The Inoperative Community, Blanchot’s notion of communism is never explicitly or thematically developed in his work. When, indeed, Blanchot responds to Nancy in The Unavowable Community, published late in his career, he once again writes elusively. But it is clearer than ever from this book that Blanchot sees the entirety of his career as involved in a rethinking of community, or communism.

He also leaves signs that the march in remembrance of those killed at the Charonne Metro Station as they protested against French brutality in Algeria, and Events of May 1968 are also to be rethought in these terms: each happens as community, as communism. In a contemporaneous essay on the intellectual, Blanchot will also allude to the drafting of the so called ‘Manifesto of the 121’, which call on those conscripted by the French army to desert.

Of course, Blanchot co-drafted the Manifesto, just as he participated, arm in arm with Marguerite Duras, in the Events and march alongside the ‘People of Paris’. And it was also Blanchot who dreamt up the idea of an international review, which was to be published in translation in several countries at once.

What happens when Blanchot’s writings are refracted through the prism of what he calls community? They shift slightly, or shimmer in a different way. Without having considered explicitly what is meant by communism, or by exploring the relationship between ethics and politics – the ethical and the political – in Blanchot’s writings, I will stop here, having simply cleared a path to a possible reading of his work.

Terror

Who better than Philip K. Dick has presented the terror of worlds that fall apart? In his most terrifying books, it is our world, the real one, that crumbles. Palmer Eldritch’s face in the sky – even here, in our world. The sign of the Fish which attests to the survival of the Roman Empire and to its secret resistants.

In Blanchot’s récits, the fictional world is, in a different way, subject to a wearing away, an erosion, which terrifyingly, seems to carry itself over to our real world. But now the face of Palmer Eldritch is everywhere, he looks at us from everything, and when we look in a mirror, his eyes look out from our own.

In the récits and the fragmentary writings, it is our world that is being presented – our world, but doubled; it is not just the field that opens itself to our grasp, but a great still opacity. And so it is with the narrators and protagonists: they, too, are doubled; their actions, their intensions are ghosted by what they cannot do and cannot have. Who are they, the ones who have lost their hold on life?

The setting of Blanchot’s fiction is mundane, the prose is calm; what is monstrous is what is made to present itself by way of that tranquility. True, there are sometimes sudden leaps – Judith dies in the narrator’s arms, J. is brought back to life – and moments where the prose leaps into a strange abstraction: words like fascination, image, return, are used as a telegraphic shorthand.

All this is odd enough, but Blanchot goes further still. What if the events of the narrative are not what matters at all – or rather, that what matters does so by way of them. In Death Sentence, the narrator says what is important is not what is told, but something else, as if the events of the book come to stand in for another happening, as though they sacrificed themselves to a greater demand.

The récit, Blanchot claims, bears upon its own happening, its own event. Indeed, the récit is just a name for this event, 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.

How difficult this is! But I will not take the long detour that would be required in order to make sense of this claim. Let me ask, more simply, about the demand of the récit, of Blanchot’s récits.

Fascination

For Blanchot, there is the faith in a kind of reading that sets you back from yourself, allowing an experience which does not have, as its measure, the ‘I’ of power and possibility. To read is to experience the ‘I’ as profoundly cracked; it is to open the fissure that, in truth, was always there, and which closed only as you, as a child, learned to speak.

For what comes with speech? The world is lifted from its hinges – or it seems to double itself; to speak is to speak of an ideal world, to know this table through the idea of a table. But then this table, the immediate, the here and now, is passed over in favour of the idea. Infancy, Blanchot says, is a time of fascination; the world is measureless, and does not hold itself at that distance that would allow it to be known (think of the boy Alexander in Bergman’s film, or of the very young children of Woolf’s The Waves).

But then comes the transition; language divides the speaker from what is spoken; this division is ideal, separating out what was joined to itself in the infant’s fascinated embrace of the world. Now comes the Fall. There is nothing immediate; or if it is experienced, it is as though in the past tense; it reaches me before me, or in that place where I am still an infant, where infancy continues to accompany me.

And it is because of that infant, that continual infancy, that I am cracked and always cracked. This is what I forget. But I am made to remember again (or, at least, the infant ‘inside’ me, the outside inside, wakes up). What carries itself over to my ordinary, everyday world is the chance of an alteration that would make the world fascinating again. Fascinating – but also terrifying, for the adult is frightened, unlike the child, of losing control.

And now each thing, like a comet’s head, bears a ghostly tail; the determinacy of the world is joined to the indeterminable; and it is as though space could at any moment give upon fascination and time upon the absence of time: themes explored at length in Blanchot’s The Space of Literature.

But there is something missing from this book that is not missing from his fiction, which I now I understand to roamed always ahead of his critical reflections, like a scout. Rereading Thomas, I shook my head: everything is here, already. Everything, and already developed.

Then Blanchot had to refind what he had found by literature in his critical writings. To refind it, and then to discover its philosophical stakes. This in dialogue with Levinas, who wrote beside him. Perhaps it is in the essays written in the wake of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, which bear on the status of the relation to the human Other, that Blanchot reaches theoretically what was already found and by way of his récits.

True, Blanchot’s fiction was always concerned with the relation to the Other, and in a startling way. What else at issue in the exchanges of the unnamed man and woman who are together and apart in the hotel room in Waiting, Forgetting?

Reading ‘The Sirens’ Song’, one might suppose these dialogues are only a way of allegorising or redoubling the happening of the récit. The relationships between the characters in Blanchot’s fiction would not matter so much as the relationship of the writer or the reader to the récit itself. Everything – plot, character development, the ‘interest’ of the narrative – would have been devoured by the black hole of the récit.

But this is misleading, as becomes clear when those récits are read alongside Blanchot’s insistence on the absolute singularity of the relation to the human other.

Conversation

‘Make it so I can speak to you’, entreats the young woman of Waiting, Forgetting. She wants the man who she is with for a single night to write, to record their conversation, to write about the anonymous hotel room in which they find themselves. He writes; she reads what he writes, but she’s not satisfied. They speak; he writes, but she does not believe she has spoken. It is his responsibility; he must help the one who came to his room when he made a sign to her from his balcony.

Sometimes she looks to him as one stronger than her; sometimes, it is clear she is stronger. Sometimes they are both weak, and their exchange becomes a litany. But he has been told, and more than once, what his responsibility is. And what of the narrator, who stands apart from both characters?

They are waiting for speech, all of them, but speech never comes. But what would it mean, speech? Is it analogous to what Blanchot will call the book to come – the way in which the artwork is never yet itself, as it recalls that infancy when the world becomes fascinating, when everything is made strange, and by way of the work.

Now the determinacy of the world is joined to the indeterminable, now there is the chance of an alteration that would let the world become fascinating. But the chance of that chance depends on the human other, and upon that communication that would reach the other. Not what is said – a determinable message, a clear communication, but the ‘that there is’ of communicativity, the saying that lets speak the indeterminable by way of the indeterminate; the ghostly tail that burns behind the world; the terror of the adult who has lost control of things. And this by way of the other, this shared – this ‘that there is’ of language, as it speaks by way of what is said. This is the narrative voice of the récit, which depends on the Other.

This is the voice that would resound for us, Blanchot’s readers. But it also figures itself as what speaks between the characters of his narratives . Between – and as a kind of background, a murmuring that each side of the dialogue encounters, and in his or her own way. But can it be called a dialogue, an exchange in which nothing is communicated?

Conversation, entretien, that which is held between, that which holds itself between: this is the relation that the reader should have with the récit. And it is the relation, too, that is held between those who speak in Blanchot’s récits. ‘Make it so that I can speak’: let speak in me what is held between us. Let speak that which burns behind all things, the fiery trail, the absence of the world in the world, and via what I say. What I say – what it says, this burning tail, this murmuring reserve that recedes as soon as speech is transcribed.

It speaks between them, the characters of Waiting, Forgetting, but speaks as it says nothing, as it conveys nothing. This is what they would like to capture. The male character writes; the narrator writes; and the woman, calls for that transcription which would show fidelity to the event that was happening between them. Calls, then, for that narrative, that act of writing which would let speech resound.

But there can be no transcription – you cannot write of that speech which is only indeterminable. The male character writes of the room, of the details of the room. He sets down what is said, and passes what he writes to her. But has he made it so that she can speak? And what of the narrator, who remains on the side of the male character, knowing more than him? He, too is a transcriber; he records, he remembers. Further still: what of Blanchot, who writes of this male character, this female character and of the narrator?

No transcription. But the récit, as a whole, is still an attempt to transcribe, to redouble, the relation of speech. The récit does not bear, simply, upon its own event, its own happening, but upon the happening of speech. In one sense, this is perfectly consistent with ‘The Sirens’ Song’: what is exchanged between the conversationalists redoubles something of the relationship between reader and récit. Of course, reading is unilateral – but what if the book was altered in its encounter with you? Imagine that the relation of reading were redoubled, and both sides, now without common measure, responded to each as to the other. That is what is at stake in the doubly dissymmetrical relation to the Other, where both ‘terms’ of the relation are altered in turn.

Responsibility

No chance that his account of the relation to the human other parallels what Blanchot has already called ‘literary responsibility’, that is, the way in which the author determines a récit in his response to the murmuring of the indeterminable. Now, however, responsibility is doubled; it becomes communal, in Blanchot’s understanding of the world, as the relation in question works in two directions.

Responsibility redoubled. The encounter with the Other. Do not think Blanchot has become Levinasian. For the encounter happens by way of the Other, at issue is a relation that is redoubled and to that extent shared – a community without common measure, that is, which no longer depends upon the primacy of what is said in the first person. What matters is the background of speech, its lack of determination, rather than the Other whose address would awaken me to speech. Or rather, that address is only the lack of determination, the reserve.

When, in the years aurrounding the publication of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, Blanchot also maintains the human Other is more other than anything else, this does not mean Blanchot has separated literary responsibility from that which awakens in the relation to the murmuring of language, to communicativity that happens by way of the relation to the Other. Blanchot has not turned from literature to ethics; nor does he rank the alterity of the Other (speech) and the alterity of the work (writing) with respect to one another.

The récit figures the redoubled relation to the Other, community. As such, it does not bear simply on its own happening, the happening of writing, but also upon the happening of speech. Both are relations to language (to communicativity, to the fact of language); both are ways in which which language gives itself to be experienced. The récit is only a particular folding of this experience – an implication of speech in writing, even as speech and writing are never separable. Speech and writing, as both are thought from the experience of language, are not distinct in kind.

Still, by emphasising the relation of speech in the period of The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot does indicate something like the ethical or the political stakes of the experience of language in question. This is not an ethics or politics of literature – not a way, that is, of showing the specific commitments that attend upon the act of reading or writing, but, in keeping with the broadening of Blanchot’s concerns in this period, a more general reflection, alongside Levinas, but distinct from him, on language.

A reflection that continues to pass by way of a practice of literary writing, and by way of Waiting, Forgetting. It is not that this récit is different in kind from those that precede it, nor not even that it outplays the theorisation of the récit Blanchot provides in ‘The Sirens’ Song’. But there is a change of emphasis in Blanchot’s writings in this period – a concern with the redoubled relation to language that occurs in what he calls community, that is, in the relation between two or more people such that each, in relating to another, is brought into contact with an experience of language.

Freedom

Terror: Palmer Eldritch’s face appears in the sky, in our world. Terror: with Blanchot our world is no longer our own, and who are we, who wander like dazed oxen in the time of the récit? But with The Infinite Conversation it becomes clearer that this terror is also a liberation, that infancy’s return as the experience of language, is the chance of freedom. A freedom, now, that I do not possess, that is not that ‘ability to be able’ in league with the unfolding of the world, but that possesses me, returning as speech or as writing.

Simplistic indeed to link freedom to indeterminability, to the experience of language. But let me leave this thought here, rather than take it further in an already overlong and convoluted post.

Ulysses and Homer

There’s no English equivalent of the French récit, which names a literary genre which tells of a single event. A few dense notes on what this word comes to mean for Blanchot in The Book to Come and elsewhere.

Ulysses journeys; this is what Homer remembers and recounts. The event of the journey is separate from the event of narration. But Blanchot argues the récit does not does not simply recount an event, whether real or fictional, representing it at a distance, but makes it happen. Ulysses and Homer are one. Then, on his account, the event would need the récit in order to occur, and the contents of the récit would allegorise the event for which they would substitute (Breton’s encounter with Nadja, Ahab’s with the whale).

But one should not be misled by what Blanchot apparently indicates about the event. The récit allows the event to complete itself, to be brought to form only as its narrative form is unjoined from itself. One might say (rather pretentiously) it is a kind of non-event that happens as the récit – and the non-event that spreads everywhere, devouring plot, character and the rest, like a black hole that turns at the heart of the book.

But if this is the case, event and non-event must be thought together. The récit allows an event to be narrated, to be limited, delimited so that it can be brought to language. But that limit is also subject to a kind of detour; it is indeterminable, or rather, that what is called delimitation or determination happens by solidifying a reserve that can never, in its entirety, be brought into focus.

The récit, it is true, always has a plot to devour, and characters to disperse; it is exposed to the danger of a kind of erosion or wearing away. At any moment, the limits of the récit threaten to come undone; the récit, especially in Blanchot’s hands, seems to be perpetually on the brink of unravelling itself. But this happens exactly as the delimitation of the récit, and as a trembling of those limits.

This is what gives Blanchot’s récits their uncertain status; they are like nothing else written. Do they bear upon a single event, or even the happening of an event? Or do they return, over and again, to those events which seem to unlimit themselves and are unable to be brought to a conclusion?

The Demand of the Récit

In Death Sentence, for example, the narrator will insist that everything he has told is but a substitute for another event, which he cannot reach. And not even an event – a kind of fall from the event, a drifting without determinacy (or perhaps determination should be rethought, and in a way equivalent to the event).

How should this be understood? The act of narration is divided. Language divides itself from what it is possible to say, to represent in terms of actions, of characters and of what befalls them, and what cannot be said: a kind of opacity in language which tears it from its referential function. Or once again, and the point is not difficult, there is what can be said by way of language – and by way of those characters and milieus language would allow the author to bring to life, and a kind of saying of language itself, its sonorousness, its rhythms, the way it seems to thicken itself into an idiom, saying nothing at all but the fact that it is.

Those compelled to write, according to Blanchot, are as though addressed by this opacity; they experience it, and the récit is one outcome of this experience – the narrative being shaped to figure an encounter with what will not allow itself to speak in terms of characters, plot, etc. An encounter with what remains intransitive in language – it is not simply that I cannot convey what I experienced of this or that day, of the beauty of that vista, of the singularity of that bouquet of flowers, but that language also resists the attempt to convey anything at all.

In this sense, it breaks from that same experience of power and possibility that, for Blanchot, following Heidegger, is the condition of our experience of the world. Higher than actuality is possiblity: the world gives itself as it is given to human powers and possibility; it depends upon that potentiality-to-be for its structure and coherence. But then, as Heidegger allows, that coherency is precarious: what is the Nothing but Heidegger’s name for its withdrawal, when we lose grip on the world, and the world seems to stand outside of our powers, obdurate and unalterable?

As with Heidegger, so with Blanchot – but this has to be thought in terms of language (just as it does in the later Heidegger): there is an experience of language as the Nothing, when it does not speak of the world around us –  or if it does, it is only to redouble the becoming-opaque of the world. But then the world, for Blanchot, is only given through language; there is, in this sense, no redoubling – there is not the world and then language, only their cobelonging in a single experience.

There are times, then, when language and the world become opaque; times – or rather, what breaks the course of time, being those happenings which can never round themselves off into a completed event because they transform we who experience them. It is not just that the récit would represent these incompletable events, for the récit is also one of them.

This is difficult! The events in question, Claudia brushing Judith’s hair, the attempt of the nameless narrator of Waiting, Forgetting, to make it so his companion could speak, transcribing their exchanges, and allowing her to read them, Thomas letting himself fall into an open grave seem to be such that, although in some sense incompletable, unlimitable, are nonetheless reported, represented, in the récit.

But to write a récit, to read one, is to undergo just such an experience; therefore, the experience of reading Blanchot is doubly strange – both for those events, those non-events that are narrated, and for the form of narration itself, when everything becomes uncertain. But in a sense, it is not simply that the narrative form is fitted to what occurred, even when it seems to be the case, as in the opening paragraphs of Death Sentence, where the narrator seems to want to tell us something immensely important, and that he has struggled to write a number of times.

No, the récit is not simply where what is told is allowed to happen, in the manner of a repressed experience that is allowed to be spoken at last. It is itself a happening (inverted commas around the word happening) – it is already an event. That is why the narrator of Death Sentence will say, in effect, that it does not matter what he writes, he is trying to speak of something for which the narrative he has written is a paltry substitute.

It is as though the récit, wanting to be written, wants to draw, phantom-like, on the life of its narrator, on the events (inverted commas around this word) he would report. But the récit is never satisfied with any of these events, knowing each of them comes undone. In Blanchot’s hands, the récit is unappeasable; it demands too much. This is because it can never finish trying to bring itself into existence – even as it can never be brought forth thus, depending, as it does, on what makes language opaque and withdraws it from meaning.

Ulysses does not precede Homer; Homer is also Ulysses in the telling of the récit; both men are one, and the writing of the récit is the adventure that shipwrecks both of them. Homer writes; Ulysses tells of what happens to him. But Homer is a name for the demand of the récit; he wants to speak of that demand, wants to let it resound through everything that is said. Is there a struggle between the two parts of the author? Either way, what was written stands in for what can never bring itself into the light of meaning. Every reported event is substitutive; it only stands in for the happening, the non-happening of the récit itself.

The Passion of Determination

To write, Blanchot argues, is bring oneself into contact with the indeterminable, or it is to experience something like the passion of determination and delimitation. It is this experience for which any particular narrative would substitute itself: the narrative voice speaks of what resists power and possibility; it is an experience of language as it loosens its capacity to refer, to speak of the world in which we are capable of understanding and of action.

But then, at the same time, the récit needs words; it needs narrative – the author must be able to complete a written text, if only as a substitute for experience in question. The author, coming into the experience for which the récit is one name, must determine this experience, lending it form. It would be possible to sketch a history of narrative in terms of these forms, but what distinguishes our time, in which Blanchot writes his récits, is that this determinacy is understood in its passion, its trembling.

Higher than possibility stands impossibility; in place of actuality, there is an absence of world – or the world is given as what resists our powers: this is what presents itself in Blanchot’s fiction. Once again, this is prefigured in Heidegger – in the idea (in The Origin of the Work of Art) that earth is what would resist world, struggling with it: that the earth resists human powers, human potentiality, and the open dimension of the world.

Even as it opens the world, the earth turns it aside from that opening, so that what seems to bestow itself – the brightness and brilliance of a world in a particular epoch – does so via a kind of withholding. Earth gives the world as what resists the dimension of light; it appears, but only as it is turned from us, its titanic face facing out into the night.

Above all, for Heidegger, it is presented thus – as a struggle with power, with light – in the work of art. He will even permit himself to dream of a great work of art that would found a world – a great inauguration whose chance is not closed to us yet, though we are deep in the epoch of technology. That is the dream of the ‘other’ beginning – the inception we cannot bring about through an act of will, but that may occur, perhaps thousands of years in the future.

With Blanchot, there are no such dreams. If one can speak of the earth with respect to his recits, it can never be foundational: it can never, by struggling with the world, tear wide a new beginning. Rather, it shows the limit of any possible world – the limit, but as it becomes limitless, as it unlimits any attempt to impose boundaries on the given in terms of human power, human potential.

But nevertheless, this does point to a kind of responsibility on the part of the author, and perhaps of the reader. That unlimiting given in the encounter with language as it seems to turn aside from reference, from referentiality, is preserved in the récit.

Récit and Critique

As Levinas comments, comparing Blanchot and Heidegger, art, with the former, is freed from the chance of offering a foundation, of the inauguration of a new epoch. It is unbound from what Heidegger calls truth. As such, it safeguards a kind of resistance, a distance from which the given can be called into critique. Art attains a critical function. This is not a formulation Blanchot would use. But he will write, as obliquely as always, of a kind of ‘literary responsibility’.

How should this be understood? Simply as the way in which the author, the one compelled to write, gives form to the experience of language in a récit. The way in which the writer – one for whom writing is not an option among others -, elected by that experience, marks that election in his or her work. Examples would include Duras, Laporte, Breton, Kafka and even Melville – but one shouldn’t think the récit presents itself only in literary forms.

In ‘The Ease of Dying’, Blanchot, commenting on Paulhan, can be read as allowing that theoretical works might also constitute récits – that to write philosophy, for example – to be compelled to write – may allow a work of philosophy to be read as a récit. Philosophy (but this is to move to quickly) would become literature, or something like literature; or a kind of research, seemingly specific to literature, would lay claim, too, to that theoretical practice in which writing – in a way, perhaps, unbeknownst to its author – is at issue.

Perhaps the word literature, like the word récit, is substitutive of the more general word, writing – a practice (is this the word?) that gives itself to be spoken (written) in a variety of genres. Then there is the task of attesting to writing – a task of reading, of critical commentary. A task that cannot spare itself from a meditation on the way commentary itself is written, and belongs to writing, that is to say, to the experience of language that writing names.

Commentary, then, is also responsible, and, with modernity, with Blanchot, explicitly so. Explicitly – and as such, unlike the implicit response to the demand of writing that determines the form of particular works in particular genres. Blanchot’s practice of commentary reveals what is implicit; as such, it, too, might be said to be a récit.

It may seem this claim confuses two levels of discourse – there is the text to be commented upon, and then there is the commentary. But the récit, the work, is already a commentary upon itself – it is given form (even though its author may not be consciously aware of this) in response to the experience of language, yes, but a response that is also a negotiation of the laws of a particular genre.

A continual negotation – an attempt, on every page, on every line, to respond to an experience. To respond over and over again. Such a response is already a commentary; it comes after the event; it is a response to the event to which the récit is linked. This response is the condition of what Blanchot calls responsibility, and perhaps it is possible to say that each writer is responsible in his or her own way.

How? By putting the determined unity of the character under pressure; to suspend plot and plotting (Thomas the Obscure); to write not a dialogue, but to stage, in what is said, the impossibility of dialogue (Waiting, Forgetting). And even to dramatise the situation of the writer; to write about writing, or the attempt to write (The One Who …) Each time a negotiation; each time the distinction between narrative and the narrative voice collapses in a new way.

Writing of Heidegger, Blanchot will, on one occasion condemn him as a writer – that is, as one who should have been aware of his responsibility. He was aware (the phrase, the experience of language is also his), but not aware enough; vigilant, but not sufficiently vigilant: how could earth and world be brought into relation with one another such that they would allow the detour of writing to come to a beginning?Above all, how could Heidegger have failed to maintain the passion of determinacy, that wavering which can never be hardened into a beginning?)

In summary, then, the récit does not name a literary genre, for Blanchot, but the practice of responding to the experience of language. Perhaps any piece of writing can be read as a récit. Perhaps, then, literary responsibility is misnamed; it refers to the way in which any author, whether consciously or unconsciously, negotiates the demand of the experience in question, and in whatever form.

A responsibility that reveals itself in and as writing, in the compulsion to write, whether it takes the final form of literature or philosophy. The final form – but there are no final forms. Or writing is what undoes the claim to finality, as it joins itself to the experience that remains on the hither side of what can be said.

Let’s say, for today, that there are two forms of friendship, one inside the other, one outside the other. The first: affinity, conviviality. Not reciprocity, only the redoubled enjoyment of the world, redoubled delight. We like the same things, we hate the same things; there is no ideological separation. Let the great things of the day take care of themselves; we are here; this is our privacy, our retreat. The pub every night after work. We pass around our ales, ‘taste this’. We entertain at each other’s houses, and burn CDs for each other, and whole days pass in each others company. Joy: life can be simple. Joy: shut the world away.

Then the second, much more difficult to invoke. Friendship without terms, or whose terms cannot be thought as is measured by a life closed in upon itself. No interiority – or rather, friendship for the other – for the one who draws you from yourself – already brings you up against the limit of what you are.

The limit? This is a thought of finitude, and of finite friendship. Where you are death is not, and where death is you are not. Very well, but when the other is dying? When the other dies before you? There is death, in person. There is a dying that crosses over and demands that you, too, run up against your death. But death presents nothing to run up against; there is no limit, or rather, the limit becomes infinite, a play of prohibition (you will not know death) and transgression (death is here, where you are not). An infinite spiral, the limit turned inside and out and back again.

But the other is not always dying (or rather, it is not always a question of the limit of death). Unless dying can be thought in another sense. This becomes difficult. A dying, now, that is the refusal of negation, of the measure of negation. Neither of us is the master, neither is the slave; that dialectic is suspended – halted at the point in which I become aware that the other shatters my egotism. I am not who I am; the other is also within me. The outside inside, but an outside with which I can never have done. There will be no fight to the death. He is here, there where I am. Or that ‘where’ is exposed, or turned inside out. Who am I, that lives outside himself? Who, whom the outside has reached before there was an inside?

The early Levinas (first half of Totality and Infinity) will claim this is due to the presence of the other: a presence in terms of which the relation to him must be thought. The later one, and perhaps Blanchot too (in a different way), will argue that it is in terms of the relation itself that the other must be thought. Levinas will not call it friendship, but Blanchot does (as he always did). Now friendship names that relation in which the other reaches me before I reach myself. He is there, within me. The outside inside. The other in whom the strangeness of everything, the whole world, is given. The strangest one.

Note that friendship is unilateral on this conception. Note too – and this is more difficult, more confusing – that it is drawn to a variety of ‘objects’. To the other person, it is true, but also to the oeuvre, and to the animal. How confusing! No question that this muddies the second notion of friendship – that there is a third way in which friendship can be understood. Friendship for the oeuvre, for the animal – but only by way of the second friendship, that is, for the other. Friendship is first of all for the human other. Then the third friendship comes after the second one.

But let us put that thought aside. Note too that though friendship is unilaterial, it can also be returned. That is, I can become other for the friend; each of us can become other in turn; we take turns, or rather, these turns are taken. No reciprocity, note that – nothing is exchanged, or rather, it is the incommensurable that is at issue each time. Burning up exchange, and the general equivalent of exchange, that is, the common – shared interests, shared ideologies – is the doubly unilateral exchange of friendship.

The incommensurable, each time. Reaching me from – where? From the friend. The friend who is the other. And is he aware of it, the friend? Does he know what he has given to me (but the giving is not his)? This is possible. I can know what I mean for the friend. I can let giving occur, and perhaps there is a kind of joy in that. And I can even know this giving is a double of the gift which gives itself through me to the other. Through me? By way of me, and not of what I am – this person, with this attitudes – but of what I am when I am no one in particular.

Blanchot will write of his friendship with Bataille in these terms. The play of thought, he calls it. Thought, each time, is at issue, and thought as friendship. Thought as friendship. But then there are two types of thought, too; the first models what is to be thought in terms of the concept. There must be a grasp, a grasping. The second, in terms of the impossibility of grasping. A gift occurs, a giving, but it cannot be seized. A gift that withdraws itself in its giving. Or a gift that, when giving, does so to the ‘no one’ who cannot seize it.

Difficult thought! Friendship and thought are the names for a relation. That relation is at the heart of Blanchot’s thought. A relation, as he says, that is without relation – which is to say, cannot be understood through the terms it relates. A relation, then, from which terms arise – terms constructed as interdictions (you will step no further) that are to be transgressed (you can step beyond).

Relation without relation. The influence of Heidegger is all too clear, but let me put that aside for the moment. Blanchot read Being and Time alongside Levinas, when both were students at Strasbourg. They immediately knew its importance. There could be no going back to a pre-Heideggerian philosophy. But the difference between being and beings (a difference Heidegger would have been reluctant to call a relation, that fallen, Latinate word) was to be rethought, along with Dasein.

To be rethought: this is what occupied Blanchot and Levinas from the later 1930s onwards. And wasn’t this task, this rethinking, at the heart of their friendship? Wasn’t it in terms of what Blanchot called friendship that the difference in question would be thought, and as early as Thomas the Obscure? Everything begins in that novel, I know that now. Everything is there that would later open in his thought, and in his friendship for thought. There would be no turn, and no deviation, only the steady unfolding of the consequences of what had been thought through that novel, and through the writing of that novel.

Two kinds of friendship (let us put aside the third, which is parasitical on the second friendship): or should one talk of friendship and its other? For friendship (the first sense) is only a contraction of the second; and the second is only an exposition of the first. Friendship, then, ‘contains’ its other, if one can speak of containing the outside inside. Contains it – by allowing the inside to turn itself inside out, to exposed, given.

And what of the chance of a redoubled friendship – of a friendship that continually returns you to the ‘other’ friendship? Such was the relationship Blanchot described with Bataille. Such, no doubt, was also at issue with Levinas. But let us think, too, of that little text ‘Encounters’, where Blanchot will also write of his encounters with Char, with Antelme, and the other text, ‘For Friendship’, where he will write of Mascolo. And recall that none of them saw him after his illness in the early 1970s: that he wrote to his friends that he was retiring from the world.

Jabes remembers his entire friendship for Blanchot was epistolatory. Short letters, in a fine hand, letters more like poems, would reach him every now and again. When he asked to meet Blanchot, he was rebuffed, as Blanchot would rebuff so many others. These letters are gradually beginning to be released. In the Kozovoi correspondence, we find a Blanchot of great tenderness. In his letters to Antelme’s wife, Monique, we witness the decline of a fine hand with old age. Then, silence for many years. He could no longer write. But he continued to speak on the phone. To Derrida, at least once or twice a year.

I do not recount these facts for the sake of anecdote, but only to meditate, as I write, on the demands of the ‘other’ friendship, to which Blanchot dedicated his life. The ‘other’ friendship – or the ‘other’ relation, or the ‘other night’, or literature (and perhaps one should write of the ‘other’ literature): these are names for the same, names for what was discovered from 1936 onwards, when Thomas the Obscure gradually came together.

1936: but one shouldn’t pass over in silence what Blanchot also wrote in those years, running up to the war. A political journalism that belonged to the day, he remembers in The Step Not Beyond, just as his fiction belonged to the night. One day that right-wing journalism stopped. And when he again made a political intervention, returning to Paris from his tiny house in the South, it was on the side of the left. The night (the ‘other’ night) had crossed over into the day: is that what happened?

Certainly it was in the name of friendship (a friendship of refusal) that Blanchot called for action on the part of those protesting against de Gaulle’s unconstitutional return to power in 1958. Friendship – the ‘other’ friendship – which does not hide itself from the public, from the events of the day. His friendship with Jean Paulhan faltered over a disagreement de Gaulle (the events of May 13th, Blanchot will write). Then the ‘other’ friendship can have a charge that is political, or at least communal, being linked, as Blanchot said in his review of Mascolo’s book in 1953, to another communism, to another kind of communism.

Abrupt conclusion: politics and ethics belong to the heart of Blanchot’s work and his life. Better: the political, the ethical are names for the stakes of the ‘other’ relation, of whatever we call it, whether communism or friendship. Second conclusion: none of this matters unless it can be thought in our own terms, and in our own idiom. Thought – and lived (but then the ‘other’ thought is always lived).

But what is called speech in Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation? ‘To speak to someone is to accept not introducing him into the system of things or of beings to be known; it is to recognise him as unknown and to receive him as foreign without obliging him to break with his difference’. The unknown – but what does this mean? That which breaks with the idea that everything yields itself up to the measure of intelligibility, lending themselves to that great synchronisation through a world or cosmos comes to appear in its seamless continuity.

What does this mean? The relation to the Other is not part of those relations which measure the copresence of things according to the powers and capacities of human intellection. Heidegger voids the substantial subject, presenting instead the ecstatic leap into the future, the stretching out towards death. From where does Dasein leap? There is no ‘there’ understood as a substantial unity. Yet for Blanchot it is as though Dasein has to come to itself such that the leap might be taken, to assemble itself – to be assembled – into that site where existence itself would become possible.

The experience of suffering will always be Blanchot’s model for that experience in which this act of assembling is undone. Suffering should be understood negatively only from that perspective wherein what is most important is to preserve the unity of the self. But there is also a sense, for him, in which the suffering which marks the relation to the Other as it undoes that unity is the condition of hope: as though the interruption accomplished as this relation would permit more than the respiration of the Same as it comes to itself or the labour of identification through which the world presents itself as what is known and knowable.

In this instant (in the suspension it accomplishes), the place I assume gives unto an experience which cannot be gathered into a unity. Who am I? ‘il’: the he or the it: the impersonal ‘subject’ of a detour which will not allow itself to come to term; the suspension of that reflexivity of the self which redoubles that great reflexivity through which the cosmos grants itself to the measure of the Same. ‘il’: not a subject nor the Da-sein which has already and always leapt from its site. ‘il’: the one in contact with the unknown such that the measure of knowing is interrupted. ‘Locus’ of a pathein which cannot be borne by subject or recuperated in what Heidegger calls authentic existing.

Who is the Other? The one I meet in that suffering which turns me from myself. Whose alterity is such that it cannot be grasped in terms of a particular attribute (the Other is not masculine or feminine, not old or young, neither famous nor obscure …) Is this a simple mysticism or theophany: the appearance of the Other as God was said to appear to Moses? But the Other does not appear as to an intact subject; it is not part of that great rushing forward of phenomena which the phenomenologist understands to be met by the rushing of a constituting intentionality. The Other as enigma, as the interruption of phenomenology: concentrated in these formulations is a conception of a relation which may be said to be without relation since it deprives itself of a ‘subject’ term (the ‘I’) and a stable ‘object’ (the presence of the thing alongside other things).

‘il’: ‘place’ of an indefinite suspension, the suffering without term to which nothing appears. The Other is, to this extent, invisible, if visibility is the measure of phenomenon. This means the Other cannot operate as the ‘object’ pole of a relation. A relation without relation: the ‘il’ ‘relates’ to the Other as to the unknown, the outside, the neuter not because it is reducible to, say, another expanse to be worked and transformed into the world, the cosmos, not to a dimension beyond this one – a heavenly place – but to what resists the constituting grasp of consciousness here and now. Here and now the encounter with the Other cannot be grasped. It is marked as a kind of trauma, as the awakening of an impersonal ‘il’, a vigilance without subject. And it is met by what Blanchot calls speech.

With what speech can one associate the ‘il’, a ‘no one’ incapable of speaking? Impossible speech – an address which cannot be traced back to the will of a subject or to an animating consciousness. A speech which erupts to break those signifying practices which allow us to name and speak of things in their absence and to grasp each singularity as a particular which would lie beneath a universal. A speech then which marks the suspension of the speaker and of the theme of the spoken. A speech which, in turn, cannot itself become a theme.

The ‘il’ addresses the Other. There is speech, upstream of the decision to speak (unless speech is understood in terms of the decision of the Other as it were ‘in’ me). Speech which is not met by the Other speaking in turn, as if, here, it were a question of reciprocity of exchange. Blanchot will follow Levinas in claiming the relation with the Other is unilateral and resists symmetry – a resistance which is not that of the master before the slave since the Other is encountered as the one who is vulnerable, as the widow or the orphan, as the proletariat – these expressions to be understood only as they indicate the way the Other solicits not only the speech which would acknowledge the Other’s alterity but also the desire to negate and have done with that alterity.

It is true, for Blanchot, I can become the Other for the one I relate to as the Other, but this breaks with any notion of exchange. What is given in such a criss-crossing of unilateral and dissymmetrical relations, in this redoubled relation without relation in which both parties become ‘il’ and then the Other in turn, is a double interruption. One which is confirmed in those friendships as Blanchot remembers existed between him and Bataille where it is not the content of what is said that is important, but the seriousness of a speech in which each acknowledges the other person as the Other in turn, and both experience, albeit traumatically, which is to say, upstream of conscious individuality, the interruption of the continuity of the cosmos.

Likewise, Blanchot will even allow for such relations to multiply themselves between those who, in demonstrating against injustices, refuse the prevailing authorities and even the measure of power: those who maintain themselves outside the play of those relations which govern the social whole. The community opened thus cannot last or gather itself into a movement of social reform but permits something like a revolution to flash up for a moment. A utopia – but only as long as interruption is permitted its play, leaping from one demonstrator to another. Still, the model of the relation to the Other remains intact: there is nothing mutual or reciprocal with respect to relation in question, not even in its redoubling or multiplication.

I’m indulging myself in writing some notes on Blanchot and Judaism. This continues from the last posts.

Speech, in this sense, is the promised land where exile fulfils itself in sojourn since it is not a matter of being at home there but of being always Outside, engaged in a movement wherein the Foreign offers itself, yet without disavowing itself’. To acknowledge the relation to the Outside in the relation to the Other prevents me from taking the Other to be another like myself.

Speech opens the Jew to the promised land in which one might live without that land becoming one’s own. There is no dwelling for the Jew.

To speak, in a word, is to seek the source of meaning in the prefix that the words exile, exodus, existence, exteriority and estrangement

are committed to unfolding in various modes of experience; a prefix that for us designates distance and separation as the origin of all “positive value.”

The last phrase, positive value, is to be contrasted with the values which are impugned in nihilism. At the outset of the essay, Blanchot has already claimed the question of what is specific to Judaism receives answers which determine the Jew negatively – as in the case of Simone Weil, in terms of a deficiency with respect to the clarity of Greek thought. He wonders whether this fear to affirm the words which begin with the prefix ‘ex-’ is that of ‘playing into the hands of nihilism and its most vulgar substitute, anti-Semitism’.

It is true that a certain anti-Semitic rhetoric will suspect what they take to be the deracination of the Jews – one which Blanchot will present in terms of a relation to what he calls the origin rather than the beginning, using the former word to refer what separates the Jew from the interiority of any particular state. The origin is what breaks any myths of the place – the same myths, of course, upon which Nazism would draw – returning each time as a call outside, as the experience of an insecurity which disrupts the relation to being in a place, to dwelling.

The call outside, God’s call, breaks not only the relation to the place, but also the mediation which would allow experience to be measured according to the security of this place. To contrast, as Levinas does, Ulysses to Abraham, is to separate one who remains himself throughout his vicissitudes, who seeks only to reach his birthplace and his wife and his son from the one who simply goes outside, who passes into the desert, that ‘between the shores’ which escapes interiority.

The response to the call assembles a people who are joined in a limit-experience, in the border that broadens and becomes desert. Above all, for Blanchot, it maintains ‘that Jewish thought does not know, or refuses, mediation and speech as mediating’. And again: ‘Judaism is the sole thought which does not mediate’. How should one understand this? The Writing of the Disaster:

Granted, Hegel is the mortal enemy of Christianity, but this is the case exactly to the extent that he is a Christian: far from being satisfied with a single Mediation (Christ), he makes everything into mediation. Judaism is the sole thought that does not mediate. And that is why Hegel, and Marx, are anti-Judaic, not to say anti-Semitic.

Judaism maintains a point of indifference between the ordinary notions of interiority and exteriority, the inside and the outside and the ‘other’ exteriority and the ‘other’ outside. It watches over this difference. 

What is refused with speech is the possibility of what will be called the master and slave dialectic which permits the mediation of the struggle between two self-consciousnesses such that a form of society is possible and eventually even the triumph of a universal state which bestows recognition upon all. Blanchot will grant ‘the dialectical fulfillment is at work, and this is necessary’ even as, alongside the dialectic, there is the relation to the outside which Judaism maintains. ‘My relation with the Other is irreducible to any measure, just as it excludes any mediation and any reference to another relation that would include it’. And it is so because it is also a relation to the outside, to the ‘other’ exteriority.

A few more notes on the ‘other’ exteriority. Considering to Pasternak’s question, ‘What does being Jewish signify? Why does it exist?’ Blanchot responds:

I believe that among all the responses there is one in three parts that we cannot avoid choosing, and it is this: it exists so the idea of exodus and the idea of exile can exist as a legitimating movement; it exists, through exile and through the initiative that is exodus, so that the experience of strangeness may affirm itself close at hand as an irreducible relation; it exists so that, by authority of this experience, we might learn to speak.

What does it mean to step outside? Simply to cross a border – to move from one space into another? Blanchot: ‘the Hebrew Abraham invites us not only to pass from one shore to the other, but also to carry ourselves to wherever there is a passage to be made, maintaining this between two shores that is the truth of passage’. To pass, passage: to ‘affirm the world as passage’ as exodus and exile sets the Jew apart from the Christian for whom the here below is scorned and from the Greek who allows this world to be measured by the transcendence of light (‘truth as light, light as measure’). It is by passing beyond the horizon of light that the Jew relates ‘to what is beyond his reach’: to that of which God is a figure.

Abraham takes his family from Sumeria. Where do they pass? Into the desert that is between spaces, between sedentary states. Nomadism, migration brings those who pass in relation with what Blanchot calls ‘the Unknown that one can know only by way of distance’; when Jacob wrestles with the one he will later call an angel, he is said to become the ‘partner’ of ‘the inaccessible outside’. Jacob is renamed Israel, the one who struggles with God. And the word Israel, too, will name his progeny.

Israel remains outside. The Jew is the one who maintains a relation to what is unknown, to the foreign even as this prevents the foundation of a state, which is to say, an interiority like any other. This is why Blanchot can affirm what Neher writes: ‘How can one be in Exile and in the Kingdom, at the same time vagabond and established? It is precisely this contradiction that makes the Jewish man a Jew’. The desert is not a dwelling place but the world become passage. 

But what is called speech? ‘To speak to someone is to accept not introducing him into the system of things or of beings to be known; it is to recognise him as unknown and to receive him as foreign without obliging him to break with his difference’. To speak is to acknowledge the Other as someone who breaks the horizon of Greek thought, who breaks with the measure of light. What does this mean?

Greek, says Levinas, ‘is the term I use to designate, above and beyond the vocabulary, grammar and wisdom with which it originated in Hellas, the manner in which the universality of the West is expressed, or tries to express itself – rising above the local particularism of the quaint, traditional, poetic, or religious’. It would thus include philosophical terms and concepts such as morphe (form) or ousia (substance) which constitute ‘a specifically Greek lexicon of intelligibility’.

Perhaps the most essential distinguishing feature of the language of Greek philosophy was its equation of truth with an intelligibility of presence. By this I mean an intelligibility that considers truth to be that which is present or copresent, that which can be gathered or synchronised into a totality that we would call the world or cosmos.

Blanchot will often draw a contrast between the cosmos and the disaster, naming with the latter a continuous discourse without the interruption which speech implies. What he calls Jewish thought would expose the desire for continuity it attempts to render everything intelligible and illuminable. Such a desire is predicated upon a model of intelligibility as the attempt to render everything present, to represent everything that has occurred here and now. Truth and presence and conjoined such that its terms can be presented as simultaneous and commensurable.

The acknowledgement of the Other that is called speech cannot be thought in these terms. Blanchot will draw on Levinas’s vocabulary of height and of the dissymmetrical relation whereby the Other is not measured by what I take myself to be (a subject, a citizen, an ego). The relation to the Other is a relation to the unknown, to the outside. Speech affirms the dissymmetry of this relation and hence the elevation of the Other.

What boredom may permit, it may also make impossible: bored, sick of the world, you are too bored to seek out others who are bored (and they are too bored to seek you). You’ve fallen to the bottom of the world, exhausted your strength and lost even your relationship to yourself. Bored, no one is bored in your place. An impersonal attention sees the indifferent sky above the congested streets and the flies who circle until they die in empty rooms. Bored, you watch television to assuage boredom. Never do you dream of leaving the privacy of your dwelling place for the streets, those same streets where others may gather in their boredom  and where flames the trail which might bear you to the future.

And yet boredom can volatilise into a stubborn refusal of constituted powers – those dangerous, spontaneous movements which hover between revolution and surfascism, between the great overturning that would bring a fiery new world into being and the desire for a leader to capitalise upon the excess that has been unleashed.

Surfascism: this was the accusatory word thrown at Bataille after his attempt alongside the Surrealists, to turn French workers away from fascism by drawing on the same forces to which fascism unleashed. Contre-Attaque, as it was called, attempted to turn the enthusiasm of the crowd onto a legitimate target – to awaken that great refusal which was also a refusal of capitalism. It finds its analogue, Blanchot is right to argue, in the Events of May 1968 in Paris.

What is the call that is heard on the streets? What is it that opens me to the future? Already Heidegger points the way with the call of conscience: it calls silently; it awakens me from the anonymity of Das Man, Dasein is called to its authenticity, to resolutely bring itself into relation with its death such that it lifts itself from the others. But the anonymity Dasein departs is a figure for the anonymity of the crowd, of those who cross the threshold that would allow each to become responsive to the Other in a new way; where each shares a response to a kind of speech. Once again, it is a silence, a kind of hole in apparent completeness of the babble of the world.

A silence? But listen closely and you will hear a murmuring – similar, perhaps, to what K. hears on the other end of the telephone line when he seeks to speak to the castle – a thundering silence that cuts through all speech which would reduce the other person to a cultural category. Who awakens? What awakens? Not authentic Dasein, summoned to itself, living each moment as a moment saved from death – the Dasein bound to itself and to being in the relation Heidegger calls mineness [Jemeinigkeit] – but the no-one-in-particular, the anyone-whatsoever who is each member of the crowd. The danger is clear: without the resoluteness, the will to which Heidegger appeals, there will be dissipation, the crowd will fall back into blandness before anything is accomplished; it remains an unruly magma and not yet a Volk.

Still, one would also have to ask what Heidegger himself fears in the same magma. What is the call that is no longer a call to authenticity, to the assumption of finite existence? Perhaps it comes not from Dasein itself, but from others, but others of the crowd. Perhaps the call is what happens when one bored individual has found others, too, who are bored, and that boredom hardens into a refusal. The thematics of mood in Being and Time is subordinated to mineness – to the attempt of Dasein to bring itself to itself, but the indication is there.

When, shortly after Being and Time, Heidegger will write of an anxiety which suspends the relation of Dasein to itself, to its world, but which yet also reveals the condition of Dasein and the world: bare Dasein in its bare transcendence, he is close to a reflection on the relation to being which sees it, from the first, as interrupting the relation of the self with itself. An interruption such that the being-there of Dasein reveals itself as an usurpation. Dasein is no longer, it is true, rooted in itself, cleaving unto itself, but ek-static, futural, it is launched at its death, but this is because of a reaction in it has closed itself to what boredom might reveal: the anonymous crowd as the field in which a kind of circulation occurs such that each takes the place of the Other, as that zone where the great usurpation reveals itself in its ignominy.

Those who are brought into the condition of responding to others out of the same experience of boredom, the same experience of the nullity of the quotidian, the same nihilism hear, witness the relation to a turning over of being and nothingness which outplays nihilism. Who calls me? If I am interpellated, it is only by what calls the ‘il’ forward in me. If I am called, it is by what dissolves me as a consumer, as a vendor, as a client, as a worker. This is the holiday of the crowd, its spontaneous festivity.

The call of conscience and the related notion of witnessing sees several metamorphoses throughout Heidegger’s career. By the mid 1930s and ‘Holderlin and the essence of Poetry’, it has transformed into the call to a Volk to come which resounds through the poem. When Blanchot writes on Holderlin, it is to reveal that the condition of modernity is the impossibility of assembling such a Volk. In Adorno’s words: ‘You can build a temple, but you can’t bring a god down to haunt it’.

Of course in his youth, too, Blanchot himself dreamt of a return to the proper body of the nation. Was this was his moment of surfascism? Perhaps the formerly right-wing monarchist Blanchot was disingenuous when he presumed in The Unavowable Community to speak of his and Bataille’s history in the 1930s as if they were parallel (‘notre historie’ …) Yet when Michael Holland worries there is a return to the same kind of rhetoric in Blanchot’s anonymous writings of May 1968 he passes over the fact that the idea of revolt, of uprising and refusal is no longer linked to a father or a fatherland. Thus Blanchot’s Lenin: the one who calls us to go outside …

But the thematics of the crowd are only a manifestation of what Lenin called spontaneism: an uprising will achieve nothing without organisation. Zizek has recently reminded us of this; recalling the Events of May 1968, Derrida will also voice a similar concern: he disliked ‘vibrating in unision’, he says, and even then, the Events are not yet a politics. Communism remains etiolated unless it joins the call to go outside with a determinate political programme. But the word might name a way of linking the common presence of the crowd with a political party, a spontaneous refusal without limits to the revolutionary fire which would sweep the old world away.

If I have made a discovery through writing here it is only one of what I have always tried to suppress: empty time, unemployment, watching dust motes in the air.  Why did this come to me? Because I write here when I cannot write elsewhere; this is a fallen writing which cannot assemble itself into a whole. Sometimes I fantasise that this same experience of inadequacy, of inadequation, but above all, of what might be called the quotidian might have some strange political force, that boredom and lassitude place strange weapons in our hands.

The quotidian (there’s a bug in Typepad which is preventing me using the word in the title of this post): who would look to it for liberatory force? Is it not what reveals itself in the stagnant provinces of Chekhov’s plays? Or in the pettiness of life in the midst of the vast bureaucracies of which Kafka writes? The quotidian appears to be superficiality itself; it is that experience of nullity that reveals itself in tedium and boredom. Whence the desire to escape from the quotidian through the busyness Heidegger calls Erlebnis, the active seeking of sensation. Heidegger considers the quotidian under the heading of inauthenticity; this is not intended as a moral category, he insists, but this is disingenuous. When he writes of idle curiosity and aimless chatter his tone is unmistakably condemnatory.

There is no question that the quotidian can lapse into the most grave depoliticisation: we watch television by ourselves in the evening, each separated from another in our houses. But the quotidian also contains the potential for a repoliticisation: the streets from which revolutions are born are part of the same ordinary life. ‘The quotidian is not at home in our dwelling places’, Blanchot writes, ‘it is not in offices or churches any more than in libraries or museums. If it is anywhere, it is in the streets’. In the streets: in the essay from which I am quoting, Blanchot is writing of Lefebvre’s studies of the  quotidian and wondering to himself what sense there might be in calling for a critique of quotidian life.

What would such a critique imply? For Lefebvre, the quotidian is an untapped political reserve. The fluidity and contingency of quotidian life is always made to conform to an overall order, a system of purposes, meanings and values. Yet there is always a deviation, always unintended deflections which no longer aim to produce an outcome linked to the social whole. Such purposelessness appear spontaneously in quotidian life. To dream idly, to read, to write: such actions are undertaken for their own sake; they have a dynamism and fluidity which escapes the attempt to bind quotidian actions to what is productive or efficient.

This is why the quotidian is always suspect: it is the breeding ground of ideologies. This is why the secret police keep files on everyone, why Mandelstam’s friends had to memorise poems of which no written copy could exist. An analogous fascination drives the market researcher: what is that determines why it is this product that is purchased and not that one? When politicians use focus groups, it is in order to predict and contain the quotidian: to understand the segmentation of swing voters into particular groups in order to target them by specific methods.

You’ve see someone on the street you half-recognise. Who is it? She resembles your friend, and yet she is an anonymous passerby. Yet in the moment of non-recognition it is as though you caught sight of the anonymity of the quotidian itself. Here is another experience of the image of the Other that would allow the relation to any given human being to become indefinite. I have experienced the nudity of the Other – of the other person who no longer presents herself within the cultural categories which allow me to determine my relations to others. The Other, now, keeps me at a distance, at her distance.

The philosophical suspicion of the quotidian lies in this same anonymity. The quotidian human being is anyone at all. I am Heidegger’s Das Man, never yet myself, always distracted and dilatory, ill-disciplined and irresolute and unaware, above all, of the fact I will die. But Heidegger’s recipe for authenticity betrays something telling: what is feared is the limitlessness of the quotidian, its indefinite expansiveness. After claiming the quotidian is capable of ‘ruining always anew the unjustifiable difference between authenticity and inauthenticity’, Blanchot observes:

Day-to-day indifference is situated on a level at which the question of value is not posed: there is [il y a] the quotidian (without subject, without object), and while there is, the quotidian ‘il’ does not have to be of account; if value nonetheless claims to step in, then ‘il’ is worth ‘nothing’ and ‘nothing’ is worth anything through contact with him. To experience quotidianness is to undergo the radical nihilism that is something like its essence and by which, in the void that animates it, quotidianness does not cease to hold the principle of its own critique.

Such nihilism (see the posts at Philosophical Conversations) suspends the relation to death what would allow us to decide between authenticity and inauthenticity. It suspends values, meaning and truth. It is experienced as a wearing away of the power to decide, to resolve, to bring oneself into relation to oneself. The ‘il’, the companion is the ‘subject’ of the quotidian, understood as the locus of experience of the il y a.

What does this mean? In his early writings, Levinas writes of the impersonal “il” as the locus of an an exposure, an opening to what Levinas calls existence in general, existence, as he puts it, without existents: the il y a. The il y a is not linked, unlike Heidegger’s “es gibt” according to Levinas, to “the joy of what exists” but to “the phenomenon of impersonal being,” or what he calls in another essay, “horrible neutrality”. If the “I” opens from the “il” , it does not leave it behind; the il y a may always return. If it does so it is as a horrifying eruption of chaos and indeterminacy. But why does the ‘il y a’ need to be horrifying? Could this ontological insecurity permit the world we share and the others with whom we share it to bring us into relation with what escapes determination?

There is the quotidian : the quotidian is without subject or object; the locus of the experience of the quotidian is the ‘il’: Blanchot presents the quotidian itself as existence without existents, as the il y a and as, here, what is called nihilism. Yet it is not horror he links to the ‘il y a’ of the everyday, but boredom. It is boredom which plays the role of the Grundstimmung which opens up the quotidian.

There is the quotidian: each in the quotidian exists, through boredom, in relation to what is called the ‘il y a’ – to the there is of chaos and indeterminacy. Comes the moment of critique when it is such boredom that brings us together: when we respond to the summons of the Other such that it brings forward in each of us what is called the ‘il‘, the impersonal opening. Critique comes as the everyday allows there to awaken the sharing of that great reserve named by the ‘il y a‘. Thus it is that shared boredom causes there to be born the great movements of rebellion, where each is the passerby and the utopic space of the street bears us towards the future.

Remembering Sartre’s analyses of Giacometti’s sculptures, as well as thinking of the relationship Charlotte Street draws between the double and the uncanny, I wonder whether Giacometti might be said to reveal not the movement of the living, but a strange restlessness which belongs to the dead. What if Jesus’s command, ‘Lazarus, venture forth’ brought forward not the living Lazarus but the one who was still dead, the corpse still wrapped in his winding sheets and stinking of decaying flesh? Perhaps it is this command to which Giacometti’s sculptures would have responded.

Blanchot remarks of Kafka’s The Castle that it is as though the distance the reader normally has with respect to the text had withdrawn into the text itself. As though the distance which is normally permitted to readers had been withdrawn and the reader is pressed up against what might be called the materiality of language. What if one were to understand a similar withdrawal of the normal distance a sculpture permits into Giacometti’s sculpture itself? (Sartre has begun to understand this …)

Blanchot writes of a ‘passion for the image’, that fascination which reveals to us a kind of shadow of an real thing. It is as though what was revealed came before the thing – as though the image were its condition of possibility and not the other way round. Strange priority. The image is what a thing is when it turns from the tasks and projects to which we subordinate it: it is what resists the very impulse of our existence, that is, to create meaning, to as it were ‘exist’ things into being, bringing them towards us as potential tools or as potential raw material. No longer is the thing what offers itself to be deployed; no longer, indeed, does it exist at any distance from me at all. Fascinated, I am as though pressed by the thing up against its image, as though the heart of the thing held me at what one commentator calls ‘its distance’.

The corpse would exist in the manner of the image of the human being such that, with the cadaver before me, I see what life dissimulated: the presence of the familiar other as it is caught, implicated by a kind of unfamiliarity, an uncanniness. I have lost my bearings with respect to the one who died; I am fascinated, instead, with the indefinite, senseless opacity of a body. Such is the situation where, for Blanchot, a corpse begins to resemble itself: it is the image that, at the heart of the living body, hides itself insofar as the living are caught up in our existence in a manner analogous to things. For the most part, cultural categories mediate our relationships: you are my colleague or a vendor, I am a patient or a service provider; each of us disappears for others into the roles we are made to perform. But what happens when the body holds me at its distance? What happens when I confront the image of the other person?

‘Each living man, really, does not yet have any resemblance’, Blanchot writes; ‘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’. One should understand by analogy with Blanchot’s remarks on the image of the thing. The image confronts us when the thing is put out of use, when it no longer has any value with respect to the tasks and projects which occupy us. The thing fails, but even as it disappears from our world, it brings us into contact with the image that as it were keeps its distance at its heart.

What is the image? One might think of it as the materiality of the thing, as its silent weight or presence as it fails to offer itself to the light of meaning. Then with respect to the image of the other person, it is as though the cultural categories which organise our relationship to others in a manner analogus to the way in which our tasks and projects organise our relationship with things have failed. But if these categories can no longer guide us, if it is the other, finally, who is to be revealed, it may appear to have happened too late: the one before me is, on Blanchot’s presentation, is a corpse, or is close to being one.

Perhaps Giacometti’s sculptures remind us of this other. This is because they do not, as Sartre writes, ‘inscribe movement in total immobility, unity in infinite multiplicity, the absolute in pure relativity, the future in the eternal present, the loquacity of signs in the tenacious silence of things’, but indicate another movement, a kind of restlessness. The image is the ‘other’ Lazarus who responds to the call ‘Lazarus venture forth’.

Blanchot observes that the phrase ‘the head clerk’ as it would occur in an ordinary sentence functions in the manner of allegory. What matters is not the phrase itself, but what it communicates; everyday communication, indeed, occurs as though without words. When this phrase occurs in a literary narrative, however, the name ‘head clerk’ no longer designates a really existing person in this way. The phrase has sense, but no reference; what I know about the bearer on this name comes from the novel itself which means ultimately from a mesh of text, from words and sentences.

With literary writing, such words and sentences do not drop away in favour of what they designate, as they do in everyday communication. The reader has only the words to go on, and if it is possible for her to flesh out the body of a world from this meagre skeleton, it is to this skeleton with which each reading must begin. It is as though, as in Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint, instead of a hot dog stand, there were only a piece of paper on which is written the word ‘hot dog stand’; still, it is not such a miracle that the reader is made to imagine a hot dog stand.

Many modern books play with these referential paradoxes; there is something peculiar about the ability to conjure a world from nothing. Yet Kafka’s case, according to Blanchot is singular, for their aim is not simply verisimilitude, that is, the creation of a living, breathing artefact, but to seize upon the condition of possibility of fiction itself.

Kafka’s novels court interpretation; they lend themselves to those readings which would allow their language to disappear in favour of an opening world. This is the danger of watching Orson Welles’s adaptation of The Trial – a danger Kafka knew when he rejected the idea of placing a picture of the insect from Metamorphosis on the cover of a book. There is only the insect of the text, only a papery creature made of words. The insect, like Joseph K., like K., is a fiction. None of them stands in relation to anything outside the text.

Kafka’s novels escape allegorical readings. What is the source of their resistance? The narrative itself does not yield up its meaning to an allegorical interpretation. Here, what resists is what Blanchot calls the symbolic quality of the text: the way it refuses itself an external referent. We are left with the book itself, its ink and pages. In poetry, what resists allegorical reading is ultimately that from which the text is made: the grain of the text, its rhythms, its sonorities, its syntax: all that might be grouped under the heading of the materiality of language. This is what reveals itself more clearly in modernist poetry which has separated itself from the old didactic order to which poetry was formerly subordinated.

Can one say the same of Kafka’s fiction? Certainly, there is the suggestion that literature can come into its own a certain point: ‘We hear in the narrative form, and always as though it were extra, something indeterminate speaking; something the evolution of this form works around and isolates, until it gradually becomes manifest, although in a deceptive way’. It is not difficult to note its landmarks (I’ll come back to that another day). But what is it that becomes manifest even as it is linked to a kind of deception? What does the text indicate? It is the fact that the key to the text lies within the text; the action it unfolds does not occur as though on the stage of a theatre – the distance between reader and text has changed. But what changes it?

In allegory, the rhythms and sonority of language do not matter. In symbolic literature, it is the materiality of language that foregrounds itself as the condition of possibility for the creation of sense. I read of K. passing over the wooden bridge, read of his first frustrating contact with the villages and of his wearying journey to the castle and I form a mental image of that same bridge, those villagers, and even the castle itself. I imagine K. But the text works such that there is nothing outside it to which I could as it were anchor the world of The Castle. It does not so much drift from its anchorage like an errant ship as disperse across the waters.

It as though the book breaks down and scatters itself – as though the coherency of the world it presents had come part. What happens? I am left with words, with words and more words, with the inky scratchings from which I had begun, as a reader, to conjure a world. I am left with the materiality of language, with all that is extraneous in the functioning of everyday speech. It is as if it were the condition of fiction itself, its hard, enduring skeleton, its rocky frame, which wrecks the ship of meaning and drags it under.

The Castle shipwrecks its reader. Or, once again, if we imagine the narration, now, as carrying characters, milieux and so on in suspension had drained away; as though we were left with only the barrenness of the ocean floor, an inhospitable place, a kind of desert without landmarks, a labyrinth without walls. This is no longer a geographical desert but a Biblical one, crossed not in eleven days but in the time of two generations. Then no longer is it a Biblical desert but a literary one in which the reader wanders like K. himself.

What does this mean? The desert is a name for the experience of the resistance of language, of what resists in language. The labyrinth is a name for the space in which the reader wanders in the instant in which the articulation of sense is suspended. But what is this experience? The surging of what, in the text, resists reading. The repetition of a kind of non-sense which reverberates through all literature. Could it be that all narrative revolves around this repetition? That narrative turns around an event which cannot be narrated such that, at the heart of the most sedate novel, the encounter with the void awaits us?

Certainly this is what Blanchot has in mind when he notes that ‘The Castle 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 one commentator to another. Of what do they speak? Of the experience that awaits us at the heart of reading. Of The Castle itself as it names the secret of literature, of fiction.

Scholars trace transformations in Blanchot’s vocabulary – he places inverted commas around words here (‘presence’), he reformulates expressions there (changing worklessness to the absence of the work), ‘writing’ begins to supplant ‘art’ or ‘literature’: no doubt. Scholars give these transformations a kind of teleology: Blanchot is refining his conceptual vocabulary, they say; he is moving from the thought of worklessness to that of the neuter; he no longer speaks of an excess of being, but of an experience which is neither that of being nor nothingness; he loses all patience with ontology.

Some of this is true – there are patterns which invite such readings (even Derrida is tempted – see Resistances). But how can the scholar account for disruptions in these same patterns? The word ‘presence’ returns without quotation marks in the very late works; work and worklessness are mentioned on the last page of the same work (The Unavowable Community) not to mention the complex interlacing of terms in the fragmentary works (The Step Not Beyond, The Writing of the Disaster).

The scholar’s ruin: what is important is the way such words are kept in motion, never settling into the fixity of a system: the fleetness of a movement of research which never pauses to rest, which goes out into strange lands, taking on the customs of those places and giving birth to itself through them just as Vishnu was said to have taken on different avatars in which to incarnate himself. But is there a Vishnu who would remain the same in those same rebirths? Only if the god gives up his place and the possibility of taking place: if he becomes a vigilance that watches over a difference at the heart of thought. A difference which will not allow him, the god, to be grasped in his unity: not Vishnu, then, but Proteus – and not even a God, but a river, Cratylus’s, in which it is impossible to step even once.

Understand that each of Blanchot’s essays undoes itself into the same river, that it is not a question of remaining the same, of the stubborn attempt to preserve itself despite its encounters, like Ulysses returning to Ithaca. It is not Vishnu who is reborn in each essay-avatar but the dispersal the form of a god cannot preserve.

Who was he, Blanchot? Who is he? Only a kind of vigilance, a watching over a difference which required his withdrawal from the world – a retreat which was again a kind of vigilance, which bore witness then and now to the dispersal at the heart of the world, to the darkness of the river beneath the crust of ice. That is also what he was, Blanchot, besides the one who lived in retirement near Versailles and it is what remains of him, watching over us in his writing.

I would like to write a few lines on the notion of childhood in Blanchot.

In The Step Not Beyond, Blanchot evokes the cries of children playing in the garden, evoking: a muffled call, “a call nevertheless joyful, the cry of children playing in the garden: ‘who is me today?’ ‘who holds the place of me?’ and the answer, joyful, infinite: him, him, him [il, il, il]’. As he comments in a later essay, ‘Who?’ in which he cites his own passage: ‘only children can create a counting rhyme [comptine] that opens up to impossibility and only children can sing of it happily’. Only children, then, could make a game of the ordeal of the self in which what one might call exposition occurs.

But the game and the children are themselves figures; if, as Blanchot writes, ‘all words are adult’, it is not because children would speak in a way that is absolutely pure or absolutely true. The child is itself a figure of the ‘il’, of the locus of the ‘he’ or ‘it’ that, as it were, says itself over again without ever lapsing into self-coincidence. It is the play of the ‘il’, of exposition, the neuter, always in default, to which the figure of the child refers.

In The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot relates the story of the son of the camp Lagerführer feared lost among the children of the camps who was made to wear a placard in order to prevent the chance of a terrible substitution:

At ten years old, he sometimes came to fetch his father at the camp. One day, he couldn’t be found, and right away his father thought: he’s gotten swept up by mistake and thrown with the others into the gas chamber. But the child had only been hiding, and thereafter he was made to wear a placard for identification purposes.

This fragment is the emblem of the fixity of relations, of an ordering and mastery that absolutizes the power of the subject – of what, perhaps, one might think under the heading of adulthood. The identificatory placard, the insistence on retaining a proper name which indicates filiation and race, prevents the child being caught up in affliction. If it is childhood in its infinite substitutability that is a figure for exposition – the neuter as the placeholder that is itself without place – the relationship between SS and prisoners in the camps is the refusal of childhood.

One can see then when he writes, as he does in ‘Who?’, ‘let us be these children’, Blanchot asks us to welcome a certain experience of substitution without arresting it or determining its form. In so doing, he asks, in the name of our childhood, our secret neutrality, to articulate a responsibility that would answer to events – horrible and joyful – in which exposition is at play. This is the chance of ethics, which is to say, of answering to the substitution which occurs in our opening, our greeting to the other person.

Recall the lines from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment:

The small room into which the young man was shown was covered with yellow wallpaper: there were geraniums in the windows, which were covered with muslin curtains; the setting sun cast a harsh light over the entire setting…. There was nothing special about the room. The furniture, of yellow wood, was all very old. A sofa with a tall back turned down, an oval table opposite the sofa, a dressing table and a mirror set against the pierglass, some chairs along the walls, two or three etchings of no value portraying some German girls with birds in their hands – such were the furnishings.

Quoting these lines in the Surrealist Manifesto, Breton complains:

I am in no mood to admit that the mind is interested in occupying itself with such matters, even fleetingly. It may be argued that this school-boy description has its place, and that at this juncture of the book the author has his reasons for burdening me. Nevertheless he is wasting his time, for I refuse to go into his room.

Breton refuses, but others have been tempted. We relate the words we read to our own experience, rendering them concrete. It seems churlish to claim that this concretion is a sham: after all, this is just a novel, and we know, as readers, how a novel works. But then Breton wants art to be more than a matter of entertainment or even edification. This is why he claims the descriptions in the novel are vacuous: ‘they are nothing but so many superimposed images taken from some stock catalogue, which the author utilizes more and more whenever he chooses; he seizes the opportunity to slip me his postcards, he tries to make me agree with him about the clichés’.

Clichés? One might object that it is this accumulation of details which permits the verisimilitude of the novel – it becomes tangible, concrete, we accompany the characters in the journeys across St. Petersberg.

Levinas observes of the reader of Dostoevsky that ‘what holds his attention is neither Dostoevsky’s religious ideas, his metaphysics, nor his psychology, but some profiles of girls, a few images: the house of crime with its stairway and its dvornik in Crime and Punishment, Grushenka’s silhouette in Brothers Karamazov’. Is this the case? I am not sure. But Levinas is taking us in an interesting direction:

Introspection is taken to be a novelist’s fundamental procedure, and one supposes that things and nature can enter into a book only when they are enveloped into in an atmosphere composed of human emanations. We think, on the contrary, that an exterior vision – of a total exteriority […] where the subject itself is exterior to itself – is the true vision of the novelist.

This is a difficult thought. Why does Levinas on the one hand assert the importance of ‘a few images’ in Dostoevsky’s fiction and then proceed to write with what seems the greatest abstraction of ‘total exteriority’? A great deal is at issue in this question, which addresses, I think, an issue Steve once touched upon at In Writing. Steve remembers a distinction in Karl Kraus between those readers who take joy in the details the novelist offers us: in the ‘ponies and boots and shoes’ (George Eliot’s phrase) and others who look instead for a theme, obsession or an idea beyond those details. Beyond them? But, as Steve notes, one should not think of there being a simple choice between details and ideas:

It’s a fair distinction, I suppose. I’m in the latter camp for sure. Sometimes the first line is enough for me to reach for the handrails. But I would say that the themes, obsessions and powerful ideas of the better novels are also found at the level of ponies, boots and shoes.

This is what Levinas indicates when, in the same essay, he links particular images in the novel to exteriority – although the latter should not be understood as an idea (obsession is a better word). What, then, does it mean? One approach to this question is to consider Blanchot’s reflections on Hegel’s notion of symbolic art.

Hegel associates symbolic art with that the ancient Orient, in particular the Egyptians, who represented their beliefs through animal symbols. But if, as he writes, ‘what is human constitutes the centre and content of true beauty of art’, then depictions of animal symbols of the divine can only be deficient; if beauty is the sensory appearance of the idea, for Hegel, Egyptian art is not beautiful. When he calls it sublime this is a sign, for him, of its deficiency.

For Hegel, the symbol fails; it remains inadequate to the idea it would bring to expression. But through its failure, its very inability to embody its idea, it might be said to indicate a kind of excessiveness or strangeness which Levinas calls exteriority. Perhaps this is why Blanchot discovers in Hegel’s symbolic art a way of approaching what is most uncanny in the work of contemporary novelists.

‘The symbol is always an experience of nothingness, the search for a negative absolute’, Blanchot writes. But what does this mean? The positive absolute might be understood in term of the absolutum which Nicholas of Cusa used to name God or das Absolute of post-Kantian philosophy as it indicates what is unconditioned: what is at issue here is something which is both self-contained and perfect. But Hegel breaks from the conception of the absolute in both cases claiming the absolute has been separated from the phenomenal world, stripping it of what precisely renders it absolute. It is necessary, for Hegel, to think the absolute and the phenomenal world alongside the knowledge human beings have of the relationship between them. The absolute, for Hegel, is the conceptual system which is contained by the phenomenal world as it develops and gives itself to human knowledge.

What, then, is Blanchot’s negative absolute? One might say it is a resistance to such a conceptual system: it is the weight, density and materiality of matter itself as it refuses dialectical development. Then it is a matter of what escapes human knowledge as it were in the very act of knowing. It is the dark side of what is known even as it seems to allow itself to be known. It is not sheer indeterminacy, but a kind of reserve or resistance in that which gives itself to be known or understood. This is how we might understand the relationship between the particular details of a novel and exteriority.

The classic novel aims at verisimilitude. It wields the abstract power of language to aim at the depiction of concrete things and relationships in the world. But what if, conversely, the details of the story, the same concrete things (Klamm’s pince-nez, the icy light on the snow, the faces of the peasants) are only indications of something which cannot be directly presented? Here, the ‘object’ of such indications is not separate from those details in the manner of, say, Schelling’s absolute. It is not Nicholas of Cusa’s God. But nor are those details merely a moment of the presentation of the absolute to human knowledge, in the manner of Hegel. Those indications are disturbing even as they remain as what they are. They are disturbing because they resonate with a reserve which cannot be known. It is as though they bring with them a vast reserve of materiality, in the manner, perhaps, of the heavy plinths Giacometti sometimes attached to his sculptures.

Then the kind of novel in question indicates what slips from us in the world through its details. In so doing, it embodies not so much a body of knowledge but a black hole which escapes the measure of knowledge, not so much a theory of the world, but an excessiveness over any particular theory. The novel, in its details, keeps memory of what resists the measure of knowledge not because it would constitute an unknowable thing-in-itself, but a reserve in things. It presents the shadow of the real.

Let’s go further still. It is possible to discern in certain novels the attempt to seize this shadow for itself – to make every encounter a movement towards its reserve. Perhaps this is how one might understand Kafka’s The Castle. It is a system of indications comprised of specific encounters and details (I’ll try and substantiate this claim another day).

The novel, one might say, is on a perpetual quest to discover its own condition of possibility (rather like the story by Josipovici Steve mentions).

A story which tells its own story, which seeks to reach behind itself and seize upon its genesis: to manifest, through its details, the outside from which it sprung. A kind of concrete emptiness, a material nothingness which reverberates in the things of the story: these are mysterious formulations, which may sound hopelessly pretentious. Nevertheless, it is this concrete absolute which manifests itself through the most powerful fictional works of the last century (and isn’t it there, too, in a film like Last Year in Marienbad or The Adventure?).

Sometimes I think that the time of such novels and such artworks has passed, that the end has already been reached. But then I remember the music of Smog and Cat Power …

In the opening paragraph of “The Last One to Speak,” Blanchot writes:

Plato: for of death, no one has knowledge, and Paul Celan: No one witnesses for the witness. Nevertheless, we always choose a companion: not for ourselves, but for something inside us, away from us, that asks us to be absent from ourselves to cross the line we can never reach. The companion, lost in advance, is henceforth the loss in our place.

Why does Blanchot bring together Plato and Celan, the themes of dying, witnessing and the notion of the companion?

One might suppose one knows about dying, about its causes, it course and its outcome, it is, after all, something that happens to others around us, but this is to mistake death as a solely physical process with death as a stepping over, and for Plato, a transcendence into the real. Of death, no one has knowledge; but death, as Socrates tells us in the Phaedo, grants knowledge to the immortal soul that was previously incarnated in the body. To strive to know it is necessary to strive to live close to death, as Socrates demands, to attempt to maintain a necessary distance from a body always prone to error. One knows nothing of death, but death is thus just the condition of possibility of knowledge; one sees, but it is the blindspot of the seeing eye that permits sight. Death, in this sense, is double, it allows knowledge, but of death we know nothing, permitting us to attain what is only possible for human beings only by withdrawing from us as something over which one could have power.

How then is death bound up with testimony for Blanchot? One is said to give or provide testimony, it is something of which the one who testifies is capable, that is, which falls within their powers to recall and to put on record what befell them. To use the figure of the companion, as Blanchot does, who is chosen for me is to point to another giving, to a passivity wherein the “il [he/ it]” is brought forward as someone who is “inside us, away from us,” as someone who comes forward in each of us in order to receive. Why does he invoke a companion as it were “within” us, or more precisely, who is away, that is, outside whilst remaining inside each of us? To “die” or, in the sense under discussion, to “witness” is to be traversed, but here it is a notion of death or witnessing that is at stake, that demands a new reflection on receptivity, on passivity.

The companion invoked so briefly in these passages from “The Last One to Speak” should be understood as one who witnesses “in” me when my capacity to witness is impossible. Memory usually allows us to bear witness, to recall something undergone, something taken on or assumed, but in the experience of the sort that Blanchot evokes, I do not bear witness in the first person. Upstream of its capacity to act in the world, the “I” has undergone something unbearable that cannot be recalled in an unequivocal manner. The notion of the companion sets the one who witnesses in place of the “I” at a distance from the “I” who emerges after the experience.

Celan’s phrase, “no one bears witness for the witnesses [Niemand/ zeugt für den/ Zeugen],” that Blanchot cites alongside the quotation from Plato* points to the difficulty of unearthing and testifying to certain experiences that are endured in another sense. The “other” witnessing in question is precisely what is claimed to have occurred in the camps. The paradox of the notion of witnessing in Blanchot bears exacting ethical stakes, for it bears upon the possibility of receiving the testimony of the survivors. The survivor has borne witness as the companion (understood as the locus of an experience of witnessing before the “I” has assembled itself), or, better, the companion survives in place of the “I,” enduring the unendurable. How does the survivor attest? And how can others receive the testimony of an event that barely offers itself to memorization?

In one sense, Celan’s phrase can be interpreted in terms of the impossibility of witnessing for the witnesses – for others, perhaps, who die around me, for the helpless ones whom the survivors resolve to remember. But it can also be interpreted in another sense, referring to the vigilance of a self that endures as “no one” [ne personne], as a traumatized spacing in which the companion as it were steps forward to experience something in my place. The latter can also be said to constitute an impossible witnessing, where impossibility is to be understood in terms of the impossibility of enduring an event in the first person. This is the interpretation of this line that Blanchot seems to offer, pointing to the experience of witnessing that is also an experience of dying: to a traumatized spacing that “survives” the disappearance of the “I”, living on as the companion.

In The Step Not Beyond, Blanchot evokes the cries of children playing in the garden, evoking: a muffled call, “a call nevertheless joyful, the cry of children playing in the garden: ‘who is me today?’ ‘who holds the place of me?’ and the answer, joyful, infinite: him, him, him [il, il, il]’. As he comments in a later essay, ‘Who?’ in which he cites his own passage: ‘only children can create a counting rhyme [comptine] that opens up to impossibility and only children can sing of it happily’. Only children, then, could make a game of the ordeal of the self in which what one might call exposition occurs.

But the game and the children are themselves figures; if, as Blanchot writes, ‘all words are adult’, it is not because children would speak in a way that is absolutely pure or absolutely true. The child is itself a figure of the ‘il’, of the locus of the ‘he’ or ‘it’ that, as it were, says itself over again without ever lapsing into self-coincidence. It is the play of the ‘il’, of exposition, the neuter, always in default, to which the figure of the child refers.

In The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot relates the story of the son of the camp Lagerführer feared lost among the children of the camps who was made to wear a placard in order to prevent the chance of a terrible substitution:

At ten years old, he sometimes came to fetch his father at the camp. One day, he couldn’t be found, and right away his father thought: he’s gotten swept up by mistake and thrown with the others into the gas chamber. But the child had only been hiding, and thereafter he was made to wear a placard for identification purposes.

This fragment is the emblem of the fixity of relations, of an ordering and mastery that absolutizes the power of the subject – of what, perhaps, one might think under the heading of adulthood. The identificatory placard, the insistence on retaining a proper name which indicates filiation and race, prevents the child being caught up in affliction (but affliction, for Blanchot, is another way in which the neuter gives itself to be experienced). If it is childhood in its infinite substitutability that is a figure for exposition – the neuter as the placeholder that is itself without place – the relationship between SS and prisoners in the camps is the refusal of childhood.

One can see then when he writes, as he does in ‘Who?’, ‘let us be these children’, Blanchot asks us to welcome a certain experience of substitution without arresting it or determining its form. In so doing, he asks, in the name of our childhood, our secret neutrality, to articulate a responsibility that would answer to events – horrible and joyful – in which exposition is at play. This is the chance of ethics, which is to say, of answering to the substitution which occurs in our opening, our greeting to the other person.

Blanchot on the image, continuing from the post on dreams from a couple of days ago.

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

How should one approach Blanchot’s notion of the image? In Nadja, Breton recalls a flea-market he used to visit to buy curios,

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

Remembering this passage, Blanchot writes:

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

Blanchot is also drawing upon Heidegger’s famous analysis of the hammer in Being and Time, where, after explaining how our relation to the hammer may be understood in terms of our involvement in making something fast, which in turn is involved in providing protection against bad weather, and ultimately for the sake of [um-willen] providing shelter for Dasein, which is to say ‘for the sake of a possibility of Dasein’s Being’. When the hammer breaks and we hold the broken shaft and head in our hands, it breaks itself from the totality of involvements, that network of references in in terms of which it was understood; it is no longer something which is part of the articulation of one of Dasein‘s projects, but is, like Breton’s perverse object, ‘fragmented, unusable, almost incomprehensible’.

Is this what Blanchot means by the image? Or is he indicating an experience which is far more wide ranging?

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

How should one understand this? Recall the conception of the self Blanchot takes over from Hegel, Heidegger and Kojeve: the self as project, as a ‘temporal transcendence’ which leaps beyond itself and towards a future which it understands in terms of specific tasks. According to this tradition, the self is not a substantive and self-present unity, but an opening to the future, an ek-stasis or standing out which understands itself from what it will accomplish. The ‘I’ as the ‘I can’; the self as potentiality: all relations between the ‘I’ and the world must be understood in terms of the measure implicit in the ‘I’: it is as though the ‘I’ were the Ulysses of the Odyssey, adventuring, risking himself, but always in view of the task of returning to Ithaca, to his Kingdom. In truth, his adventures do not change Ulysses; likewise, the ‘I’ of projects and tasks itself remains constant in its dealings with the world.

Yet in the relation to the image, as Blanchot sets it out, something different occurs. No longer are things experienced in terms of a mediating self-relation. It is as though the relation itself were truncated or suspended – it can no longer reach the thing, the person as an object. Conversely, this relation can no longer be understood as the reaching out, the transcendence or ek-stasis , of a subject. In place of the self, the ‘I’ which would retain is reflexive self-identity, there is the place where ‘personal intimacy is destroyed’ and there is only ‘the menacing proximity of a vague and empty outside’. What remains? Blanchot will often reply: vigilance.

What does this mean? Levinas will always oppose Ulysses’s journey to Abraham’s: the prophet made an authentic voyage insofar as he was willing to give everything up in heeding God’s word. Understand vigilance as the exposure not to a word but to a noise without form which is delivered not from high, but from the heart of the real – a formless noise which does not commands but fascinates, claiming our attention while refusing to allow it to close on a particular, determinate object. Our attention is claimed and lost; no longer can we fix ourselves at a distance from the things in the world which would allow them to enter our schemes and our projects; no longer, indeed, can we determine a place for ourselves at all.

To keep vigil is, one might suppose, to watch over something, but Blanchot is not interested in the experiences of a subject which would be present to itself, able to integrate its experiences. No longer is it possible to synthesise what has happened. Outside the psyche, outside memory and the possibility of memorisation there is a ceaseless unfolding in which the ‘I’ is turned inside out. Who am I, in the experience in question? No one – there is no one there. Not only that, there is no world either, if this is understood in terms of a totality of involvements, a contexture in which things make sense in accordance with the for-the-sake-of-Dasein.

What speaks in the experience in question? ‘the deep, the sordid basis upon which it continues to affirm things in their disappearance’; of what does it speak ‘of less than this thing, but of us. And, speaking of us, it speaks to us of less than us, of that less than nothing that subsists when there is nothing’.

In Blanchot’s terms, there is no one there to be vigilant – but vigilance is there nonetheless. Does this mean someone or something else is vigilant in me – that I have been possessed as by an alien force? Rather, it points to a dispossession; I am occupied not by a subject or a substantive but by an impersonal streaming. It seems the ‘I’ always survives its encounters with things and with persons, leaping forth into the world and returning to itself. But there is always the chance of an experience which causes it to lose its position in the midst of this leap, stranding it among the things and persons towards which it would press forward.

In this instant, (but is it right to invoke a temporal punctum, a particular instant?) self-relation itself is broken; the self is torn apart like Orpheus by the Maenads. Torn apart – but something remains. Not the self, 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 inside of me. In this instant (but this is an instant torn from itself, a ‘now’ in dissension: diachrony) there is no longer the personal ‘I’, the one who is able to act in the world, but the exposition or unfolding of this ‘I’: the ‘il’, the ‘he’, the ‘it’. Vigilance refers not to a personal experience, a traumatic memory, but to the exposure of the inside to the outside, a turning inside-out.

Here it is not matter of positing a pure outside, of substantialising this term, rendering it an inaccessible thing in itself. The outside must be thought in its relation with the inside; exteriority and interiority are entwined and cannot be thought each without the other. Think the ‘I’ and the ‘il’, the personal and the impersonal together – recall the struggle at the heart of the ‘I’, that secret violence which joins and unjoins the unity of the self.

At the essence of the night, there is the dream. And in the interminable day, the image.

I’m not sure I quite understand Serge Leclair’s dense but beautiful book A Child is Being Killed, and I’m not sure I want to. It fascinates me because it remains out of reach, and this is why, perhaps, I have begun to write about it several times without ever satisfying myself I have anything to say about it nor even the means to say it. I remain hesitant about treating a text that answers to the experience of psychoanalysis as I would a theoretical work since I lack this experience. Nevertheless, reflecting on Leclair’s work will allow me to return to the theme of childhood.

Leclair focuses on what he calls “primary narcissistic representation” as it is incarnated in the infans. In the later Freud, primary narcissism structures the first stage of life, preceding the formation and consolidation of the ego. As such, it is once again the “subject” of an experience to which the child cannot oppose itself or overcome since it is undifferentiated or “objectless.” In Leclair, the child becomes the primary narcissistic representation who must be killed not just once but over and again if there is to be the lack of an object required for desire and speech.

Leclair draws on Freud’s “On Narcissism,” agreeing with Freud that the affectionate parent lavishes the attention on their child that they would themselves have liked to receive. In this way, they feed the primary narcissism of the child with their own primary narcissism. The ascription of perfection to the child, the dream that he or she will enjoy a happier and more fulfilled life than his or her parents, that he or she will resist illness, death, suffering and restrictions on his or her will repeats and re-enacts the primary narcissism of the parent who, all along, wanted to be “the center and core of creation”. Freud invokes “His Majesty the Baby” – the image of ourselves that the parent bears as the narcissistic object of their parental love.

Drawing on Freud’s analyses, Leclair underlines the importance of the primal phantasy “a child is being killed” as the attempt to overcome this self-sufficient tyrannical child who is unable to speak and desire insofar as he is without lack. Leclair makes the programmatic claim that psychoanalytic practice must aim at exposing the ongoing labor on the part of the subject to “kill” this wonderful child whom, as he writes, “from generation to generation, bears witness to parents’ dreams and desires”. The psychoanalyst must understand that “there can be no life without killing that strange, original image in which everyone’s birth is inscribed”.

In a phrase that draws Blanchot’s attention, Leclair invokes the “impossible but necessary murder” that permits life to refer to the putting to death of the returning “wonderful child”. The primal phantasy to which Leclair refers echoes Blanchot’s own account of the companion who comes forward in us to experience what cannot be endured in the first person. It recalls the passages on Levinas where Blanchot writes of the “unbearable,” referring to a pre-originary affection – a receptivity to the Other that occurs before the organization of the subject.*

In his fragments on Leclair in The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot refers to the infans as a “silent passive,” a “dead eternity” from which we can only separate ourselves by “murdering” it. This murder, Blanchot notes, liberates our desire and our speech: it is also the condition of the capacity to murder. In this sense, the infans is, he writes, a companion “but of no one”; the one who we seek to particularize as an absence that we might live upon his banishment, desire with a desire he has not, and speak through and against the word he does not utter – nothing (neither knowledge nor un-knowledge) can designate him, even if the simplest of sentences seems, in four or five words, to divulge him (a child is being killed)” (71-72).

It appears that Blanchot concurs with Leclair: in one sense, the child is being killed; the experience of absence annihilates the child by turning upon him a capacity to negate that grants him an apparent freedom. But Blanchot concurs because he allows the child to stand in for the companion and the murder of the child to figure the movement from the first to the third person. The child becomes a name for an asymmetrical and non-reappropriable reserve harbored by the “I” which suspends the possibility of its ever achieving self-presence, of a stable being-there in the first person.

The return of the child is the return of “il” in the place of the “I” as the bearer of the experience in question. Yes, the “I” will regain the power that is proper to it, but in the instant to which Blanchot refers, there is no “I” there to detach itself from the experience who could recollect it or who could synthesize it into a sequence of other instants.

In this sense, Blanchot reads Leclair just as he reads Freud: he points to an alteration – a primary event that is the repetition of a “first time” without anchorage in what is properly individual about our histories, any of us, each of us. A child is being killed: what returns, for Blanchot, is not a tyrannical child but the “il” that disperses or disarranges the power of the “I” – the neuter as refusal. But the attributive function of this phrase, the reference it makes to being, to the positing of the “is,” is itself suspended. The “murder” that the “I” seeks is a murder of the companion, the “il” that would refuse to allow itself to become negated and to be particularized in this negation. This refusal prevents the “is” of the phrase fixing an event in place and time, of assigning a discreet point, a single experience to the origin. The origin is originarily repeated in an experience that undoes the self that is unified under the sign of the “I.”

What is important for Blanchot in his reading is the role Leclair allows the phrase “a child is being killed” to assume, repeating it until its strangeness becomes apparent, until it resonates outside a psychoanalytic context, rejoining his meditation on language. The figure of the child bears no absolute privilege in Blanchot’s writings; in happily acceding their places to the “il,” the children in the fragment are a figure for the words like witnessing in which Blanchot opens a dissension. This is what Blanchot does with words like "work,” “death, “inspiration,” “fascination,” “the "night,” “insomnia,” “vigilance,” “communism,” “community,” “the companion,” “friendship,” in order to name whilst declaring the inadequacy of that and any other act of naming, thereby indicating a heterogeneity borne by the conventional meaning of the name in question. Thus the “other” work is not binary opposite of work, just as the “other” friendship is not enmity. To use formulations of the kind, “a communism without communism,” the “other” night, “daytime insomniac,” etc. is simply to make each word the locus of an impersonal naming.

In this sense, the word neuter, like the figure of the child, has no absolute value in Blanchot’s work; it is a placemarker, the empty, infinite strangeness of the “il” as it resists the attributive function of language, the spacing that unfolds and refolds in speech. The neuter indicates the enigma of nomination, uprooting ostension in the repetition, the flux and reflux of a speech that is the faltering of language, of speech, of reason. It yields its place to the “il”, the "he" or the "it" that hollows out an infinite gap in language whilst remaining empty, rendering intercalary any word that would fill in this initial caesura. The phrase to which Blanchot points in his reading of Leclair is a sign less of the respiration of language than its asphyxiation, less what Levinas might call Saying than smothering, less the wisdom of love of Otherwise Than Being than the madness of a foreword that unravels every word in advance.

Leclair’s child becomes for Blanchot the word that speaks the neuter, the “il” whose interminable repetition says over and again the displacement of the speaking “I.” Perhaps this is what speech would mean in Blanchot – it is not the response to Autrui that Levinas calls Saying, but a response to the impersonal other, to l’autre as it is incarnated in the experience of the excess of language over the power of the speaker, in the void that absents itself in the “I” such that an impersonal language, the rustling and murmuring of a language without a subject, can reverberate in its place.

Goethe murmurs of Romanticism: unfinished books, unaccomplished works. Blanchot responds:

Certainly it is often without works, but this is because it is the work of the absence of (the) work; a poetry affirmed in the purity of the poetic act, an affirmation without duration, a freedom without realisation, a force that exalts in disappearing and that is in no way discredited if it leaves no trace, for this was its goal: to make poetry shine, neither as nature nor even as work, but as pure consciousness of the moment.

Without works? But then it never tried to produce a work, but only to mark in the work, to the extent that it broke its ancient forms, what refuses its measure. Wrecked lives, broken works better to affirm a movement of research, a search for a poetic knowledge. Poetic consciousness: a thinking, a not-yet-thinking in which the meaning of poetry and art is itself transformed. Schlegel, Novalis, Holderlin know themselves, as they write, to be true philosophers, truer to philosophical research than the philosophers around whom later Romantics will gather (Fichte, Schelling). It is as though for these three names such research had to take on another name: the Work, writing, in order not to realise itself but to experience and attest to what cannot be realised in the Work.

Novalis: ‘The poetic philosopher is "in a state of being an absolute creator."’

Schlegel: ‘The history of modern poetry is a perpetual commentary on this philosophical axiom: all art must become science, all science, art; poetry and philosophy must unite.’

The Athenäum is a manifesto, not the first, perhaps, although it is absolute new in affirming, as its content, something like an awareness literature would have gained of itself. Blanchot:

The poet becomes the future of humankind at the moment when, no longer being anything – anything but one who knows himself to be a poet – he designates in this knowledge for which he is intimately responsible the site wherein poetry will no longer be content to produce beautiful, determinate works, but rather will produce itself in a movement without term and without determination. To put this differently, literature encounters its most dangerous meaning – that of interrogating itself in a declarative mode – at times triumphantly, and in so doing discovering that everything belongs to it, at other times, in distress, discovering it is lacking everything since it only affirms itself by default.

Literature lacking itself, in lieu of itself, makes itself responsible in the figure of the poet for keeping open an absence in the work. An absence? A kind of presence, too: presence which only literature can affirm. But what does this mean? If the Romantics are inspired by the French Revolution, it is not by the classical oratory of the revolutionaries, but by the Terror itself. Heads tumbled from the scaffold, death was everywhere.

True, the Athenäum warns us ‘You will not waste your faith or your love on political things, but reserve yourself for the divine domain of science and art.’ Science, art: it is a question of a responsibility which will not be limited by anything but the great Work itself. The Work which indicates an absolute freedom unknown to even to revolutionary politics. And yet it still bears a revolutionary inspiration – it is still a matter of a manifesto, a manifestation:

Art and literature, on the one hand, seem to have nothing other to do than manifest, that is to say, indicate themselves in accordance with the obscure mode that is proper to them: manifest, announce, in a word, communicate themselves. This is the inexhaustible act that institutes and constitutes the being of literature. But, on the other hand – and herein lies the complexity of the event – this becoming self-conscious that renders literature manifest, and reduces it to being nothing but its manifestation, leads literature to lay claim not only to the sky, the earth, to the past, the future, to physics and philosophy – this would be little – but to everything, to the whole that acts in every instant and every phenomenon (Novalis).

The whole: how should one understand this? There is, in the Romantics a kind of power that revels in itself – the work of furious negation, the denial of everything, the denial of God, the denial of nature. This is the Terror: write, negate the given, lift the world from its hinges, celebrate the power to name which grants the world to you as a writer, allowing it to be reborn in your words. Speak the whole, say the world and you no longer depend upon it; speak and the world might be destroyed but you retain the power to speak.

But know that words are never yours, that by writing you only play with the words that were there before you. To write: sham power, power over nothing. Ah but the temptation is there nonetheless: the whole is that space which spreads itself before the writer: the world become page, the page become the blankness before the creation, the writer as the revolutionary who will call everything into being anew. Lay claim, then, to the sky, to the earth, to the past and the future, lay claim to science and art – and lay claim to more than this: the world is yours, the world is reborn on those pages upon which you write. Write furiously, do not pause because then you will remember that this revolutionary movement is empty, that those words were there before you, that language itself is an impersonal structure whose power is lent to you and will soon withdraw. Live in the madness of the revolution, blood pouring from your pen …

Isn’t this to accede to humanism, to the supposition that each of us, any of us, can occupy the place once taken by God? Or is it to depose humanism itself, to restore power to the power of the language which streams through us and allows us to speak? By whose power do you speak? Your own? – Or is it a borrowed power – one which you will punished like Prometheus for stealing the divine fire?

The Romantic poet embodies Prometheus in his daring and in his punishment. For the dullness of the daily round, when words, dull words, steal you from yourself over and again, is the eagle which swoops upon the Titan, devouring anew the lobes of his liver. But there are moments in which the whole glitters before you like fire in heaven and you dream of the Work which would bring heaven to earth.

In the end, the writer has no power over the power of language; the poem must fail; literature falls short of the Work. What matters is only the trace of the Work in such failures, the break in the poem which indicates the whole.

Romanticism inaugurates an epoch; even more, it is the epoch in which every epoch reveals itself for, through it, the absolute subject of all revelation comes into play: the "I" that in its freedom adheres to no condition, recognises itself in nothing in particualr, and is only in its element – its ether – in the whole where it is free.

Romanticism understands the whole as all that is, all that was and all that shall be. And thereby the Romantics confer that great act of recognition which reveals the significance of those titanic creators of the past (Shakespeare, Dante, da Vinci …) and of the innocent splendour of classical art. But if this is its achievement, it also deprives it of consolation: romantic art is adrift from itself, from its classical certainties; its task is not to realise but to indicate, not to complete but to fragment. It is no longer constitutes a world or inhabits one, belonging instead to the whole which retreats from any possible world.

This is what Hegel understood when he proclaimed that art could no longer answer the highest form of Absolute Spirit: Romantic art is deprived of itself, in lieu of itself. But this is the point: by that stroke, a change of epoch has occurred: art becomes merely an object of aesthetic, literary critical contemplation. Art, literature become what they are, attaining themselves at the moment what is called art no longer belongs to a particular world but to the whole ‘behind’ every world. Art has died, but art lives from its death; it is dead, but its dying will become its sole content, understood as what resists, in art, every attempt to secure its meaning and its future.

Holderlin, from ‘Wie Wenn am Feiertage …’/ ‘As when on a Holiday’

Jetz aber tagts! Ich harrt und sah es kommen,
Und was ich sah, das Heilige sei mein Wort.

But now day breaks! I waited and saw it come.
And what I saw, the holy be my word.

Blanchot complains of the French translation: ‘Et ce que j’ai vis, le Sacré soit ma parole‘, ‘And what I saw, the holy, may it be my word’. Rather: ‘le Sacré soit ma parole‘. One does not speak the holy, the holy is speech – the poet’s speech. The holy: here it is a name for the immediate. But why is this? Consider Hart’s remarks on Blanchot on God:

For Blanchot, who is writing on behalf of literature, "God" stands for any immediate singularity, since that which transcends all concepts and that which falls beneath them are both ineffable. Literature wants precisely what it cannot have, the absolutely singular, and it cannot have it because this singularity is destroyed by the very conceptuality that makes literature possible.

Elegantly put. Desire: lierature’s desire to invoke what refuses to call under the generality of the concept. What, then, did the poet see? Perhaps, Blanchot comments, ‘nothing more than the present of this wish, this provoking resolution that gathers in an intimacy of belonging and through an already sacriligeous contact the holy and speech in the space of the extremity of desire’. The poem desires. But what does it desire? That the holy and speech might come together; that one might speak of the absolutely singular. But this is impossible to the extent that the language which the poet is obliged to use remains passes over the singular in favour of the universal. Then the desire of the poem must be without issue. Char: ‘Le poème est l’amour réalisé du désir demeuré désir‘.

Can you say what it is impossible to say? It is a question, here, not of rendering the impossible possible (naming it -), but responding to what withdraws from the possibility of signification. And yet the impossible does not lie beyond the possible in the manner of a frontier. Above all, the impossible is not a term. It is not ‘in’ the poem nor anywhere else. It is neither the one nor the other – it is nothing but the relation itself, desire reaching out to what it cannot possess.

For the most part, language is neutral, unobtrusive in its functioning. But what happens when, as sentence falls after sentence, this neutrality as it were foregrounds itself in its strangeness? When, sentence to sentence, one hears not the world that would be reflected in the words one uses, but just the rhythm of words, words no longer bound to the task of articulating a world. No longer is it a question of representing something through language: it is as though, rather, language had become a thing itself, a thing which exists unto itself, belonging not to the world but to an absence which opens when language no longer functions unobtrusively, neutrally, but when, through the fall of sentences, language itself breaks us from the immediacy of the world we thought we were able to represent.

Adrift from the world we are adrift from ourselves as the ones who occupy a world. Then we know that language had already separated us from the world to which we thought it bound us: that the power to speak is also the powerlessness to speak about the world. Language, our power, is also our fate, and its ‘neutrality’ might be the experience of what makes unbearably present the fact that we are bound to what tears from the world and ourselves. But are we entirely unmoored from the world? We can still speak of common objects and tasks; we talk to one another about one another. For the most part, communication does not fail us. The neutrality of language is its functioning – but then, with the novels of Kafka, say, or Beckett, this functioning is exacerbated and pushed beyond itself, becoming a kind of parody of the unobtrusive. Then the neutrality of language both binds us to and separates us from the world – both at once. Ne uter: neither one nor the other: neither the being of the world nor the absence of the world. The oscillation of being and non-being.

From Leaves of Hypos, trans. Jackson Matthews

Ce qui m’a mis au monde et qui m’en chassera n’intervient qu’aux heures où je suis trop faible pour lui resister. Vielle personne quand je suis né. Jeune inconue quand je mourrai.
Le seule et meme Passante.

What brought me into the world, and will drive me out of it, comes to me only at moments when I am too weak to resist. Old when I was born, She will be young and unknown when I die.
The same, the only Passer-by.

A few lines in the margins of Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation. When will I understand what he means by le neuter?

What are the characteristics of Char’s poetry? Blanchot lists: 1) There is the emphasis on the substantive ‘the absolute inextinguishable’, ‘the impossible living’, ‘pleasure’s moaning’, ‘Chilling’ [Transir], ‘Bordering’, 2) an extraordinary density of images, which multiply along the phrase, 3) ‘a tendency to paratactic order; when words having no articles defining them, verbs without a determinable subject (‘Alone dwell’), and phrases without verbs speak to us without any preestablished relations that organise or connect them’. These are all part of the articulation of a fragmentary speech [parole]

The fragment – not a negation of an existing whole, just as it is not part of that whole. Neither privative nor positive, then; one must think in terms of a separation and discontinuity and even an exile. In these terms, one must think the fragmented poem not in terms of what it does not accomplish, but in terms of an accomplishment measured by another measure. It is a matter of writing, of a questioning, or an affirmation linked to the multiple, to what lies beyond unity.

Is the fragment an aphorism? No, Blanchot insists: the aphorism has a horizon; it closes itself – it is bounded. By contrast, the peculiarity of Char’s poetry is the way it is composed of separate phrases each of which seems separate from the others – each isolated and disassociated to the extent one is obliged to leap from phrase to phrase across blank spaces of text. A peculiar arrangement. Here, it is not a question of harmony, unless this is understood by analogy to what Heraclitus thought as the invisible harmonia behind paired contrasts: that hidden harmonia linked to other enigmatic words to which he granted a new profundity: logos, aletheia, physis. As with Heraclitus, it is a question of what is disjunct, of a divergence or breakage which permits the opening to an exteriority beyond a simple signification. Is it possible to say that something is named thereby – that an indication occurs by dint of that relation which reaches beyond what can be signified, that, as with Heraclitus, there is a revelation of something that is common and hidden, which reveals and conceals?

Heraclitus often speaks in the neuter singular; one finds phrases like ‘the-one-thing-wise’, ‘the not-to-be-expected’, ‘the-not-to-be-expected’, ‘the-not-to-be-found’, ‘the-not-to-be-approached’, ‘the common’. What do they designate? Neither the Platonic idea nor the Aristotlean concept. The neuter – not a third gender so much as that which cannot be assigned to a genre. It is neither general nor particular; neither subject nor object. Does this mean it oscillates between the two, or that it awaits determination? It is, rather, a question of another kind of relation which escapes us for as long as we pass over what is specific to a thinking-poetry, a movement of research. Another relation? One which opens onto a height analogous to the one Zeus assumes when he measures with his scales the balance of forces at the Trojan War?

In Char’s poetry, an archipelagic speech permits the open sea to surge between phrase-islands. Something passes – but who passes? Does ‘the passing’ refer to the one who passes or to another movement? ‘How does one live without the unknown before us?’ asks Char. Poetry, the relation to the unknown. Not the not yet known, nor indeed the absolutely unknowable one would approach by means of a process akin to negative theology. Poetry: the relation to the unknown as the unknown, keeping it unknown, allowing it to remain under cover. It is a question of indication. Poetry: speech which indicates. It is, for Blanchot, the simplest speech. Why? Because its speech is the way the unknown is indicated, the way it is named and brought to language.

1.

For Hölderlin, writing to his friend Böhlendorff, the ‘fire of heaven’ is present to the Greeks in the same way as its opposite the ‘clarity of representation’ is present to the Germans. Indeed, it is this clarity, according to this strange reciprocity, that would grant the Greeks the extraordinary capacity to produce such precisely determined work. The Greeks, indeed, ‘have little mastery over holy pathos since this was innate to them.’ What is proper to the Greeks is the ‘fire from heaven’, but to claim it as their own, they had to pass through what was foreign to them – through the ‘clarity of presentation.’ Homer would have accomplished this transition. After Homer, however, the Greeks were able to ‘excel in their gift for representation’ because the author of the Iliad was able to ‘plunder the Junonian sobriety of the Occident for the benefit of his own Apollonian kingdom, thus truly appropriating the foreign element as his own.’

Conversely, the same ‘clarity of presentation’ is what is proper to contemporary civilisation, according to Hölderlin. To grasp themselves, to make divisions and structures, to enclose and enframe: The Hesperides, for Hölderlin, must therefore pass through the heavenly fire that is foreign to them. This is what, according to Heidegger, reading the Hesperides as the Germans, and literalising Hölderlin’s eschatology, Hölderlin’s poetry would permit. The Germans bear the danger of ‘suppressing every fire on account of the rashness of their capabilities, and of pursuing for its own sake the ability to grasp and to delimit, and even of taking their delimiting and instituting to be the fire itself.’ They must confront the heavenly fire anew, which is to say, for Heidegger, to bring themselves into an encounter the Greeks. The Germans must thus bind themselves in a sort of reciprocity with the Greeks, to those who are attuned in wonder to the coming to presence [anwesenheit] of phenomena.

In his reading of Hölderlin, Blanchot argues that to seek to bring oneself before the fire today is to risk dissipating the same ability to delimit and determine before it is properly appropriated. He quotes Hölderlin: ‘Who can withstand it, whom does the terrible splendour of the Ancient World not cast down, when it seizes him, as it did me, like a hurricane tearing up forests of young trees, and when he lacks, as I do, the very element from which a strengthening self-identity might have been derived?’. Hölderlin would not have been able to bring himself face to face with the Greeks; dazzled, he fears that he will be torn from himself. Heidegger would agree: the divine fire frightens Hölderlin because he is too German – because he cannot bear the fire itself. Yet Heidegger also has faith that Hölderlin’s work is marked by this confrontation – that Hölderlin would have been able to maintain a relationship with the foreign element.

As Blanchot comments, the young Hölderlin ‘yearns to take leave of his form, escape his limits, and be united with nature’; inspiration is the joyful attempt ‘to return into life’s unity, into its eternal ardour, unreserved and immeasurable’; and yet, Blanchot notes, ‘This movement is also desire for death.’ Empedocles would attempt to burst into the heavenly realm through dying – ‘to be united with the fiery element, the sign and presence of inspiration, in order to attain the intimacy of the divine relation’.

Yet in the older Hölderlin, this joyful attempt to seize upon the origin of inspiration, to leap, with Empedocles, into the volcano, becomes more complex. The poet responds to a double requirement. How do the finite and the determined enter into relation with the infinite and the undetermined? Blanchot writes of Hölderlin, ‘On the one hand, the greatest hostility to formlessness, the strongest confidence in the capacity to give form – der Bildungstrieb – on the other, the refusal to let himself be determined, die Flucht bestimmer Verhältnisse, the renunciation of self, the call of the impersonal, the demand of the All, the origin’. This manifests itself in what Blanchot calls ‘the destiny of the poet’ – in the experience of one who risks an ‘immediate relation with the sacred’ such that he can communicate the sacred (or rather, the perverted essence of the sacred) in his poetic work. But this is an unendurable experience. It is as if the gods who would once have granted what Hölderlin calls the ‘measure’ to the Greeks are placeholders for an experience of khaos, the abyss.

2.

In Blanchot’s words, the sacred ‘threatens ceaselessly to tear and disorient us’. But did it not threaten the Greeks, too? Is it possible to discern a reserve concealed by the gods themselves – a turbulence of the sacred before the gods, in their charisma, could grant a shared but pre-reflective ethos to a people? There is a transgression of shared, pre-reflective norms that constitute what Hegel would call Greek Sittlichkeit that would reach back before the Greeks and before the institution of any possible people. It is this non-Greek opening that Blanchot’s Hölderlin witnesses. His attempt to impose form on the indeterminable is what defines Hölderlin as the poet in our time – which, for him, is the ‘time of distress.’

The time of distress: for Blanchot, this phrase always designates ‘the time which in all times is proper to art’: it is the time of dispossession, of the impossible attempt to determine the indeterminable that becomes explicit in the wake of the gods. It is a time that reveals itself not in Hölderlin’s call for the return of the heavenly fire to Germany, but in a kind of limitless distress. For it is in bearing witness to the absence of the gods, to the ruins of the temple, that Hölderlin develops his invented mythology, which is to say, his construction of an imaginary Europe in line with Herder’s palingenesis. Hölderlin pretends that this Europe exists and that he, the poet, speaks for its community. In so doing, he pretends there is a relationship between poet and audience of the sort he believed Pindar to have enjoyed even as he knows this relationship is impossible.

At the same time, as David Constantine observes, this does not constitute an act of deception, since the ‘mythology’ itself is palpably mythological. The appeals for community, for the return of the gods and for a communicable myth are themselves mythological figures. Hölderlin’s mythical Europe is a way of marking its distress; to elect himself as the poet who is bound to its phantasmic community is another way of indicating the way in which we belong to a time of distress.

Blanchot’s Hölderlin bears witness to the risk that he might not even be able to reclaim his existence for himself, let alone, as in the case of Heidegger’s Hölderlin, answer through his work to the destiny of Heidegger’s Germany. For Heidegger, echoing Hegel, the great work of art is to be thought in terms of its answering ‘absolute need’, referring to the ‘fashioner and preserver of the absolute’. But Blanchot conceives need in another sense. It is true, Blanchot writes, that the ‘great writer’ is able to hold back from effacement: ‘he maintains the authoritative though silent affirmation of the effaced “I.” He keeps the cutting edge, the violent swiftness of active time, of the instant’; at the same time, however, the work turns away from him. Yes, he is able to determine the work, to leave his mark, but this is only the secondary power to impose silence upon the word. Only the strength to silence is his; it is ‘what remains of him in the discretion that sets him aside’.

Hölderlin’s greatness: he allows a kind of longing to resound; he marks his work with failure, with distress. He writes in the time of the distress, which is to say, the time without the heavenly fire.

3.

The modern artist, the writer without the shelter of the old didactic order of church and state, bears witness to the fact that lethe, the river of forgetting, awaits the one who would bring the work into existence such that that work can never set truth itself to work. World, revealed through the ‘un-’ of unconcealment, through the ‘a-’ of aletheia, can never be stablised such that a people could be instituted; the nation can never be brought into history by a unifying work. Holderlin is the ‘poet of poets’ for Blanchot as well as Heidegger because his work is marked by the traces of a trauma that is too much to bear, that bears witness to the khaos that can never be brought into relationship with a Heideggerian world or epoch. In place of ‘the measured favour of divine forms as represented by the Greeks (gods of light, gods of the initial naïveté)’, Blanchot comments, there is now ‘a relation that threatens ceaselessly to tear and disorient us, with that which is higher than the gods, with the sacred itself or with its perverted essence’. Holderlin’s work is torn and disoriented. Does it indicate what is higher or better than the gods? Or does Blanchot refer to the khaos from which the gods emerged? It is not the divine laws that would be, for Heidegger, the ‘simple and essential decisions’ that open to a people who share a belonging to historical institution, but the sacred transgression, the sacred as transgression, in which these same laws are suspended.

The poet, according to Hölderlin’s poem, wanders from land to land in the night like a priest of Dionysos, writing of the night in which he wanders. Hölderlin knows that inspiration is the risk borne by the poet in contact with the night. This is why he writes in response to the dedicatee of ‘Bread and Wine’, ‘it is fitting to consecrate garlands to Night, and song/ because she is sacred to those astray and to the dead,/ though herself she subsists, everlasting, most free in spirit.’ The poet wanders. For Heidegger, this is not an empty nomadism, a movement without repose. The night in which Heidegger’s Hölderlin wanders is the night before festivity, before Germany comes into relation with the foreign element. The poet wanders. But Blanchot’s Hölderlin cannot look forward to the same festival, to the ‘other’ beginning of poetic dwelling. The time of distress is now the condition of art.

What are poets for in a time of need, Heidegger asks? A time of need – our time – is the time without gods: the time in which both the gods are indifferent to the fate of the human being and the human being, in turn, forgets the gods. Ours is thus the time of the default of the gods, as both Heidegger and Blanchot claim. The danger is not just the forgetting of the gods, but the forgetting of this forgetting. What are poets for? Hölderlin’s poets wander the earth like the priests of Bacchus, but the meaning of this straying might disappear. In time, poetry seems to be ‘for’ nothing other than a word-play without responsibility, and art is able to disappear into the archives of the history of literature or the history of art.

Both Heidegger and Blanchot remember what for Hölderlin is the defining moment of modernity, the withdrawal of the holy, whether understood as the forgetting of the gods or, in turn, as the forgetting of the original context of what we would have only recently learned to call art. For both, the gods have fled; the Greek temple has become an artwork because it is no longer a place of worship, just as, no doubt, the churches of the present day might one day become the architectural markers of a vanished religion. But Heidegger dreams with Hölderlin of another beginning, of a return of the gods, and of the people who would be united by the poem. He holds out for a Volk to come who would be gathered by the ‘working’ of the work of art. Blanchot, however, argues that the modern work of art disperses its addressees such that no gathering would be possible. The gods will never return and the wounds of the community can never be healed.

4.

The time of distress – this is what is allowed to emerge in the modern work of art, when the work has a greater chance to affirm itself as itself, without shelter. What keeps us in ignorance of the modernity of the modern art is the way in which this affirmation is dissimulated by the secular cult of the creator-genius.

Hölderlin is an author whose relation to the work is not that of the demiurge over his creation.  His signature is marked by the time of distress; he has retained only the secondary power to impose silence, thereby providing a temporary determination of the work in the poem.

‘He who writes the work is set aside; he who has written it is dismissed. He who is dismissed, moreover, doesn’t know it. This ignorance preserves him. It distracts him by authorizing him to persevere’; but Blanchot will spend hundreds of pages showing us that this ignorance is troubled by an awareness of what is lost each time the artist begins again. ‘The writer never knows whether the work is done. What he has finished in one book, he starts over or destroys in another’. Yet Blanchot’s Hölderlin is afraid because he experiences writing as a temptation towards the measureless. He takes as his task the preservation of the absence of the gods, which is to say, the absence of the figures of the sacred. He writes, ‘God’s default helps us [Gottes Fehl hilft]’, but the same default also threatens to unleash the terrifying experience with which the inspired poet is now in contact.

Hölderlin is thus dependent upon what he receives from the absence of the gods, upon the infinite reserve that allows him to exist as a poet only in the tone he imposes upon it in silencing it. But it is this ability to claim responsibility for the origination of the work of art, to assume a kind of authority over what terrifies him, that makes him a quintessentially Blanchotian poet. Blanchot’s Hölderlin knows that poetry is born from the struggle between determination and the indeterminable, but it is his knowledge that this struggle always exposes him to the time of distress that makes him the quintessential modern poet for the author of The Space of Literature.

An enigmatic footnote from Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation: ‘Heidegger is essentially a writer, and therefore also responsible for a writing that is compromised (this is even one of the measures of his political responsibility)’ (437).

But why should Heidegger be understood first of all as a writer? Being and Time, after all, is a text of transcendental philosophy, one which commences with human Dasein in order to raise the question of the temporality of being. What changes with ‘What is Metaphysics?’? Blanchot notes that this text, delivered to a community of professors, questions the organisation of the faculties of the university. But does it do so in view of what might be uncovered through a practice of writing? No doubt Blanchot is thinking of Heidegger’s later texts, where it is a matter of speaking from Ereignis, and not about it; of performing the movement through which language, so to speak, is propriated or enowned by the truth of being such that it bears witness to a silence within language.

Heidegger will come to find the word metaphysics and even the word philosophy problematic. He will present his practice as a simple thinking – a practice that attempts to hold itself into Da-sein, into the site in which truth happens or has happened, which is to say, respectively, in terms of thinking and of a dialogue with poetising. It is a question of poiesis, of bringing forth.

How one should understand its relationship to the testimony of those whom Heidegger refused to acknowledge as such: the dead of the concentration camps? Blanchot writes:

Heidegger, this thinker of our own time, is so bereft of naivety that he has to have disciplines to put it into perspective, disciples, moreover, who can’t be called upon to excuse him from what happened in 1933 (but this last point is so serious that one cannot be content with an episodic allusion: Nazism and Heidegger, this is a wound in thought itself, and each of us is profoundly wounded – it will not be dealt with by preterition). (Our Clandestine Companion)

What was unthinkable and unforgivable in the event of Auschwitz, this utter void in our history, is met with Heidegger’s determined silence. And the only time, to my knowledge, that he speaks of the extermination, it is as a ‘revisionist’, equating the destruction of the eastern Germans killed in the war with the Jews also killed during the war; replace the word ‘Jew’ with ‘eastern German’, he says, and that will settle the account. (Thinking the Apocalypse)

A wound to thought – Blanchot will claim that Heidegger obviated a responsibility specific to writing. What does this mean? According to Blanchot, writing, although it seems to be irresponsibility itself, is indeed linked to a certain vigilance. It is here he draws on a formulation from Levinas: language is already scepticism, he writes in The Writing of the Disaster.

Scepticism – but of what? Of language as it constructs anything – as it lends itself to the act of negation that allows words to lift themselves from what they designate. An act of negation? Let me call this, too quickly, the work of death (I am thinking, of course of Hegel, and of the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit – but I have tried to write about this before). Contrast this to the murmuring of what Blanchot calls dying – of the suspension of the work of death, whereby it is impossible to complete a negation and to articulate a particular, determinable word. (There is an article at this journal which elaborates this point in more detail).

This is the meaning of the murmuring to which Blanchot frequently alludes in The Infinite Conversation. It does not refer to the letter of texts by Beckett or Sarraute, but to what reverberates through their texts. Murmuring has no specific content; it is formless: it is not yet this or that word. As a suspension of signification, it prevents the very formation of a word. One might think this suspense, in contrast to the work of death, as it is linked to a certain worklessness or dying. The word is, if I can put it this way, forever idled. (This does not prevent Blanchot from writing somewhat confusingly of the poetic word. But here he means only the reverberation of the murmuring of which I have written, which is not the Anklang of the truth of being.)

Language, in Blanchotian poetry, is scepticism. Strangely, it is through this scepticism that language is capable of a kind of testimony. But how is this bearing witness, this testimony, possible? Compare Heidegger: a certain kind of language (thinking-saying, poetry [Dichtung]) is able to witness the silence linked to the truth of being. For Blanchot, it is not the truth of being that is witnessed but, as it were, its errancy or non-truth. This may sound like nonsense; if it does, it is because I am writing quickly and schematically (I have tried to write more patiently and carefully on this topic elsewhere). Broadly, it means that nothing can be built upon the contentless murmuring of which Blanchot writes; no great work can be erected on what Heidegger might call in the language of the Contributions the site of Da-sein such that the truth of being can pass. Rather, murmuring unworks all such sites; it might be understood in terms of a limitless murmuring, a bad infinite that prevents the institution of Da-sein.

Murmuring, then, is that to which writing answers according to Blanchot. Heidegger is a writer insofar as he also attends, albeit in a different way, to what Blanchot calls murmuring or worklessness. But this is also what makes him responsible as a writer, according to Blanchot. If Heidegger is close to attending to what Blanchot calls murmuring, he is not close enough; he still emphasises truth – the possibility of an act of creation or institution that would happen as Da-sein – over untruth. Why does Heidegger neglect to condemn the Holocaust in its specificity – that is, without linking to the mechanised food industry or comparing its victims to German casualities etc.? For Blanchot, it is because he cannot attend to a kind of murmuring within language that one can find in the cry of the Other. Here, Blanchot has drawn very close to the Levinas of Otherwise than Being.

The cry of the Other: is this sheer hyperbole? Sentimentality? I will not reprise the argument one finds in texts by Caputo and Fotì that Heidegger passes over experiences of pain and suffering in his readings of the poems of Trakl and others. What allows Blanchot to link worklessness to the cry? It attests to something like the unworking of the power or the potential of the body. Then one might put the idled body alongside the idled word …

I will write quickly and schematically that the poet’s testimony is thereby related to the testimony of the concentration camps. Murmuring in some way joins them both. This opens the possibility of understanding Blanchot’s reading of Celan. Of course, I have explained barely anything here. I still, however, want to ask this question: what relationship does worklessness have to Heidegger’s history of being, the Seynsgeschichte? It indicates, perhaps, another kind of poietic thinking – another kind of bringing-forth. The task: read Blanchot’s fragmentary texts alongside those being published in Division 3 of Heidegger’s collected works. Might one understand their fragmentariness in terms of the incapacity of The Last One to Speak, The Writing of the Disaster and The Step Not Beyond to provide a site for Da-sein?

A little later, Guido Schneeberger (to whom Farias owes a great deal) sent me or had sent to me by his publisher the speeches Heidegger made in favour of Hitler while he was rector. These speeches were frightening in their form as well as their content, for it is the same writing and very language by which, in a great moment of the history of thought, we had been made present at the loftiest questioning, one that could come to us from Being and Time. Heidegger uses the same language to call for voting for Hitler, to justify Nazi Germany’s break from the League of Nations, and to praise Schlageter. Yes, the same holy language, perhaps a bit more crude, more emphatic, but the language that would henceforth be heard in the commentaries on Holderlin and would change them, but for still other reasons. (Thinking the Apocalypse)

You know the dream: a language of proper names, a unique word for each object. One might imagine Adam bestowing the name of everything in the world … In a marvellous book, Elena Russo contends that this Edenic language is what, in fact, many of my favourite authors seek.

Recall the scene in de Forêts’ The Chatterer where the garrulous narrator, who has suffered a beating the night before and is lying wounded in the snow, hears the singing of children:

At first I could have sworn that those voices were falling from the sky above, or that they came from the most remote corners of the earth, when in truth they were close at hand, sending wave after wave onto the icy air, a choir of such subtle dissonance, that it could have been mistaken for the racket of wakening wings.

The narrator envies the immediacy of the song, the fact that it means nothing, that it has no determinable content. Is it this blessed state he is trying to achieve through his chatter? Is it in this way he could recover his innocence in the plenitude of music? For Russo, he joins the narrators of other books in the attempt to reach the simplicity of silence beyond language, to find the mystical intuition that would restore the world in its immediacy.

Pure and secret incantation, just beyond the pale and heavy world we carry within us, graced by that special seduction of all that is untouched by the corrupted smell of sin, charming us, as can only the evocation of the words joy, sun, spring; coming forth out of a bloodless, sexless universe, . . . its aerian loveliness so unlike my wounded animal’s defeat; clear as a night freeze, fresh as a bowlful of spring water; ideal, at long last, like all things that suggest the existence of a harmonious world.

The dream of a self-expression which would return one to a pre-linguistic state – to an innocence before language: isn’t this what one finds in Blanchot: a stark choice between existence and representation? This is what Russo contends. I will venture a response here, although I know I will be returning to her book again and again.

Blanchot’s own brand of linguistic idealism is representative of a whole tradition, although it stems from contradictory presuppositions that have hardly any coherence at all in the eyes of anyone who has not completely surrendered to the seductiveness of mystical linguistics. Language appears to him alternatively as what separates us from reality (it is an abstract and reductive structure that we arbitrarily impose upon the world) and as an instrument of freedom and creativity that allows man to free himself from the fetters of daily reality in order to experience a more elusive and spiritual essence of things.

But perhaps the distinction between existence and representation in Blanchot is more complex than might appear. I will try, rather feebly, to sketch a response to Russo here.

Blanchot roots his account of language in the distinction between existence and existents as one finds it developed in Levinas’s early philosophy (see Time and the Other). Recall Levinas’s analyses: there is an existence without existents: the swarming of a pre-cosmos, the unordered chaos. This is the breakdown of the world which reveals itself in certain experiences. It is here that a future that seems promised to the human being is denied to it; the world no longer pretends to be fitted for human comprehension. What is ‘real’, here, seems closer to the Real of Lacan or Zizek, resisting an order which it can only present as a kind of excessive absence-presence, a looming reserve, a mark of a refusal to signify. Granted, the world only gives itself to be experienced thus in a certain suffering or pain. You cannot flee upstream from that pain: you are riveted to the spot. In this experience you encounter being in the raw, so to speak. There is no escape, no evasion.

What has this got to do with language? In a sense, the power to speak is to negate particular things, to take them up into an ideal existence. When I speak, I can determine the world; my power to speak bears witness to this power of determination. Granted, I can fall into talking in cliches, in stock expressions, merely passing the word along as Heidegger puts it somewhere – perhaps it is more appropriate to note that the power to speak confirms the power of the human being (I’ll come back to this) …

But there are experiences in which it is impossible to name anything, in which I am no longer able to wield the power that belongs to me as a speaker, as the animal endowed with logos. Heidegger, for example, places great emphasis on those times when the word will not come – when I cannot find the word. It is as though a tool is broken. Then there are particular uses of language, call them rhetoric or poetry, which, according to the ancient figure, circulated from Aristotle through Quintillian, clothes the naked body of language. Sometimes, the way I say something, the way I intone a particular sentence for example is more important than the content of that sentence. Is there, at the ‘core’ of language, a simple mirroring of the world? There is, rather, a movement in language towards opacity, as if one cannot detach the clothing of thought from its body, the external form from the internal content.

Language, according to Blanchot, exhibits two contrasting movements – it moves towards purification, transparency and towards idiomaticity, which it displays through an emphasis upon rhythm and sonority. It is not, then, a lost immediacy for which Blanchot yearns, over against the idealism to which he is condemned by language. There is no edenic experience in which things are given in immediacy. To be sure, there is a way the thing resists our grasp (how do I write of this blooming, radiating tree before me?) – but it has its correlate in the way language, too, is resistant.

Existence without existents – is there an experience of language deprived as it were of negation? A language in which negation, which Hegel will also call death, cannot complete itself – in which a kind of dying or becoming resounds in the place of particular words, particular meanings? I venture that there is a peculiar doubling – there are two experiences of streaming, two rivers into which one cannot step even once. Edenic plenitude remains a myth. Language does not simply separate us from the ‘real’ world, but nor is there the idealistic correlate of this apparent realism. Language can drift towards idiomaticity – towards its own refusal to signify…. Contra Russo, I contend that there is a redoubled refusal in Blanchot’s writings in which a certain refusal within language and a refusal in the opening of the world seem to echo one another. Abyss calls out to abyss, vortex to vortex.

This what Blanchot foregrounds, I think, in the essay on The Chatterer. At issue in Des Forets’ book is a chattering without content, to the undoing of the form of language and the form of the world. The author is not God, or a replacement for God – but nor is the author the devil. Non serviam is the devil’s motto: but it is not simply that the author is devilish, deforming the world, but because the language of the poem echoes a movement in the world towards the unformed, towards what cannot be formed. The poet has caught out the world’s secret, its hidden manicheism: that it was made by God and by the devil. There was no Eden, no sensory and immediate access to the things. Yes, the word as it negates the thing is a simulacrum of that thing; the word becomes a thing in its turn, with its own life. But that is not all that language does. There is a rebellion against negation: an excess or dying which reveals itself in a murmuring below the level of formed words.