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<The following is a draft from chapter three of Lars Iyer's Blanchot's Vigilance. It will be up for a limited period only.>

Giacometti destroys his statues, dozens of them. His aim is simple: he means to sculpt the human being in a manner sculpture has been as yet unable to achieve. Upon what techniques does he draw? There is the influence of Egyptian art which, according to Schaefer – an authority with whose work Giacometti was familiar – attempts to depict the essence of a person rather than their real appearance.[i] Schaefer attacked the Greek discovery of the artistic representation of perspective because it breaks with the way in which we remember images – frontally or as a profile. Giacometti says enthusiastically: ‘no other sculptures as closely resemble real people as Egyptian sculpture’; but what do they resemble? Not simply the sculptor’s models.[ii] True, the portraits of Diego, Giacometti’s brother, are noticeably portraits of this and not another individual. But perhaps Giacometti has another kind of resemblance in mind.

Giacometti claims in an interview he always turns familiar models into strangers: ‘You are no longer the person I thought I knew. You no longer have any particular characteristic. As for individuality, you become a generalised head, the head of everyone’.[iii] Such impersonality was already a practice in Egyptian art: it is difficult to tell a sculpture of Akhenaten from one of his wife Nefertiti, for example. Laurie Wilson speculates that this was to provide a political stability in maintaining the appearance of an unbroken continuity in the royal line. Perhaps, too, it was a way of keeping something from death, and some speculate that Egyptian sculptures are ‘doubles’ or ‘ka’ figures, depicting an ethereal replica of the body. The aim of sculpture was to preserve the double, the soul, from its 'second' death. Were Giacometti’s post-surrealist figures likewise a way of keeping something alive?

Sartre is in no doubt: the statues attest to the power of the human being to begin. Giacometti presents a living human being and not a corpse; this is his great achievement. Giacometti’s aim, Sartre writes, is ‘not to glut galleries with new works but to prove that sculpture is possible by carving’.[iv] But how will he accomplish this? It is as simple, Sartre says, as Diogenes proving the possibility of movement to Parmenides and Zeno by simply walking up and down. Yet that simplicity is hard to achieve. Giacometti: ‘If I only knew how to make one, I could make them by the thousands …’[v]

Giacometti's workshop is covered in the dust made by his tenacious carving. If he destroys his statues, this is the correlate of a desire to escape the heaviness of the material with which he works. ‘Never was substance less eternal, more fragile, more nearly human’, Sartre comments.[vi] ‘Giacometti's substance – this strange flour that slowly settles over his studio and buries it, that seeps under his nails and into the deep wrinkles on his face – is the dust of space’.[vii]

The dust of space: this is what remains as Giacometti resists the attempt to erect a monument, to fill space. ‘Giacometti knows that there is nothing superfluous about a living person because everything is function. He knows that space is a cancer that destroys being, that devours everything.’[viii] Everything is function: this is why, for Sartre, it is necessary for the sculpture who would seek the true semblance of the human being to pare away all superfluity, to reduce what is sculpted to a bare frame. Giacometti’s intention ‘is not to offer us an exact image but to produce likenesses which, though they make no pretence at being anything other than what they are, arouse in us feelings and attitudes ordinarily elicited by the presence of real men’.[ix]

How is this possible? The classical sculptor is constrained by his own imitative practices. His temptation is to concentrate in the sculpture every likeness to his model he can find. In this way, he seeks to eliminate his own perspective, to attain, with the sculpted form, an absolute semblance; but it is in this ambition that the absolute is lost. For the sculptor is burdened by presumption that the human being occupies perceived space as would any object.

How, then, might one sculpt the absolute? Giacometti accepts the relativity of a perspective, pushing the sculpture back into an indefinite space, away from any attempt to remain faithful to every semblance in his model. For Giacometti, Sartre emphasises, the human being is presented at a distance: ‘He creates a figure “ten steps away” or “twenty steps away”, and do what you will, it remains there. The result is a leap into the realm of the unreal since its relation to you no longer depends on your relation to the block of plaster – the liberation of Art’.[x] The image is liberated from the material, retreating to that distance at which the human being is always held.

Even Rodin still took measurements when making his busts. He didn’t model a head as he actually saw it in space, at a certain distance, as I see you now with this distance between us. He really wanted to make a parallel in clay, the exact equivalent of the head’s volume in space. So basically it wasn’t visual but conceptual.[xi]

Giacometti goes on to claim that to model what is seen would lead to the creation of a ‘rather flat, scarcely modulated sculpture that would be much closer to a Cycladic sculpture, which has a stylised look, than to a sculpture by Rodin or Houdon, which has a realistic look’.[xii] He also outlines the dangers of monumentality – even large sculpture is, he claims, ‘only small sculpture blown up’.[xiii] The five metre tall sculptures in front of the Egyptian temple only become sculpture when seen from a distance of forty metres. Compared to prehistoric art, or to that of the Sumerian or the Chinese, contemporary sculpture remains conceptual, cerebral: it depicts what is known rather than what is seen.

For Sartre, the point is more complex. ‘From mere space Giacometti therefore had to fashion a man, to 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’.[xiv] The sculptor is able to close the gap between the great bursting forth of existence, and the rocky substance of his medium. What we see is what we live; the sculpture is as close it can be to an ethereal replica of human existence; before Giacometti's figures we come face to face with our freedom stripped as it were to its bare frame.

There is another possibility. It is not a question of our freedom, of our initiative or ecstasis, but of a freedom which presses in from the future. The ‘distance’ of the sculpture is such that it reaches us from a future that is not ours, that we cannot determine. Giacometti’s sculptures do not present me with an icon of my freedom, but with a freedom I cannot possess. Nothing in the sculpture is function; it dramatises not the explosive power of human existence, but the struggle of the image to withhold itself from existence. To present this struggle in the sculpture of the human being is to attempt to realise a true resemblance of the human being. But with what does he present us? Not with the loquacity of signs, but the inertness of a thing; not the opening of the future, but the suspension of the present, not the absoluteness of the human being, but the negative absolute as it is made to assume human form. The human being has become a thing; it is not an ethereal replica of the human body I confront, but the body become matter, the body that has collapsed into the body of everything.

What if this materiality, this resistance, is already implicit in our relation with any other person, any Autrui? What if the freedom presented in the sculptures was that of the Other as she resists my power not because of any initiative of her own, but because she is Other for me? ‘Lazarus come forth’ says Jesus to the dead man. Lazarus goes towards him, Blanchot suggests, even as another Lazarus remained wrapped in his winding sheets and stinking of death. For Sartre, Giacometti’s sculptures celebrate life, the great leap into existence. But what if they present something more akin to the cadaver of our friend, that is, the stubbornness of matter as it refuses to resemble the one we knew in life? What if Giacometti reminds us that the corpse reveals a materiality which was dissimulated in life?

*

Blanchot’s remarks on the corpse in The Space of Literature provide an orientation.

He who dies cannot tarry. The deceased, it is said, is no longer of this world; he has left it behind. But behind there is, precisely, this cadaver, which is not of the world either, even though it is here. Rather, it is behind the world. It is that which the living person (and not the deceased) left behind him and which now affirms, from here, the possibility of a world behind the world, of a regression, an indefinite subsistence, undetermined and indifferent, about which we only know that human reality, upon finishing, reconstitutes its presence and its proximity.[xv]

Lost is the relationship between the cadaver and the one we knew when she was alive. The horror of the ‘world behind the world’ must be understood relative to the power we take to be our own.

It is striking that at this very moment, when the cadaverous presence is the presence of the unknown before us, the mourned deceased begins to resemble himself.

Himself: is this not an ill-chosen expression? Shouldn't we say: the deceased resembles the person he was when he was alive? ‘Resembles himself’ is, however, correct. ‘Himself’ designates the impersonal being, distant and inaccessible, which resemblance, that it might be someone's, draws toward the day. Yes, it is he, the dear living person, but all the same it is more than he. He is more beautiful, more imposing; he is already monumental and so absolutely himself that it is as if he were doubled by himself, joined to his solemn impersonality by resemblance and by the image.[xvi]

The corpse does not present the ‘ka’ which survives death, but the materiality which survives life. ‘No man alive, in fact, bears any resemblance yet’, Blanchot writes.[xvii] The friend we know through her many attributes – her gestures, her laughter, the tone of her voice – conceals a materiality which presents itself only after she dies.

Why does Blanchot write that the corpse resembles itself? How does a thing sustain itself as itself such that it can be experienced? It is held together by our interest, our understanding; it is animated by our existence; such is the power of human life as Sartre celebrates it. What of the Other? For the most part, I understand her through the cultural categories through which my relation to others is mediated. You are my employee; I am your client; I know you as a service provider; you know me as a vendor of your company’s products – each time, it is a question of passing over the alterity of the Other in favour of relations which are instrumentally defined. That is to say, others are sustained in their coherency for me in terms of my understanding of their place in the world.

What, though, about the corpse? Something in the corpse resists that power; which means, too, I cannot situate myself with respect to what happened as I approached the cadaver of my friend. To claim the corpse resembles itself is not to invoke a magical power it would possess but rather to indicate the way it withholds itself from my capacity to accommodate myself with respect to its differentiation. Here collapses into nowhere: the place I hold, the hypostasis I maintain, becomes uncertain; my hold on time falters.

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

Is it appropriate to write of the image of the Other? To recall: the image foregrounds itself when the thing is cut off from the tasks and projects to which it is usually subordinated; the image thereby resists the basic impulse of our existence to create meaning, to ‘exist’ things by grasping them first of all as potential tools or as raw material. No longer does the thing offer itself to be deployed. Fascinated, I am as though pressed up against the image of the thing even as the image holds me apart at what Paul Davies calls ‘its distance’.[xviii] It is as if what was revealed preceded the thing; as if the image were the condition of possibility of the thing and not the other way round.

What happens when we confront the image of the other person? She holds herself at a distance from any determination; she maintains herself at a distance. In the case of the corpse, this has happened too late; but the closed circuit of my interiority is interrupted as the Other comes to resemble herself. The unknown keeps me at a distance – at its distance.

*

Its distance: is this what Blanchot remembers in a short meditation written in the wake of Antelme’s death?

In The Human Race, his testimony to his experiences in the work camps, Robert Antelme learns that K. is going to die; he’d been in the infirmary for a week. He looks for K. at the infirmary, but cannot find him, although he recognises a few of the patients as he passes a row of beds. ‘Where is K.?’ he asks a nurse. ‘But you passed him. He’s over there’.[xix] Antelme must have passed right by K.’s bed. The nurse points out K.; Antelme goes across; he sees a man with hollows instead of cheeks and expressionless eyes. Formerly, the man had been lying down, now he has raised his head on his elbows. Perhaps he is smiling. Now Antelme goes towards him, thinking this patient was looking at him. But where is K.?

‘I went over to the next bed and asked the guy lying on it, “where’s K?”’[xx] He turned his head and with it motioned towards the person propped on his elbows’.[xxi] Then the patient with the long nose and the smile was K. But this frightens Antelme: ‘I looked at the person who was K. I became afraid – afraid of myself – and I looked at the other faces, seeking reassurance. I recognised them clearly enough. I wasn’t wrong; I still knew who they were. The other person was still leaning on his elbows, head down, mouth halfway open’.[xxii]

Where is K.? Antelme looks into the blue, unmoving eyes of this patient. Then he looks at the other patients, whom he recognises. Then Antelme addresses the unknown patient (the one who has taken the place of K.): ‘Hello, old man’.[xxiii] ‘There was no way I could make myself more visible. He kept that appearance of a smile on his face. I didn’t recognise anything’.[xxiv] Antelme moves away. ‘Still nothing but the drooping head and the half-opened mouth of nobody in particular. I left the infirmary’.[xxv] In one day K. had become unrecognisable. A double had substituted itself for him.

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

Blanchot comments on this passage in his tribute to Antelme:

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

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

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

Is this what Giacometti’s sculptures indicate? Perhaps the attenuation of his figures is a way of attesting to the peculiar relation Blanchot calls resemblance. Giacometti struggles to realise a likeness of something which cannot be realised, to present an image of what cannot be represented. He destroys his statues and remakes them because he would attempt to repeat the encounter with the Other, to allow it to reverberate in sculpted matter. His sculptures are not ‘ka’ figures, an attempt to preserve something from death, but would allow dying to press towards us. It is the density of matter, not space, which would destroy everything. Matter is cancer.

As we have seen, the artwork might be said to ‘work’ (which is to say, permit the play of worklessness within the work) as it brings the viewer into relation with the image, the materiality that lies dormant in the material from which it was made. But what is the relationship between this materiality and the Other? It may appear that the materiality of the Other and the materiality of the artwork are analogous since both would be images. But this is too simple. As I will show, the relation with the Other, for Blanchot, occurs by way of language. Materiality (as it names the image, worklessness, the negative absolute etc.) is indeed the bridge between the relation to the work and that to the Other, but this claim needs to be refined through a discussion of Blanchot’s account of language.

*

Blanchot quotes the following remark from Jacques Dupin on Giacometti: ‘the spectacle of violence fascinates and terrifies him’, commenting.[xxxi]

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

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

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

What does this mean? In a passage from The Human Race, when Antelme recalls marching with four thousand other prisoners, led by the SS, on a track through the woods. They hear a deluge of shots; the prisoners do not turn. One of their number has been shot. The column moves ahead. In the silence they hear ‘the sound of solitary fear and nocturnal, diabolical terror’. Terror: but the column march, they can only march. What will happen? Each fears another fifty will die then another fifty until all the prisoners are dead. They will march until there is no more column for the SS to lead.

An Italian prisoner is summoned by the SS: ‘Du, komm heir!’ The SS man is looking for a man to kill; anyone will do. The victim blushes. He knows he has been selected by chance. He does not ask: ‘why me? Why not another?’; there are no criteria. None of the marchers is worth more or less than anyone else. The column is silent. Each tries to ready himself to be chosen at random to die. Each is afraid for himself, but Antelme notes ‘we probably have never felt such solidarity with each other, never felt so replaceable by absolutely anybody at all’. Think of the one who stood next to the Italian. Hearing: ‘Du, komm heir!’ and seeing another go forward in his place, Antelme writes, he 'must have felt half his body stripped naked'.

Terror: someone will die in your place, just as you might die in the place of another. It is the possibility of this mortal substitution which allows each to feel solidarity with the other. But is it the chance of this same substitution, where one prisoner might be taken for the Other, where each comes to resemble no one in particular, that offers the chance of a kind of hope?

What the SS fear is the relation which implicates from the side of the huddled magma – the near-interchangeable prisoners who are brought by affliction to the point of dying. The SS fear to acknowledge they belong to the same human race as the deportees. A fear which leads to more death, but, as attested in Antelme’s book, reveals that there are always too many people to kill, and the mania for destruction has, at its limit, the numberless human race.

The prisoners fear death, but the SS fear the prisoners. Terror and fascination are mixed, which is why, on the march, they neither kill everyone at once nor let them all go. They are bound to them, the SS, even as they know the war will be lost. But to whom are they bound? To the ones they might become, to the Other. It is not a question of empathy but of alterity. Beyond fellow feeling, the sense of what I might share with the Other as an equal, there is an awareness of what cannot be so shared. Unless what Blanchot calls community were thought as a sharing which passes through the relation to the Other – one, then, which involves an experience that cannot be exchanged or measured by a common unit. This is why the son of the camp Lagerführer feared lost among the children of the camps was made, when he was found, to wear an identificatory placard.

Resistance vouchsafes itself in the ones who have fallen beneath need, who had died to everything but a naked desire to survive. It is those who are most weak, the ones on the brink of death, who come to resemble themselves. Is it thus that they present themselves in the same way as the image of things? When his friends found the starving body of Antelme alongside other dead and dying bodies at Dachau was it a thing that they found? Blanchot writes: ‘Each time, we receive from Giacometti this double discovery that is, each time, it is true, immediately lost: only man would be present to us, only he is alien to us’[xxxiii]. For Blanchot, the otherness of the human being is qualitatively different from all other others. How can this be reconciled with Blanchot’s discussions of the negative absolute or the neutral double of the world – of the ‘there is’ of language and the world that has become image? To think through Blanchot’s argument, it is necessary to trace his negotiation of the work of Levinas.

*

Dasein is bourgeois: this is the upshot of Levinas account of the conditions of the genesis of the ego. The ego, he explains, needs material to produce its own identity; the effort to be takes the form of the attempt to organise the world into sources of food and nourishment. Labour and possession are required for the ego to consolidate its being in the world. Likewise, reflection and comprehension are needed if the ego is to protect itself from the uncertainty of the future.

Drawing on Heidegger’s claim that being is in each case mine, Levinas claims the activity of the verb ‘to be’, the verb of verbs, is accomplished in the structure of mineness. Just as Heidegger uses Wesen as a verb, Levinas argues ‘esse’ is ‘interesse’; essence, with the human being, turns upon and hypostatises itself. As such, the ego’s practical and theoretical involvement with the world answers the interests of being. Even Heidegger’s transformation of the notion of the understanding from the ‘knowing that’ of purely theoretical speculation to the ‘knowing how’ of practical engagement with the world is ordered by the need for the ego to maintain the security of its hypostasis. The same holds for the related notions of the project, temporal transcendence, the for-the-sake-of, and being-towards-death as Sartre inherits them and uses them as interpretive tools in his account of Giacometti’s sculptures.

The Other, for both Levinas and Blanchot, is experienced as an interruption of the spontaneous need of the ‘I’ to lay claim to existence, to seize and digest being. The hunger to be, to exist, is also the need to have done with the Other. Practically, I work to meet my needs, consolidating my identity; this is a way of confirming my essence as active interesse. Theoretically, I reflect in order to increase my emprise, com-prehending the world, reducing everything that is different to the measure of the same. Thus it is that the singularity of the Other is transformed into a particular.

That the Other resists this transformation is not a tribute to her agency. The word Other only makes sense as the term of a relation; as Other, she does not exist for herself as an ego with powers commensurate with my own. The Other resists, this is true, but she does so because she is the Other for me, and what she resists is the power implicit in my existence as it confirms the tautology of being. The Other resists, but she does not do so as another ego. This means she is vulnerable to the demands of the labour which confirms the economy of being, of mineness at a practical and a theoretical level. At the same time, she resists in her singularity and throws off violence – she refuses to be killed, which is to say negated, because she addresses me.

It is my response to this silent address, for Levinas, which happens as the primal event of language. Language begins and rebegins in this address; the relation to the Other as it is marked in language animates the dead letter of speech or writing. The Other addresses me; but this does not mean there is anyone ‘behind’ the address; she does not ventriloquise God or speak in place of anyone else. Nor is it a matter of what she would want to say since she does not exist as the Other for herself. The Other resembles herself, Blanchot maintains, holding us at her distance. But when he presents this self-resembling as a relation to language, the response to the Other is analogous to that of the literary author to the anonymous murmuring of language. The Other brings me into contact with the ‘there is’ of language as though she were a living incarnation of the narrative voice. It is in this claim he differs from Levinas.

Early to late, Levinas attempts to avoid the neutralisation which occurs as soon as one attempts to write of the relation to the Other, or even to talk of the Other to someone else. How is this possible? With the word the Other, I betray the Other – to speak or to write of the Other is to risk understanding the Other as a particular. At the same time, this risk is necessary if the Other is to be spoken of at all. Then there must be a way of speaking without universalising, or at least of marking in the text what cannot be grasped by means of the text. This is why he will have to make a special claim for the status of Totality and Infinity as a work of philosophy in the context of a discussion of what he calls fecundity. For Levinas (the apparent misogyny of this example should not concern us so much as its structure) the birth of a son transforms the father’s existence. His son is of him but different from him; the birth of the son happens as a break in the self-relation of the father, opening a future for him which is no longer bound by the structure of the same.

In fecundity the I transcends the world of light – not to dissolve into the anonymity of the ‘there is’, but in order to go further than the light, to go elsewhere. To stand in the light, to see – to grasp before grasping – is not yet ‘to be infinitely’; it is to return to oneself older, that is encumbered with oneself. To be infinitely means to be produced in the mode of an I that is always at the origin, but that meets with no trammels to the renewal of its substance, not even from its very identity. Youth as a philosophical concept is defined thus. The relation with the son in fecundity does not maintain us in this closed expanse of light and dream, cognitions and powers. It articulates the time of the absolutely other, an alteration of the very substance of him who can – his trans-substantiation.[xxxiv]

Thus does the infinite enter the finite order; time is reborn in the son with whom the father cannot completely identify. It is not born for the son until that son becomes a father in turn. Fecundity is no longer measured by what I can grasp or comprehend just as it breaks, for Levinas, from the pell mell of the il y a. Youth is the alteration of a substance that would otherwise remain mired in itself. It overcomes the senescence of finite existence.

Levinas goes on to make a similar claim concerning philosophy, specifically, that which is being set forth in Totality and Infinity: ‘Philosophy itself’, he writes, ‘constitutes a moment of this temporal accomplishment, a discourse always addressed to another. What we are now exposing is addressed to those who shall wish to read it’.[xxxv] Totality and Infinity would, like the son to the father, reach us from the future, and in such a way that it shatters our relation to ourselves as readers. Like the son, it might be said to resemble itself.

Then Levinas would claim for Totality and Infinity the same status as the poem which would stubbornly refuse to offer itself to meaning, being composed solely of sonorousness, of rhythm. As we have seen, however, the poem must lend itself to meaning; Totality and Infinity must allow itself to be read, thereby yielding itself up to the measure of sense. As such, Levinas cannot escape the danger implicit in writing: that the circulation of words dispossesses the author, speaking anonymously and impersonally in his place. But once again, like the poet, Levinas can still attempt to interrupt the articulation of sense – this time, not to affirm the irreducibility of the poem, but of the relation to the Other of which Totality and Infinity would speak.

I can write or talk of the Other as I can write or talk of anything, but in so doing, I am unable to make the differentiation at the level of language between human others and other others. To remain at the level of the said, which is to say, that order of discourse which will only allow me to speak of the Other as a particular, means to pass over the saying which occurs in my acknowledgement of the singularity of the Other. It is this acknowledgement which, for Levinas, is upstream of the content of what is said. Yet the said is interrupted; saying occurs in the acknowledgement of the Other as the Other, which is to say, in its singularity. A singularity which, since it must be thought as a relation, singularises the one who acknowledges the Other.

Herein lies the demarcation between the relation to the human Other and other others put forward by Levinas and, in his own way, Blanchot. For both, although they understand it in different terms, what is called saying separates the Other from the world of things. While this claim is implicit in The Space of Literature, it becomes less so in works subsequent to it. It is marked in the essay on Giacometti in the formulation ‘only man would be present to us, only he is alien to us’ – a lesson we would receive from the sculptures.

How, though, if the Other is not merely the image of a human being, can Blanchot make this claim on behalf of a sculpture? The Other, Levinas writes, is ‘a being which surpasses every attribute. Through an attribute, it would be precisely qualified, that is, reduced to what it has in common with other beings; an attribute would make this being into a concept’.[xxxvi] To reduce the otherness of the Other to an attribute would be to create an idol; the prohibition against making representations of God also holds for the Other. But this is exactly what Blanchot does when he understands Giacometti to have presented the Other, if that is indeed what he has done, in material form.

The relation to the Other, for Levinas, is completely different from the relation to things. Levinas writes, ‘In expression a being presents itself; the being that manifests itself attends its manifestation and consequently appeals to me. This attendance is not the neutrality of an image, but a solicitation that concerns me by its destitution and its height. To speak to me is at each moment to surmount what is necessarily plastic in manifestation’.[xxxvii] Blanchot, by contrast, presents the relation to the Other as analogous to the relation to the image as part of a more general concern with what might be called the materiality of language as it is indicated in its rhythm, sonorousness or texture. Like Levinas, Blanchot will present the relation to the Other in terms of language. But unlike Levinas, it is the image of language, its neutral double which the relation to the Other allows me to experience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take, for example, the role Levinas’s notion of scepticism plays when it is repeated in The Writing of the Disaster.[xl] According to the well worn philosophical trick, scepticism is made to refute itself: to articulate the thesis, ‘there is no truth’ is to already make a truth claim; the thesis contradicts itself. Or else, with Hegel, scepticism is the way in which the coherency of a given worldview brings itself into question; it thus operates a name for the motor of the dialectic, and is reconcilable with the completed philosophical system. For Levinas, by contrast, scepticism names the unsaying of the said. This is possible because saying is not to be understood as articulating a thesis; as such, it escapes self-contradiction. For the same reason, it is not identifiable within the system and escapes all attempts at reconciliation with the said. With the reduction performed in the text of Otherwise than Being, philosophy thinks in two times; it is marked by an irrefutable scepticism which unsays the said and steers writing away from the temptations of art.

What does Blanchot intend when he uses the term scepticism? The following quotation offers an indication:

Scepticism, a noun that has crossed out its etymology and all etymology, is not indubitable doubt; it is not simply nihilist negation: rather, irony. Scepticism is in relation with the refutation of scepticism. We refute it, if only by living, but death does not confirm it. Scepticism is indeed the return of the refuted, that which erupts anarchically, capriciously, and irregularly each time (and at the same time not each time) that authority and the sovereignty of reason, indeed of unreason, impose their order upon us or organise themselves definitively in a system.

Scepticism does not destroy the system; it destroys nothing; it is a sort of gaiety without laughter, in any case without mockery, which suddenly makes us uninterested in affirmation, in negation: thus it is neutral like all language. The disaster would be that portion of sceptical gaiety, never at anyone’s disposal, that makes seriousness (the seriousness of death, for example) pass beyond all seriousness, just as it lightens the theoretical by not letting us trust it. I recall Levinas: ‘Language is already scepticism’.[xli]

Part of this quotation makes reference to Blanchot’s suspicion of etymologism. The appeal to scepticism would no longer see language as traceable to its Greek roots, thereby awakening another memory – that of an indefatigable reciprocity between words and things, a dance which will not settle into a primal word.[xlii] What is important in the present discussion is the way in which scepticism is linked to the question of irony. It is in terms of the exploration of the notion of irony that Blanchot’s account of scepticism and saying might be understood.

*

When I speak ironically it is with the expectation that only some may grasp what it is I am saying. This is not a simple snobbery – it is not just that discourse itself is too common, too lowly to allow the philosopher to speak, but that there are different ways of hearing that same speech of receiving and understanding what is said according to one’s training in philosophy. To learn about the views of this or that philosopher is insufficient; what matters is to appropriate philosophy for oneself, escaping the cave to enter the real world beneath the real sun.

For those who have not escaped the cave, there is the chance the Socrates’ irony will at least point the way out. One knows at least that the Socrates of the dialogues is meant by Plato to be the real philosopher; the sophists and others with whom he discourses are pretenders. When Socrates says to Agathon in the Symposium: ‘you are inspired!’ his indirect message is clear: you are not inspired. Unlike Agathon, the informed reader can understand what Socrates means. What do we learn? The difference between a philosopher and pretend philosophers, between wisdom and sophistry. Why, though, does Socrates not just say what he thinks? Because his perspective is one which can only be appropriated after years of training. Simply to repeat an argument is not enough; the dialogue leads Socrates’ interlocutors up to the point where they might grasp the complexities of the issue for themselves. The same holds for the readers of Plato’s dialogues.

Irony, then, is carefully controlled; it is a pedagogical tool which operates in an economy where Alcibiades can crown Socrates with the laurel wreath Agathon won for his play. It is clear to Plato’s reader who the real master of poetry is meant to be. Socrates is already in command of speech: he says what he knows and knows what he means to say.

That he is made to do so in the written dialogues of Plato who so distrusts writing is ironic. Plato distrusts writing; but what does he distrust? The unmasterable irony of writing that exposes his books to the risk of misreading, compromising the uprightness of speech, that rectitude in which the speaker attends the words he speaks. A text can never master its own textuality; it is public and therefore must give itself to be read in the absence of its author. This is what a writer like Bataille embraces, dreaming of the unknown readers who will encounter his book. Bataille, as we will see, affirms the ‘there is’ of language in his writings and in conversation. Plato and Levinas are, by contrast, committed to the idea that a philosophical message can reach the reader intact, thus overcoming the ambiguity of writing. But what happens when writing is permitted to speak in another way? When writing gives itself to the bad faith of reading and ironises everything it is meant to convey?

Blanchot does not content himself with elevating written discourse above spoken discourse, absenting himself in order to let writing speak, but would attest to the way in which speech, whether spoken or written, allows the ‘there is’ of language to resound. What is called speech, for Blanchot, refers to writing and to speech, as I will show by considering in turn the relationship between speech and literary writing and speech and the relation to the Other.

*

There is little dramatic irony in Homer. The Homeric hero lives in the glory of his acts, in the splendour of immediate action. Action is the thing; characters rarely pause to think, and when they do, it is to puzzle choices before them: there is no monologue which is not part of the unfolding of the action. With Christianity, the chance of the richness of irony takes a huge leap when Augustine develops the first person narrative in the Confessions. No longer is it a matter of external observation or external action; Augustine gives us an allegorical presentation of an inward life which comes to climax in the conversion of book eight. With Augustine, the way is prepared not only for allegory, but for the psychological account of inner life. Inner monologue is no longer a pause in outward action. There is a new complexity in the displacement of perspective; an old man narrates the experiences of a young man; the plot is one of self-transformation.

With Rousseau, there is a mutation of interiority. The narrator of the Confessions is not a type like Augustine’s narrator, who would exemplify the attempt to live in conformity with Christ. Rousseau’s detailed portrait of his own emotional development is intended as an end in itself. His quest to display and justify himself before the world is intended to compensate for what he saw as his ill-treatment in his life; to win the world’s sympathy is not enough: he wants to be seen as a good man because he was true to the springs of his emotion. 'I may omit or transpose facts, or make mistakes in dates', says Rousseau in the opening paragraph of the seventh book of the Confessions, 'but I cannot go wrong about what I felt, or about what my feelings have led me to do; and they are the subject of my story’. This is why Rousseau sought to leave with the Confessions a witness in his favour, defending his good name against the plot against his reputation. The Confessions would set out his life from the appropriate perspective, interpreting events so that its pattern reveals the ‘blind fatality’ which draws him towards catastrophe. Catastrophe follows catastrophe – the book ends on the brink of a new disaster which Rousseau promises he will narrate in part three. The book breaks off there, but there is a sense, as with Kafka’s The Castle, that the book will never end. It is born and reborn, for Rousseau, from a terrible sense of foreboding. But what does he fear?

The dresser crab encrusts its shell with the disparate materials it finds on the ocean floor. Likewise, writing, the raw desire to write, clothes itself in whatever it finds. The one for whom words will not come, who cannot begin, is like a crab without a shell. He suffers from not writing. The wind that rips across his exposed body is the form of his pain. But to write, too, is to suffer. The sinners in Eden are ashamed because they are nude; the writer is ashamed of a surfeit of clothing. Every word exposes him; every sentence he encrusts in his shell is a sentence too many. He suffers from non-writing in the form of writing. Blanchot: ‘Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. May God help me. Which I translate modestly: In the space of writing – writing, not writing – here I sit bent over, I cannot do otherwise and I await no help from the beneficent powers’.[xliii] With Rousseau, Luther’s ‘here I stand, I cannot do otherwise’ becomes ‘I cannot stand and I can do nothing’; God cannot help him. Of what does he confess? He confesses to nothing; the Confessions, in his place, lets speak the ‘there is’ of language.

If Kafka does not attempt to write a confession it is because he is closer to language, to the streaming of language. His diaries mark that great moment when the ‘merciful surplus of strength’ gives birth to a literature which leaps beyond him. It is not Kafka’s suffering that is the secret topic of his writings, but the suffering of writing – a formulation that is absurd unless we understand that language refuses itself to the measure of human power. Now the ‘there is’ of language is permitted to refer to nothing but itself, opening a labyrinth into which the reader disappears. The literary text is no longer of the world, no longer a representation, an attempt at verisimilitude; it attains a kind of irony beyond anything which results from the author’s conscious manipulation of the relationship between characters and audience. Language ironises itself, interrupting the economy of the said.

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

The reader is in the same quandary as Antelme was before K. in The Human Race. ‘It would remain true that between the man I’d known and the dead K., whom we all know, this nothingness had existed’: the same nothingness opens itself in the instant between the lofty work of literature called The Castle by the celebrated author Franz Kafka and the book you opened by chance in the library which begins, ‘It was late in the evening when K. arrived’.

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

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

Blanchot does not refer, here, to the personal Other, Autrui, but to l’autre as it names the neuter. Yet it shares several features in common with Levinas’s Autrui. It is linked to a kind of saying: ‘it says nothing, not only because it adds nothing to what there is to say (it knows nothing), but because the narrative voice subtends this nothing – the “silencing and keeping silent” – in which speech is here and now already engaged; thus it is not heard in the first place, and everything that gives it a distinct reality begins to betray it’.[xlviii] What does this mean? It speaks without content; if, as Blanchot goes on to claim, even as it can take the voice of a character or a narrator, it cannot be confined to their voices. It is impersonal; it does not mediate information but presents itself in a manner analogous to what Blanchot writes of the Other. The narrative voice resembles itself. Thus it is possible to invoke the immediate presence of the language which, like the Other, does not exist at the same level as me. Like the relation to the Other, the relation with the language of The Castle is dissymmetrical; I speak as I am brought into contact with the inexhaustible murmuring of language such that I lose my rectitude. I do not speak; the ‘il’ speaks, and it does so without expecting speech to be reciprocated. Nothing is exchanged; there is only the donation of the narrative voice in the event Blanchot allows himself to be called saying.[xlix]

With literature, something else happens. Ironical complexity permits all manner of permutations on narration, but these techniques are only more complex renderings of what is already at stake when, in a certain kind of literary writing, the voice of the narrator is supplanted by the narrative voice. Now no one in particular speaks and the narrative itself no longer strives for verisimilitude.

Unmastered irony, the irony of a writing that would no longer permit the rectitude of the philosopher: this is what reveals itself when language holds us at its distance. When Blanchot allows himself to write of an ‘ironic outbidding’ of the reduction, this should be understood as what he would later call scepticism and saying: as the ‘there is’ of speech that resists the one who would command it as it occurs in literature and in the relation to the Other.[l]

*

What, then, about the irony, the scepticism of spoken discourse? When Blanchot remembers his conversations with Bataille, it is not to present his friend in the manner of Plato’s Socrates: true, there is a seriousness in his conversation, a sense that everything is at stake; what takes place between the speakers is a play or a game of thought. It is not the content of what is said which matters, but that it is said at all. What counts is not the order of discourse, spoken and written, which Levinas calls the said, but what he calls saying.

In what sense can this be called irony? It is a question of irony which no longer allows itself to be mastered, but which is implicit in language itself insofar as it escapes any attempt to bind it to what it is possible for you or I to say. Even though it is at play in all discourse, struggling with measure of human power, this unmastered irony reveals this struggle only in exceptional circumstances such as those Blanchot experienced in his friendship with Bataille.

Most often when we speak, and also when we hear someone else speaking, we do not fail afterward to experience a feeling discomfort, as though some shame were attached to using words, whether to say important or insignificant things; in the first case, because we have betrayed them by speaking too adroitly or too awkwardly, in the second because we have betrayed the seriousness of speech itself. I do not mean to say that every conversation with Georges Bataille was free of this feeling, but rather that speech then took up its own malaise, and as soon as it was sensed, assumed it and respected it in such a way as to offer it another direction. Here speech’s lack interceded on speech’s behalf, becoming the way that, through a decision each time renewed, one turned toward the other so as to respond to the frankness of a presence (just as the eminence of being, its height, cannot be separated from its decline).

[…] In the precaution from which Georges Bataille never considered himself free, even when speaking with a very old friend, there was no prudence nor even simply a concern for the interlocutor. There was much more: a silent appeal to attention so as to confront the risk of a speech spoken in common, also an accord with this reserve that alone allows one to say everything, and, finally, an allusion to a movement toward the unknown to which, almost immediately, two persons together who are bound by something essential are as though obliged to bear witness.

A precautionary speech, turned toward the interior, and by this precaution designating the impossible central thought that does not let itself be thought.[li]

Why would we feel shame when we speak, or hear someone else speak? Because to speak of serious matters is to risk betraying them by speaking too easily, as if the topic of discussion were entirely under our command, or too frivolously, thereby losing the seriousness of the topic altogether. To speak of insignificant matters is to pass over a seriousness no longer tied to that of a particular topic, but to speaking itself. The presence of speech would be a serious affair, one in relation to which we would feel shame unless, like Bataille we were able to allow this seriousness to speak.

How is this possible? By allowing language to reveal its malaise as it is vouchsafed in my inability to say something, to find the right word, failing, thereby, to turn language into something over which I could exert power. Language suffers; it undergoes a malaise. What does this mean? It comes to resemble itself as it refuses to lend itself to human power. As such, the one who speaks exhibits a kind of reserve with respect to speech. This was Bataille’s gift, and the gift he allowed those who conversed with him: speech was able to speak in what they said; saying was given its due.

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

One could say of these two speaking men that one of them is necessarily the obscure ‘Other’ that is Autrui. And who is Autrui? The unknown, the stranger, foreign to all that is either visible or non-visible, and who comes to ‘me’ as speech when speaking is no longer seeing. One of the two is the Other: the one who, in the greatest human simplicity, is always close to that which cannot be close to ‘me’: close to death, close to the night. But who is me? Where is the Other? The self is sure, the Other is not – unsituated, unsituable, nevertheless each time speaking and in this speech more Other than all that is other. Plural speech would be this unique speech where what is said one time by ‘me’ is repeated another time by ‘Autrui’ and thus given back to its essential Difference. What therefore characterises this kind of dialogue is that it is not simply an exchange of words between two Selves, two beings in the first person, but that the Other speaks there in the presence of speech, which is his sole presence; a neutral speech, infinite, without power, and where the unlimited in thought, placed in the safekeeping of forgetting, is at stake.[lii]

Each in turn becomes the Other for the other person; each presents himself as the corpse who will not respond to Jesus’s call to come to life. Each becomes the ‘other Lazarus, the stranger who cannot be experienced by an intact ‘I’. This is experienced as a kind of speech – as a plural speech which happens as the opening of language to Difference, that is, to a saying which cannot be exchanged, but is given each time from one to another.

What Blanchot calls the seriousness of language is unrelated to the content of what is said. Each speaker, as he acknowledges the Other, which is to say the seriousness of plural speech, of the neuter, is vigilant in turn. Writing this essay, Blanchot would be vigilant over vigilance, remembering a scepticism or irony of language that would otherwise be forgotten.

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

What separates Blanchotian from Levinasian vigilance with respect to speech, to writing? Totality and Infinity presents a claim ostensibly similar to Blanchot’s; the relation to the Other, according to Levinas, obtains as language, as discourse. In this way, the Other might be said to resemble herself: the relation to the Other is not one of identification but of differentiation. Speech happens not because of this differentiation but as this differentiation; it is my response to the alterity of the Other.

For Blanchot, in contrast to Levinas, I am related to the Other such that I experience the materiality of language. What does this mean? The ‘there is’, for Blanchot, as for Levinas, is what is experienced in suffering, affliction and weariness. But Blanchot also thinks the ‘there is’ in terms of the malaise of language – the way it turns itself aside from those who would assert their power over its impersonal murmuring. Language suffers; it undergoes a malaise: these formulations should not mislead us; it is not a question of invoking an occult force implicit to language itself, but of indicating the way in which language resists our powers. One meets this ‘there is’ in The Castle and in Breton’s Nadja; it awaits us as the récit in the most compendious novel, and surprises us in the automatic poetry of the Surrealists. The narrative voice is a name for the ‘there is’ in the speech. But something like the narrative voice is also at stake for each of the participants in the ‘game of thought’ Blanchot presents in his essay on Bataille.

For Levinas, language begins as I face the Other, acknowledging her alterity. Saying accomplishes the reduction of the economy of the said as it neutralises the singularity of the Other but also the reduction of the drunken song of the poet, that only loosens the ties which bind us to the world of things, singing of a world where the Other has not yet appeared. To be vigilant is to have been awoken by this reduction, this interruption of being. But this vigilance is quickly compromised; the Other is forgotten in her singularity and I, too, forget the way I have been elected to my own singularity. Whence the need to repeat this reduction in turn, to redouble vigilance in the letter of Otherwise than Being. Levinas’s text would watch over all language; it is vigilant over vigilance as it occurs, if we have ears to hear it or eyes to read it, in all language.

With Blanchot, irony becomes a name, like saying and scepticism, for the materiality of language. Considering the statement, ‘the meaning of meaning would be neuter’, Blanchot allows a conversationalist to invoke ‘an ironic outbidding of the epochē’, referring, here, to the way in which ‘meaning operates or acts through a movement or retreat that is in some sense without end, through an exigency to become suspended’.[liii] What does this mean? The order of power and possibility are held in abeyance; the measure of time and space fails and the economy of meaning with it. Meaning finds itself inscribed into an aneconomy. The epochē that allows the phenomenologist to commence her labours is likewise inscribed such that thinking begins not with the lucid and self-aware transcendental ego, but with the ‘il’ that is deprived of any relation to itself. The outbidding of the epochē occurs because of the unmasterable irony of language.

Ironical discourse is necessary for Plato because he stands within philosophy itself and cannot address his readers directly. We have a sense as readers of Plato of the traits the philosopher would exemplify; if Socrates is an impressive figure, it is only as he embodies the seriousness of the love of wisdom. We are persuaded of his greatness not because of the miracles he performs but because of the power of reason. He has no authority other than that power. We cannot seize this power for ourselves if we merely repeat Socratic formulas. If I am to understand why Alcibiades takes the laurel wreath awarded to Agathon for the greatness of his poetry and places it on Socrates’ head rather than simply admiring the pathos of that action, I must take the leap into philosophy. Otherwise I remain as Johannes de Silentio does before the figure of Abraham: awed, but living in bad faith.

What if the natural language in which philosophy is always embedded bears a force of its own, a kind of irony which prevents this leap? What if the inexhaustible murmuring of language prevents the would-be philosopher finding a place from which to speak?

Georges Bataille had the power to speak no less than the power to write. I allude not to the gift of eloquence, but to something more important: the fact of being present through his speech and, in this presence of speech, through the most direct conversation, of opening attention even unto the centre. Not that he was prepared to play a Socratic role, initiate some sort of teaching, or even act in the subtle fashion that the words one utters one allow. Even less than Nietzsche would he have wished to move on the impulse to be right or to exercise influence, whether by the intermediary of signs or by example.

Independently of both content and form, what this power of saying made manifest to every interlocutor is that speaking is a grave thing: as soon as one speaks, even in the most simple manner and of the most simple facts, something unmeasured, something always waiting in the reserve of familiar discourse is immediately at stake.[liv]

The Bataille with whom Blanchot presents us in The Infinite Conversation does not stand within philosophy, addressing those of us who remain on its outside. He does not aim to instruct, but rather to let speech affirm itself in its irony, its scepticism. Bataille does not so much possess a power over speech as over what would allow him to remember speech’s powerlessness. His vigilance is such that he can permit the seriousness of language to resound, inviting his interlocutor to affirm it in turn.

For Blanchot as for Levinas, it is a question of maintaining a vigilance over vigilance. Speech happens as the malaise of language that brings forward the ‘il’ in place of the ‘I’ – or, better, reveals the ‘I’ was always an usurper, taking the place of an impersonal streaming which dissolves all places. Like the inspired Blanchotian poet who allows worklessness to resound in the work, Bataille exhibits power enough to allow this experience of language to resound. Bataille does not speak from within philosophy, addressing those who have yet to pass through that training which would allow them to deploy language in the service of a mastered philosophical irony. He lets speak that seriousness of speech which interrupts the seriousness of philosophy.

Let us return to Levinas. Blanchot is not rejecting Levinas’s account of the singularity of the Other, dispersing it into the singularity of all others, of everything. He does not seek to elevate literature above philosophy, placing the laurel wreath back on Agathon’s head, but to show how the ‘there is’ of language marks itself in literature and philosophy. For Levinas, the Other in her singularity interrupts the neutrality of discourse (the said) as well as the attenuation of that neutrality which he claims happens as poetry. As William Large argues, this is because the Other is said by the Levinas of Totality and Infinity to attend or assist the words she speaks in such a way that there is a surplus, an excessiveness over of the content of what is said.[lv] Levinas thereby betrays his own insight that alterity is to be understood as a relation because he treats the Other as the source of alterity.

Levinas finds himself in the position of the Plato of the later dialogues who, in order to guard against the poison of writing, gives Socrates more and more dominance over his interlocutors and that of which he would speak. He becomes a monster of continuity, threatening by his power and authority to displace the message Plato would convey by means of the dialogues. This is why Plato sought to interrupt by making others the protagonists of the Laws and the Sophist, and by allowing Parmenides victory over the young Socrates. Nowhere is this more clear than in the Symposium, where Socrates is made to describe the lessons about eros he learnt from Diotima. Perhaps Diotima becomes, according to a vigilant, ironic reading of the text Plato would not permit, a name for what Blanchot would call the unknown, for the ‘there is’ of language as it shatters Socrates’ authority.

In an analogous manner, the figure of the Other in Levinas’s text threatens to usurp the place of the alterity to which the Other would bring me into relation, as if it were no more than a powerful ego. It as though it is the Other’s qualities which would account for alterity, and not the relation itself.[lvi] For Blanchot, the Other brings us into relation to the scepticism which outplays the letter of Levinas’s text. Now it is a matter of another, unmastered irony, wherein writing can no longer be subordinated to the presence of the Other.

I'm reading at the following event, 8PM, The Bridge Hotel, Newcastle:

A BENEFIT EVENT FOR MORDEN TOWER AT THE BRIDGE HOTEL

An evening of music, prose and poetry at The Bridge Hotel to raise money to support the cost of licensing Morden Tower for live events, featuring live music from:

:zoviet*france: with Rhodri Davies || Richard Dawson || Popular Radiation || Gwilly Edmondez || Wrest || The Noize Choir || Hapsburg Braganza || Adam Parkinson || Posset || John Pope || Jamie Allen & Will Scrimshaw

and poetry and prose from:

Jackie Litherland || Ellen Phethean || Lars Iyer || Tom Pickard || Radikal Queen || Valerie Laws

Morden Tower is part of Newcastle's mediæval town wall, built in about 1290. From the mid-Sixties it became a major venue for readings of contemporary writing, including internationally renowned poets such as Basil Bunting, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Seamus Heaney. In more recent decades it has also gained a profile as a live music venue with its eccentric and intimate qualities providing an unconventional auditorium for artists such as Chris Corsano, Sir Richard Bishop, Jack Rose, Keith Fullerton Whitman, :zoviet*france:, Alasdair Roberts, and A Hawk and a Hacksaw. This event will contribute to maintaining a stable future for a unique venue.

http://mordentower.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morden_Tower

Entry £7.00 | all proceeds to Morden Tower

<Draft of chapter two from Lars Iyer's Blanchot's Vigilance. Up for a limited time only.>

Keep on as much as you like. Trust in the murmur's inexhaustibility.

Breton[i]

It is easy to understand Surrealism as a failure – as the moment in which the artistic vanguard could have realised itself. In one sense, its achievements are clear; they fill our museums. But the Surrealists sought something greater: the abolition of an art that would hold itself apart from the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Surrealism might seem to have survived only as a style, yet its task was not to change art, but to realise it by freeing it from the artistic field, drawing out the consequences of an artistic obsolescence the Dadaists had already understood, and rendering it political.

Yet Surrealism always risked appearing to be politically irresponsible, opening itself with protean enthusiasm to dreams, trances, practical jokes, automatism, the contradictory, party games and collaborations in a pursuit of the surreal, affirming above all an openness to chance. But these techniques were the signs of an attempt to discover a mode of research, of experiment, suitable to the age of Marx and Freud; their goal was to rethink experience, to expose each individual to the risk implicit in their hidden desires, to bring about a revolution on the grandest scale.

As Breton emphasises, the Surrealists would ‘uproot thought from an increasingly cruel state of thraldom’ in order to ‘return it to its original purity’, to adopt a tenet of ‘total revolt, complete insubordination’; ‘everything remains to be done, every means must be worth trying, in order to lay to waste the ideas of family, country, religion’.[ii] The surreal was not to become a pastime; Surrealist writing and painting were to remain experiments and not works of literature or art, answering to the unyielding need for their creators to combat ‘poetic indifference, the distraction of art’.[iii] But few can answer this exacting demand. As Breton admits, ‘unflagging fidelity to the commitments of Surrealism presuppose a disinterestedness, a contempt for risk, a refusal to compromise, of which very few men prove, in the long run, to be capable’.[iv] The Surrealist is, for Breton, never Surrealist enough; the Surrealist experiment demands an unyielding commitment to risk – to the dictates of desire that implies the resistance to nationalism, militarism, racism, colonialism, and religion.

Bataille observes that there was, on the part of Breton, ‘a desire for common consecration to a single sovereign truth, a hatred of all forms of concession regarding this truth, of which he wanted his friends to be the expression, otherwise they would cease to be his friends’.[v] Surrealism is nearly as well known for its internal disputes as for the artworks associated with its name. There is no doubt that the group was extraordinarily well organised, but its discipline came at the price of purges and excommunications. Bataille is not unsympathetic; Breton’s failing was not to have proposed the affirmation of a communication of friends around ‘the truth’, but to have reduced friendship to certain ‘outward forms of fidelity’.[vi] Breton, no doubt, was capricious and arrogant, but these traits coexisted with others that permitted him to answer to the Surrealist demand. Those who left the group did so out of a commitment to a new form of communication that would allow them neither to retreat into the solitariness of the life of the writer nor to content themselves with forms of sociability that depend upon reciprocity and mutuality.

For Blanchot, writing after Breton’s death, Surrealism demands the maintenance of a friendship with the surreal that is more important than any particular relationship between individuals. As he suggests, although Breton gave himself a guiding role, orienting its proceedings and co–authoring its programs, this was only in order to recall its participants to the demand of Surrealism insofar as it made every one of them ‘each one’s Other [l’Autre]’.[vii] But to claim that Surrealism is an affirmation of friendship does not mean that surrealists were simply friends, bound to one another by shared interests and mutual respect. Surrealism is, Blanchot insists, ‘always a third person in the friendship; an absent third term through which passes and through which issues this relation of tension and passion that effaces characters as it gives rise to and motivates initiatives and attractions’.[viii] The friendship of one Surrealist for another invokes the surreal itself.

Certainly, the friendship between the Surrealists overturns social categories to the extent that they break with the model of a certain mutuality and reciprocity. Nothing is expected in return; friendship, as a response to a demand, must remain unilateral and intransigent, because the Other is another Surrealist. It exposes the Surrealist to a reserve that cannot be dominated or contained. In this way, the surreal tears open the ordinary notion of friendship, binding a group of extraordinarily individualistic individuals to a common cause by refusing to allow what they share to collapse into something simply held in common. This is what Breton’s intransigence achieves – as Blanchot notes, ‘he had the particular power not of being the one any more than the others, but of making surrealism each one’s Other’; he would have the Surrealists expose themselves to the demand of the Other [l’Autre] – ‘of living it with friendship in the most rigorous sense of this exacting term: making the surrealist affirmation, in other words, a presence or a work of friendship [oeuvre d’amitié]’.[ix] The practices – automatic writing, sleeping experiments, etc. – with which one associates Surrealism are, according to Blanchot, rendered possible by the practice of friendship that Breton required. To fall short of the friendship in question would be to fall short of Surrealism. But this implies that friendship is always revocable since it is liable to contract into a simple reciprocity and never quite measures up to the demand of Surrealism, that is, to the collective, communal affirmation of an encounter that would happen by chance.

On Blanchot’s account, then, Surrealism would name an encounter with the surreal in and as friendship. But the encounter in question cannot be a deliberate choice; it happens, and the Surrealists attempt to witness its advent, holding themselves in the space it opens and awaiting its return. Surrealist friendship permits no concordance between its terms; the surreal, in this context, designates a point of juncture that is also a point of disjuncture, a haunting of mutuality and reciprocity that withdraws itself even as it occurs. It opens a relation to ‘the Outside’ or ‘the unknown’ that can never be secured and to this extent means that Surrealism, as a practice, can never arrive as such.

By 1945, as Blanchot writes in his first major essay on Surrealism, it no longer names a school; it might even seem irrelevant, but ‘a state of mind survives’.[x] Surrealism lives on, wandering from the grave where it was seemingly laid to rest. Surrealism is not dead but dispersed; it is a ‘ghost’ that cannot be exorcised. For Blanchot, it is difficult to assume an authority with respect to Surrealism, assessing its failure or success, for it does not belong to a milieu, to a place or time in terms of which it could be explained and accounted for. The Surrealist demand is not the exclusive property of those associated with its name, nor indeed of those who would take up its name today. Surrealism, in this sense, belongs to no one and those who think themselves enfranchised to judge, to gauge its success or to recount its history, do so at their peril – for, as Blanchot warns us in a later essay, Surrealism, or a certain ghost of Surrealism, will rise up and ‘demand justice’.[xi] This is why its ghostly demand, its call for justice, has eluded us.

*

October 4th 1926. André Breton wanders aimlessly toward the Opéra with a newly purchased book by Trotsky under his arm. The offices and workshops are emptying out, and Breton muses to himself of the workers leaving for home, ‘it was not yet these who would be ready to create the Revolution’.[xii] Then, as he crosses an intersection, he sees a young, poorly dressed woman ten feet away; unlike everyone else on the pavement, he notes, she carries her head high; but if she has a kind of pride, she is also ethereal (‘she scarcely seemed to touch the ground as she walked’).[xiii] There may have been, he remembers, a faint smile wandering across her face; she was made up strangely, her eyes flashed out.[xiv]

She speaks of her poverty and he asks himself: what is happening in her eyes?[xv] She tells Breton the name she has chosen for herself: ‘Nadja, because in Russian it’s the beginning of the word hope, and because it’s only the beginning’.[xvi] Then she asks Breton a question which repeats the one he asked himself in the opening lines of the book: ‘Who are you?’

Who are you? Margaret Cohen notes of those same opening lines that they make play with a French adage ‘Dis-moi qui tu hantes et je te dirai qui tu es’, ‘tell me whom you haunt (in the sense of frequent) and I will tell you who you are’.[xvii] Breton makes it apparent that he appropriates this expression in other than its colloquial sense in the following passage:

I must admit that this last word [haunt] is misleading, tending to establish between certain beings and myself relations that are stranger, less avoidable, more disturbing than I intended. It says much more than it means, it makes me play while still alive the role of a ghost, evidently it alludes to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am.[xviii]

As Cohen observes, ‘Breton goes from suggesting that haunting is related to the places and persons that one frequents to reflecting on how this dependence starts to undermine the integrity of the I itself’.[xix] ‘I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my differentiation [différenciation] from them’.[xx]

Differentiation: Breton asks himself ‘who am I?’ and writes: ‘Such a word [haunt] means much more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part, evidently referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am’.[xxi] Breton ‘plays a ghostly part’ – what does this mean? ‘What matters is that the particular aptitudes my day-to-day life gradually reveals should not distract me from my search for a general aptitude which would be peculiar to me and which is not innate’.[xxii] What will he find? How will Breton answer what is scarcely a question but a kind of demand issuing from the reserve into which Nadja herself will disappear? How will he bring himself into relation with an event which might be said to happen without occurring, flashing up and disappearing such that he will never be sure it took place?

Does Breton really watch over differentiation? He may appear too domineering – after all, he is callously indifferent to Nadja’s incarceration, to her madness; the surrealist researcher, supposedly committed to the Revolution, becomes indifferent to this impoverished woman; the writer who would give himself to the blind play of chance cannot follow her into madness. Perhaps, though, Nadja was written to protect him from Nadja and he domineers because he is afraid, knowing his own identity is fragile. But what is that fragility compared to Nadja’s? What is his weakness when, unlike Nadja, he will recover his strength in order to write? Who am I? Breton does not reply, like Nadja, ‘I am a soul in limbo’. To flirt with differentiation is not yet to undergo its risks; Breton remains the writer who would extract a lesson from experience, holding himself back from his encounters in the diary he keeps from day to day. Yet if he didn’t write, if writing did not spring forth from his pen every day, how would he have witnessed what he experienced? To write is not simply to congeal experience, idealising it, as if the encounter with Nadja lay outside language. Breton writes, too, because he is vigilant, because he would, by writing Nadja, hold himself into the draft of her madness. He survives it, true; he has the strength to write, but if nothing was preserved, what then?

‘I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my differentiation [différenciation] from them’. Nadja testifies to differentiation only because Breton was preserved in his power to write. The danger is to contrast the creation of works with that of a more general practice of existence, as if existence itself did not already depend upon work, upon the attempt to sustain the hypostasis which permits each of us to say ‘I’. Nietzsche wrote nothing in his last years; if Hölderlin was able to write in the years of his madness it is because that madness withdrew for a moment, granting him a merciful surplus of strength to write a few fragmentary lines. Plato already knew that madness is linked to poetry – but he knew, too, the poet would have to survive the madness of inspiration in order to write.

Inspiration is not a simple receptivity. The receptiveness it presumes requires an answering desire to suspend reason or wilful deliberation – a willingness to admit an empowering spirit into the work, to render it productive. The artist must embrace dispossession, acknowledging the authority of a possessing voice, but it is also necessary to assume responsibility for the work, to shape and realise what has been received so that it might inspire others in turn. Breton, then, is inspired; the encounter with Nadja permits him to draw upon a deeper level of self-expression, an enhanced fluency. Still, the objection arises that the differentiation he experiences is not real: his identity remains too solid, too permanent. But upon what does this solidity and permanency rest? As I will show, the surreal is claimed to void language and experience of subjective content; Breton hears in its murmuring the impersonal workings of the unconscious as it augurs the great transformation of the world.

The promise of Surrealism depends upon the fragility of identity, upon the weakness which inhabits the same auto-affirmative strength implicit to existence. Breton’s strength is to pass through weakness rather than conquer it; he aims to bear witness to the play of differentiation, to the ghosts it awakens and the freedom it summons from the future. The greatness of Surrealism lies in the faith it places in the impersonality of inspiration, asking each to endure it in the name of a revolution to come – that great equality wherein each is given over to that afflatus which was once thought the privilege of the poet. It is a collective work; ‘I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my differentiation from them’ – a striving that asks others, Breton’s readers, to struggle in turn.

What does inspiration become? An experience of the dissension of sense – of the great nonsensical ‘there is’ of language as it withholds itself from the power of human speech. Breton places his strength at the service of weakness, of that great receptivity Surrealism would permit. When he asks Aragon to throw a seven hundred page novel on the fire this is not an act of random cruelty, but an attempt to avoid subjecting differentiation to the creation of an artwork the culture industry might admire. When he appears to abandon Nadja to the mental hospital, it is because the surreal is no longer at stake in their relationship. Nadja was never a Muse for Breton, but a collaborator, a friend. If Breton’s book bears her name, it is only as an indication of an encounter wherein the surreal was at stake – an indication and not a term, for it is not Nadja herself who interests him, but the friendship that would allow both to draw close to the surreal.

Nadja is not about Nadja but nor is it entirely about Breton. Who am I?, Breton asks. He is answered by a differentiation as it marks itself into the composition of Nadja. Whence Breton’s story of the amnesiac who asks a clerk in the hotel lobby for his room number and then, having gone there, jumps from the window and returns to question the clerk once again. Whence, too, the fugue which allows Desnos to take on Duchamp's personality, or Eluard’s mistaking Breton for a deceased friend. Then there is the story of the thriller in which a Chinese man replicates himself thousands of times and invades New York; and the painting by Watteau in which the same couple is shown over and over. Finally, there is Nadja herself, who appears to be only one of a series of women Breton encounters, real and unreal (Madame de Chevreuse, Mélusine, Solange and the actress who plays her; the young woman who recites Rimbaud to him in the rain).

Who am I? Breton asks and seeks to learn of his identity by exploring the places he haunts and the encounters which haunt him. He searches for himself in the ambulism which would allow him to follow the labyrinth laid out by his unconscious phantasies as it entangles him in a complex realm in which the real historical significance of the sculpture of the Porte Saint-Denis and the statues of Dolet on the Place Maubert and Rousseau on the Place du Panthéon are bracketed and put out of play. Unbound from their function of commemoration and celebration, the monuments loom forward in their obscurity, just as a phantasmagoric Paris looms around Breton as he wanders with Nadja by his side.

Nadja, a text which bears the name of hope, is marked above all by a restlessness, a wandering; this is a text which must be understood according to its own avowal to record everything. Who writes? Breton himself? Only if the name of its author is allowed to mark in Nadja that vigilance over vigilance which allows the surreal to reverberate. But what does this mean? How are automatism, freedom and surrealism bound to differentiation? What would it mean to do justice to the surreal?

*

In the first Surrealist manifesto, Breton gives an account of the genesis of his first piece of automatic writing. One evening, just before he falls asleep, Breton claims to perceive a phrase which was something like: ‘there is a man cut in two by the window’; this is accompanied by ‘the faint visual image […] of a man walking cut half way up by a window perpendicular to the axis of his body’.[xxiii] An uncanny image, which Breton wants at once to use as for a poem. But as he does so, it was succeeded by a whole series of phrases which, he writes, ‘surprised me only slightly less and left me with the impression of their being so gratuitous that the control I had then exercised upon myself seemed to me illusory and all I could think of was putting an end to the interminable quarrel raging within me’.[xxiv]

Breton confides in his fellow surrealist Phillippe Soupault; they decide to practice the technique together. A single day yields fifty pages; comparing their work, Breton and Soupault find it to be similar; the difference of the texts, Breton decides, lies only in the different tempers of the men. Who speaks? An inexhaustible murmuring which would resound through each of us, any of us, as we open ourselves to automatism. A murmuring, then, which would allow each of us to become a poet and liberate poetry itself from the poetic field (from the preserve of literature, of literary culture). For it is now a question of the surreal, which is to say, of existence, of life in its totality, of the total human being.

Who speaks? Beware of the interpretation that automatism excludes premeditation and conscious control. The Surrealist does not simply allow the pen to wander across sheets of paper; it is not a matter of mental relaxation, as if one would merely have to passively wait for the treasures of the unconscious to reveal themselves. Active consciousness has a role; great effort is required to yield to the claim of the magnetic fields. It is necessary to keep watch over the desire to create a literary work; the Surrealist experimenter must not reread what she has written and fall victim to the images that are conjured by the words on the page; she must remain at the edge of the writing as it pushes forward into the unknown.

Automatism requires a new mode of interrelation between consciousness and unconsciousness – passivity is required, but so too is activity; if the unconscious holds the initiative, consciousness is required such that its message can be carefully transcribed. There is the risk the writer is tempted by a kind of branching – that two or more thoughts will present themselves simultaneously, endangering the recording process. Or the imaginative charm of the poetic images may distract the experimenter, arresting the movement of differentiation. More broadly, the researcher has to resist the conditioned reflex which would allow the uncontrolled élan of automatism to be brought exclusively under conscious control. Yet control is required if the Surrealist is to avoid the terrible temptation of laying claim to the words which spring from her pen as her own. She must remain a machine part, a recording device attuned to the ‘magnetic fields’ of the unconscious. The spontaneous dynamism of the unconscious must be rendered explicit; it is not merely sleeping philosophers that we must become, but thinkers who can effect a synthesis between our dreams and waking life.

Who speaks? What speaks? Who occupies the locus of that vigilance which keeps watch over speech? The answer to both questions is the same: the magnetic field which quivers through our depths. Our depths? – rather, it is as though automatism turns each of us inside out in order to give issue to that murmuring speech which streams in our absence. Then the 'who?' of Breton’s 'who am I?' finds no answer other than the murmuring, the speech of automatism as it overruns the human power to speak and to act.

Is Nadja written automatically? The book passes from philosophical musing to sentimental novel; it takes the form of a memoir and then a case study; a concern for documentary realism coexists alongside lyrical flight; forty-four photographs seem to mock the idea of providing evidence for the events it describes. It may seem Nadja is too artful to be truly automatic, that it yields to a kind of narrative teleology, the satisfaction of an ending. But automatism is not arbitrary – the attempt to follow a series of semantic and phonic associations which sometimes leap from the text to the street (as in the case of the presentiment of the sign BOIS-CHARBONS) and sometimes from the street to the text (the whole of Nadja) is borne by an unconscious impulse. From Mad Love:

Desire arranges multiple ways to express itself […] the least object to which no particular symbolic role is assigned, is able to represent anything. The mind is wonderfully prompt at grasping the most tenuous relation that can exist between two objects taken at random, and poets know that they can always, without fear of being mistaken, say of one thing that it is like the other….. Whether in reality or in the dream [desire] is constrained to make the elements pass through the same network: condensation, displacement, substitutions, alterations.[xxv]

Breton draws on his own experiences of applying Freud’s practice of free association which had drawn the psychoanalyst towards the phenomenon of dreaming. Freud saw dreams as symptoms which would allow of an interpretation that would uncover their true significance by clarifying the associative links which led to them. The ‘manifest’ dream, that is, the way it is remembered and recounted by the patient, conceals the true meaning of the dream because of the self-censoring desires of the superego. For Freud, it was necessary to understand what he called the dreamwork, that is, the way in which the ostensible contents of the dream attest to the play of latent desires in a kind of thinking that is saturated with desire.

These latent thoughts can be divided into prelogical ways of thinking – condensation, displacement, plastic representation and a rational, logical component called secondary revision. Condensation should be understood as the combination of latent dream thoughts into a single manifest element and displacement as the way in which, in the dream, the apparently innocuous detail can become highly significant and the apparently important event can be treated casually. Plastic representation is that process through which important people in the patient’s life are represented by a stock of common symbols (the king = the father, etc.). The latent content manifest in prelogical thought is retrospectively ordered by secondary revision, through which the patient, under the guidance of the censoring superego, is able to construct a narrative out of the material of the dream.

The shared goal of psychoanalysis and Surrealism is to surprise and catch unawares the play of latent desire not just in dreams, but in phantasy, parapraxes, myths, symptoms. In Mad Love, Breton gives an account of his visit with Giacometti to a curiosity shop. Breton tells us he was obsessed with the phrase, le cendrier de Cendrillon, the ashtray of Cinderella. He encounters a spoon, which, for some reason, he feels is linked to the ashtray of the phrase even as it suggests the symbol of the shoe, the slipper of Cinderella. A series of associations is produced: ‘slipper-spoon-penis-perfect mold for this penis’; thus, according to Breton, the mystery announced in the phrase le cendrier de Cendrillon is solved: the series spoon-shoes-slipper, the search for the foot that fits, is about a desire for love.[xxvi] He now recalls Freud’s suggestion about Dora’s mother's jewel case: ‘The box […] like the reticule and the jewel case was once again only a substitute for the shell of Venus, for the female genitals’.[xxvii]

For Breton, desire opens a path through the world; it is a matter of attending to the signs of this desire. For Freud, the neurotic patient might be cured if those signs are understood in terms of the latent content to which they bear witness. The paths of Freudian psychoanalysis and Surrealism diverge in their respective methods of research. Freud is a man of science, Breton a poet; Freud separates unconscious desire from reality, and Breton seeks to bring together desire and the real, claiming our conception of the real is produced by our desire. This is what Breton indicates when he writes, ‘I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak’.[xxviii]

Surreality: most have taken the phrase ‘future resolution’ to indicate that the surreal would indicate a kind of transcendence which would be reached through dialectical synthesis. Suzanne Guerlac argues Breton’s notion of resolution might be read electrochemically. She reads resolution in relation to the verb résoudre, understood in terms of the resolution of a problem. Yet it also carries the meaning, to reduce, transforming something into its constituent elements or causing it to disappear (to reduce a broth in cooking). Breton’s se résoudre en is given in Robert as follows: ‘Hail clouds resolve [se réduisent en] into water’.[xxix] Guerlac draws the conclusion that instead of considering Breton's declaration in terms of a philosophical (or logical) problem in need of dialectical solution, we should read it as a description of an alchemical process.

Is the resolution, then, a kind of reduction? The surreal does not occur anywhere other than the real but it is not simply given. Effort is required by the Surrealist to hold handed-down ideas in abeyance, permitting access to the matters themselves, to absolute reality. This is why Breton is intransigent, guarding against the danger that Surrealism becomes a battery of artistic techniques rather than a struggle for revolution, and watching over the relationships between Surrealists themselves, lest they become indistinguishable from those between people in the world.

When will this happen? Only when it can do so for all, when automatism is generally unleashed, which is to say, after the revolution. But when will the revolution come? It is Nadja, not Breton, who has faith in the people who, one day, will erupt in revolution.[xxx] But Nadja was ‘sucked back into the whirlwind of everyday life’.[xxxi] She disappears into insanity; Breton, reporting her incarceration, can only lyricise about the injustice of mental hospitals. Nadja disappears from the narrative and Breton turns, in the last section of the text, to a new, unnamed beloved, who, he seems to think, incarnates the surreal itself.

Without doing it on purpose, you have taken the place of the forms most familiar to me, as well as of several figures of my foreboding. Nadja was one of these last, and it is just that you should have hidden her from me.

All I know is that this substitution of persons stops with you, because nothing can be substituted for you, and because for me it was for all eternity that this succession of terrible or charming enigmas was to come to an end at your feet.

You are not an enigma for me.

I say that you have turned me from enigmas forever.[xxxii]

Who is she? The one for whom, Breton writes, no one else can be substituted. Nadja, by comparison, was only the last of a series of lovers which has now come to an end. Yet we know from his later books that this new lover, rejecting him, will indeed be substituted; Breton will love others. But in Nadja, he is preserved in his faith that the unnamed addressee of its final section would halt the endless play of substitution. Why, then, does his book bear the name Nadja and not that of his lover to come? One might suspect that this title speaks the truth – that the non-substitutable would indeed be substitutable and there is only ever the open-endedness of those associations which transforms the world itself into passage. In one sense, Breton fails surrealism. In another, as he writes after Nadja of other lovers, he witnesses the truth: he is condemned to write because there is only substitution, only an infinite play of proxies.

The surreal does not lie on the other side of the written text of Nadja, as if it were a matter simply of finding the right way to name or describe it but can only be indicated in that text. An indication Breton might be said to betray as soon as he tries to bring the chain of substitutions to an end. But one, indeed, which undoes this betrayal in turn as it requires he write Communicating Vessels and Mad Love, preventing him from ever allowing the surreal to come to rest in a term. In this way, it is not Breton who is vigilant, but the automatism of his texts as they allow themselves to free associate in the direction of their author’s unconscious desires. And, too, they might be said to be vigilant without him, pressing beyond his attempt to seize on the surreal in the convulsive beauty of his unnamed beloved. Breton fails the surreal, this is true – but his writing does not. He falls short of his own intransigence, but his writings press towards the matters themselves. It is only in this movement, this passing, that the Surrealist reduction is accomplished.

*

For Husserl, the reduction allows the philosopher to achieve an appropriate self-responsibility; for Heidegger, too, the aim is authenticity, but the reduction itself is something which cannot be brought about through an act of will: this is what it means, for him, to philosophise as a finite being. For Blanchot, something stranger occurs, which seems to do away with the idea of philosophical self-responsibility altogether. Now the reduction is linked to an experience of language as it reveals itself in literary fiction. Firstly, fictional writing suspends reference – it does not represent the world, or, through its operation, carry through the free eidetic variation that Husserl advocated as the path to uncover the essence of an object. Secondly, it suspends the intentionality of the author and reader as they seek to animate a fictional world on the basis of what is presented in language. In so doing, it foregrounds what might be called the materiality of language, the immanent field of the ‘there is’ as it resists meaning. Is this what is named by the inexhaustible murmur?

In a particularly terse section of The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot allows conversationalists to put forward some propositions about the reduction. One conversationalist asks whether ‘the meaning of meaning would be neuter, neutral’.[xxxiii] The other replies: ‘let us say that meaning is not posed, neither positive nor negative, yet affirming itself as though outside every affirmation and every negation’.[xxxiv] This reply is to be expected: the neuter, etymologically speaking, is neither one nor the other – neither negation, then, nor what might be posited and affirmed through negation; neither positivity as it rests in itself, nor negativity as it undoes what is given.

The first conversationalist replies in turn:

Again, neutral, if meaning operates or acts through a movement or retreat that is in some sense without end, through an exigency to become suspended and by an ironic outbidding of the epochē. It is not simply the natural position or even that of existence that is to be suspended so that meaning, in its pure disaffected light, might appear; meaning itself can only bear meaning by placing itself in brackets, in parentheses or quotation marks, and this through an infinite reduction thus finally remaining outside meaning like a phantom that dissipates by day and that nonetheless is never lacking, since to be lacking is its sign.[xxxv]

The neuter is indicated through a reduction that is without end, never terminating such that it could be delimited and stabilised, and without sense, insofar as it reveals only that wavering between being and nothingness Blanchot calls the il y a. No one is there to whom anything could be revealed; there is only the ‘il’ as the ‘subject’ of the experience and the il y a or the neuter as the ‘object’ of experience. Yet what is revealed thereby is part of the economy of meaning; it belongs to meaning’s articulation. One conversationalist says, ‘Meaning would therefore only exist by way of the neutral’; the reply comes: ‘But insofar as the neutral would remain foreign to meaning – by which I mean, first: neutral as far as meaning is concerned; not indifferent, but haunting the possibility of meaning and non-sense by the invisible margin of a difference’.[xxxvi]

Indefinite suspense, the eternal epochē: is this what Breton seeks to avoid in Nadja? Is it this fear which Breton attempts to overcome via the Blanchotian equivalent of repression, that is, the desire for determinacy? Nadja’s madness is only a figure for that experience which would bring about that exposure, that turning inside out which Blanchot places at the heart of his work and allows himself to call the surreal. It is as though, for Blanchot, Surrealism contained its own latent content – that what is manifested as the desire for the surreal is only a desire for the neuter, and that the dreamwork is only a name for determination and interiorisation. In The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot dreams of a psychoanalyst ‘for whom a sign would come from the disaster’; Freud would be one for whom this sign had not come even when he uses the word ‘es’ for what we in English know as the id.[xxxvii] This ‘es’ is not yet the Blanchotian ‘il’. It is in the name of the struggle with interiorisation, with determinacy, that Blanchot will attempt to do justice to Surrealism. A peculiar justice, insofar as it will transform what Breton calls absolute reality into the negative absolute, the vigilance of the surrealist into the vigilance of the il and automatism into the play of what Blanchot calls the neuter.

*

For Blanchot, the day is that place in which it is possible to begin, when the human being can engage in those projects before it; the possible is its dimension. If the night is the contrary of the day, it is only that place wherein one rests in the midst of tasks and projects; it is still governed by possibility. Thus, day and night, action and repose belong to the same economy; to sleep after the day is done, to prepare for another day, is to remain secure in the measure which permits the project.

But there is another experience of both the day and the night. First of all, ‘the essence of night’:

In the night no refuge is to be found in sleep. And if you fail sleep, exhaustion finally sickens you, and this sickness prevents sleeping; it is expressed by insomnia, by the impossibility of making sleep a free zone, a clear and true resolution. In the night one cannot sleep.[xxxviii]

Then, secondly, there is the day which ‘survives itself in the night’, which ‘exceeds its term’: the ‘interminable “day”’ linked not to the time of the project, but to ‘time’s absence’.[xxxix]

The interminable day, the essence of night: what do they name? They are linked, Blanchot writes, to ‘the threat of the outside where the world lacks’.[xl] The world refers to the field which is understood in accordance with what is possible for the human being, that is, according to the measure of what the human being is able to do. Both alternatives keep the measure of this 'ability to be able' intact; preserving the human being as the one for whom tasks and projects are possible. That which is outside my capacities is still organised by the measure of those capacities themselves.

What, then, does it mean to invoke the ‘threat of the outside’ – of an experience ‘where the world lacks’?[xli] No longer, in this case, can tasks be weighed up in terms of what I am able or unable to accomplish. It is necessary to conceive of an event which no longer falls within the field of possibility – as though the economy of possibility finds itself inscribed within a space which it is unable to control, one which opens onto an outside which is no longer its outside. Or, once again, there is an inadequacy of the field of the possible to itself, inhabiting it and dividing it at its source. It is in these terms one should understand what Blanchot calls the essence of night and the indeterminable day as well as the experiences to which he links these terms: the dream and the image.

In the essential night, nothing can be done; sleep is not the place of repose, but of restlessness. Coming from outside the world, outside the order or the economy of the possible, the dream is not the secret repository of our wishes, assembling the residues of our daily experience beneath whose manifest content the psychoanalyst would be able to find latent desires. It must be thought, according to Blanchot, in terms of an insomnia or awakening in which it is no longer you or I who dreams – you or I, that is, understood as those beings who can make their way in the world.

Who dreams 'inside' me? But isn't the dream, on Blanchot's account, what is outside me? ‘The dream’, writes Blanchot, ‘is the reawakening of the interminable’.[xlii] It is the return of an experience which cannot be delimited. Like the essential night, it does not permit rest; it presents no secure foothold from which to launch oneself into the future. It entails, rather, the collapse of the beginning and the repetition of an experience without any determinate content. This experience shatters not only the 'content' of the dream, but the idea that a dream could be a receptacle of meaning, latent or otherwise. There is no ‘content’ to the dream since there is no interiority of the dreamer. The dream is the breakthrough of the outside; it is not your dream or mine, but something like the dream of the night – a dream from which the dreamer must be reborn each time she dreams. A rebirth which suspends the temporal order of the possible.

Shattered time: the 'manifest' content of the dream, which evidences, according to Freud, the secondary processes through which its scattered ideations are synthesised into a narrative unity, always passes over the disjunction to which the dream belongs. For Freud, the unconscious is timeless, but the latent desire the dream reveals belongs to an experience of time which is neither 'in' time (the time of the project, of the possible) nor outside it. This leads Freud to posit a common, perhaps transcendental account of the symbolic universe to which we would all belong thereby indicating an experience of, as it were, the 'outside' of time 'in' time.

Who experiences the dream? It is necessary to reconceive the locus of experience – not is it the personal ‘I’, the one who is able to sleep or wake, but the exposition or unfolding of this ‘I’: the 'il'. The chance of this unfolding is there from the start, inhabiting experience as a kind of possible impossible. It is not a recurring dream, but what recurs in every dream; it is not the bearer of the personal secret, the key to a psyche which the psychoanalyst might unlock, but the exposure of the inside to the outside, the disclosure of the prior imbrication of the possible and the impossible, of time with time's absence. ‘Perhaps one could say that the dream is all the more nocturnal in that it turns around itself, that it dreams itself, that it has for its content its possibility’.[xliii] To what latent desire does the dream attest? To the desire to be extinguished in the instant where the 'il' comes forward to take your place. The desire for the essence of the night, the interminable day.

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 that is the opacity of things which do not place themselves at our disposal. This 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 bear upon what Blanchot calls 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).[xliv]

Remembering this passage, Blanchot writes:

a tool, when damaged, becomes its image (and sometimes an aesthetic 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.[xlv]

Blanchot directs us away from the psychoanalytic technique of free association to Heidegger's famous analysis of the hammer in Being and Time instead. Heidegger explains how the hammer, in breaking, removes itself from that network of references in which it was enmeshed. 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'. It is a short step from the account of the breaking of the hammer to what amounts to a phenomenological reduction in his early philosophy: that experience in which I become in my anxiety only a lieu-tenant keeping place for the nothing.[xlvi] In both cases, there has been a lapse in my capacity to produce meaning. Such production is understood, by Blanchot, in terms of the existence of the human being in which it throws out webs of signification wherein particular things are ‘caught’ and, so to speak ‘existed’. That is to say, things show up as being meaningful, as being imbued with meaning in view of the transcendence of Dasein.

Yet not all things allow themselves to be caught in this way. Would the items at the flea-market tell us something we have missed about the world? They would intimate, rather, something about its hither side, which Blanchot presents when he invokes the other ek-stasis – not the initiative of the self, based on power, upon the opening of possibilities, but the interruption of this power and this possibility as the ‘neutral double’ of the world obtrudes.[xlvii]

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, apropos 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.[xlviii]

For Heidegger, Dasein is only a 'temporal transcendence' which leaps beyond itself and towards a future which it understands in terms of specific tasks and ultimately as its own care for its own existence. According to this tradition, the self is not a substantive and self-present unity, but an opening to the future, an ecstasis which understands itself in terms of its thrown projection into the world. 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 suspended and it can no longer reach the thing as an object. In place of the self, there is the experience where 'personal intimacy is destroyed' and there is only 'the menacing proximity of a vague and empty outside'.[xlix] It is no longer a question of my transcendence into the world as it were grasping and digesting being but of being taking its distance from me. I no longer ex-ist in the Heideggerian sense but am ex-posed; what I encounter does not permit me to draw back into myself. I am brought into an encounter with what outstrips me, with what refuses to be interiorised. A kind of reversal occurs; I encounter something which does not merely limit my power to bestow meaning, but escapes the measure of sense altogether.

This reversal is what I encounter in the ‘other’ image. It cannot be confined to the shadow of a particular thing – or rather, it reveals what is other than all things to the extent that they can resist me, refusing the attempt to grasp and seize beings that is inherent to my existence. It is not the ‘other’ image of a particular thing I confront as it would be linked in a determinable relation to its ‘original’. The ‘other’ image is not delimitable; it is as though the encounter with the ‘other’ image is only the trigger for a broader collapse.[l] The narrative voice, I argued in chapter one, resounds through the voices of the characters and the details of the story. The reader can no longer remain intact as a spectator; she is fascinated to the extent that she is brought up against language as it operates symbolically. The experience of the ‘other’ image is analogous: confronting the image of a particular thing, I am pressed up against the ‘neutral double’ of all the things in the world.

What comes first, then? Meaning? Non-meaning? The original? The copy? There is an ambiguity, which is to say both at once. I might experience the image as what is primordial or profound ‘in’ things and the ‘original’ – things in the world – as what is superficial. Or we might experience things in the world as what are more real or more significant than the image. Put another way, the world might appear solid and sure, but at any moment, this solidity and security give way as I am turned over to the uncertainty of the image.[li] Then again, the ‘reality’ of the image often seems illusory and I forget those periods of fascination, of intimacy in which I can no longer make my way with confidence in the world. Yet when I am fascinated by the image, there is no determinable content to my experience; if this contentlessness might be said to be affirmed as the content of my experience there is no one there to experience it. What is left to me but to forget what I cannot undergo in the first person?

Outside the psyche, outside memory and the possibility of memorisation there is a kind of unfolding in which the 'I' is turned inside out. Who am I, in the experience in question? No one. Personne. What exists? 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 this experience? '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'.[lii] 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? It points, rather, to a dispossession; I am occupied not by a subject or a substantive but by an impersonal streaming.

It may appear the 'I' always survives its encounters with things and with persons as long as it is alive, leaping forward into the future, always retaining the capacity for hope. But there is always the chance of an experience which makes it tumble in the midst of this leap: this is what happens in physical suffering, according to Blanchot, but also in writing’s sickness unto death. The leap is interrupted. In this suspended instant, self-relation itself is suspended; the self is torn apart like Orpheus by the Maenads. Something remains – not the self, it is true, but something like an awareness of the river upon which the torn body of Orpheus was cast (an awareness of the river 'in' his dispersed body): of the river which flows in my place, the outside streaming in what was once my interiority. No one is there – but there is a way of understanding this ‘no one’ as designating an impersonal vigilance – the ‘il’ which thereafter leaves its trace in memory. The inside is exposed to the outside; the surreal is only what reveals itself to the vigilant ‘il’, which is to say the neuter.

Which comes first, image or object? Both come at once; both are implicit in my experience of the world and myself. What Heidegger calls ecstasis or transcendence is not negated by what Blanchot calls the ‘other’ ecstasy, the plunge into immanence; likewise, what Heidegger calls the understanding of being is not dissolved into what Blanchot calls the ‘there is’. There is never a simple field of existence without existents despite what Levinas implies in his early studies; existence and the ‘there is’ or the neuter must be thought together. To seek the future resolution of these two states into an absolute reality is to miss the fact that they cannot be resolved; if Surrealism can be understood in terms of a kind of reduction then it is one that maintains these states in their tension, struggling one against the other.

*

After Dada, it was no longer a question of lending support to an ailing artistic institution, but of liberating inspiration itself from the artistic field. One finds both the demystification and democratisation of the inspiration in the insistence that anyone is capable of answering its call. The poet and the artist are not defunct, but their value is no longer artistic. Inspiration, released from the artistic sphere, is for everyone. The work of the inspired artist is only a sign of a Surrealist practice to come. The great danger for the Surrealist is to understand the poem as a vehicle for the poet’s self-expression: to subordinate it to the desire on the part of the poet to realise a finely crafted work. The poets remain ‘instruments too full of pride’; they are unable to allow themselves to become, like the Surrealists, ‘simple receptacles of so many echoes, modest recording instruments’.[liii] ‘Language has been given to man so he may make surrealist use of it’.[liv] But how might one engage with this gift? How does it engage us? It can be presented as a kind of trauma.

The capacity to remember depends upon a certain freedom with respect to the past. For the psychoanalyst, this freedom runs up against resistances. The patient’s complex can be dissolved when it is understood in its secret relation to past events. Analysis depends upon a power to remember beyond the confines of individual, conscious memory. Automatic writing is also supposed to yield up a secret, but it can do so only to those who are no longer regulated by the closed economy of consciousness. In one sense, automatism is a power to remember what has been forgotten, bearing witness to the lost continuity of the unconscious. Automatism would attempt to seize upon this trauma, this murmuring, making it speak at last. But as it does so, it runs up against an irresolvable contradiction in language itself.

For the most part, ordinary language uses the name to identify the thing, idealising it, taking it into the universal. This is to lose the thing in its real existence: the thing and its name are not identical; the word can only encounter the thing as an instance of a universal, as a particular that awaited idealisation. A certain literary writing, by contrast, understands that the negation of the word gives the thing a new, ideal existence as a word. In Blanchot’s words, it ‘observes that the word “cat” is not only the nonexistence of the cat but a nonexistence made word’, that is, a completely determined and objective reality.[lv] This sort of literary language would become thing-like, transposing the singularity of the thing into language. Listen to a single word, Blanchot writes, and you can hear nothingness ‘struggling and toiling away’: ‘it digs tirelessly, doing its utmost to find a way out, nullifying what encloses it – it is infinite disquiet, formless and nameless vigilance’.[lvi] Thus the work of literature indicates something unreal and non-representational, letting non-existence exist as a kind of ‘primal absence’, not as the sign of absent things but as a thing itself, as an object made of words.[lvii]

Language, in the literary work, would attempt to coagulate into its own substantiality, the immanence of its textures, rhythms and sonorousness as they resist the transcendence of meaning. It would seek to rid itself of everything it might name with the aim of achieving a physicality of its own, a perfect immanence. The word no longer disappears in the act of signification. Its arbitrariness with respect to its signified gives itself to be experienced in the very heaviness of the word. As such, it joins itself to the heaviness of every word and of all language. The word ‘cat’ becomes image; it is the trigger of a more general collapse – one which, too, implicates the language user, insofar as the word ‘I’ searches in vain for what it designates. What gives itself to be experienced is the ‘there is’ of language itself, its neutral double. There emerges the presence of what appeared previously to be an absence, the being of what was taken to be nothingness: language becomes symbolic as the oscillation of being and nothingness can be heard in every word.

To write, as Blanchot observes of Mallarmé, ‘is not to evoke a thing but an absence of a thing’; ‘words vanish from the scene to make the thing enter, but since this thing is itself no more than an absence, that which is shown in the theatre, it is an absence of words and absence of things, a simultaneous emptiness, nothing supported by nothing’.[lviii] Yet words must mean if literature is to be readable; the poem, made of language, cannot become a thing. The literary work needs to become a cultural object, available and accessible. Likewise, there is the chance the literary writer becomes the virtuoso whose work evidences a mastery of narrative modes, of incident and characterisation as it reflects back the glories of the world.

The work of literature becomes what Blanchot calls the novel when it fails to become an autonomous thing unto itself. In so doing, it becomes impure and non-absolute because it depends on the world it mirrors: ‘Willing to represent imaginary lives, a story of a society that it proposes to us as real, it depends on this reality of which it is the reproduction or equivalent’; it is always in collusion with a certain mimetologism.[lix] In this sense, literature hovers at the crossroads of verisimilitude and the creation of an autonomous thing. It is never a pure thing or a pure representation; it comprises both movements and cannot do without them. Literary language depends on a paradox, on an irresolvable contradiction.

The Surrealists want to resolve this contradiction not in favour of the human being, but of the impersonal murmur of which all literature is only an echo. Surrealism is the faith that language might permit the great overcoming of the antimonies and contradictions which prevent us from realising our total existence. All difficulties will be resolved; this new language we speak will attain what language always struggled to be. At last, language can attain itself as thinking rather than a means of thinking, seizing upon the truth of immediacy, of immediate life without mediation. Language will no longer be an instrument through which the human being might realise its freedom. Automatic poetry is freedom, not freedom incarnated, but freedom absolute as it acts and manifests itself. My freedom, for Breton, does pass through words, it is realised in them; I discover in writing a relation to myself without intermediary. Is it my freedom any longer? Is the relation in question a relation to myself? Rather, a freedom which traverses us as we are given to automatic writing, and a relation which cannot be situated in a term.

Who is the one given to automatism? No one. Who writes? Personne. What gives itself to be written? The il y a of language, which the surrealists know as the inexhaustible murmur. Whence the surrealist attack on the hackneyed notion of individual talent, on the artwork as hallowed cultural object, on the great museums and galleries of our culture. For it is an equality that is issue; we are equal with respect to the gift of automatism.

Surrealist poetry is a poetry of freedom, of spontaneity, of automatism. How then to understand the Surrealists’ affirmation of Marxism, of communism? How to understand the poetry that would give itself in service of the revolution? Because to write freely is also to take responsibility for what freedom is not; it is to brace oneself against the conditions of society, to flash against the darkness of our present condition – to flash, and, in this flashing, to expose the cracks and interstices, the great contradictions in the present state of society.

The Surrealist has faith that the problems which we take to be important are only a function of the contradictions implicit in our society; it is only after the revolution that one can begin to understand what freedom might mean. Freedom will be grasped negatively until it is grasped no longer as freedom from oppression or exploitation. And on the day after the revolution? The day after surrealism achieves itself? That is the day from which automatic poetry is written. A day which calls us on the pages we read and write. It is bound to the outbreak of a freedom to come; it is already there, ahead of us. Inspired, automatic writing is also critical; if it appears uncommitted, this is only because it is belongs to another order of commitment, because it burns like a star which has consumed everything but itself; it is total, absolute.

Human possibility, human capacity: are these words appropriate for a poetry which reaches us from the future and calls us towards an unimaginable equality? Perhaps it is better to write of what is humanly impossible, or what at least reaches us from the day which approaches us from the other side of time.

Yet for all this, words must mean; the Surrealist cannot overcome the contradiction in language once and for all. Even as Surrealism looks to the reduction that would come after the revolution, this ‘after’ can never actually happen. Automatism, naming human impossibility, the potency of an impersonal freedom, cannot achieve itself as the action of free human beings. If it is free, it happens without the human being, that is, impossibly, not because it is a natural event, occurring like the blooming of a flower or the opening of the day, but because it does so in the withdrawal of the animating power of human existence. An impersonal freedom happens ‘within’ human freedom. I speak, I act as it, too, speaks and acts. I write as it writes; I think as it thinks inside me. The Surrealists are right to observe there is nothing mysterious about this event; to claim it does not occur is only to indicate the way in which it withholds itself from the time of projects and possibility; to allow that it happens is to envisage an event which is impossible but that nevertheless is always happening. Surrealism holds open the indication to such an event, attesting, even in its non-occurrence to the suspension of the instant which breaks with the ordinary course of time.[lx] But how does this indication occur? How is it marked in the Surrealist work?

Breton’s Nadja sets out to retrace the course of a series of episodes that pertain to his encounter with the young woman who bears its name. Its author presents his text as an ongoing narrative of a sequence of events as they occur. He gives the impression that the book that will come to be called Nadja would lay itself open to whatever happens. It seems entirely by chance that Breton meets the wandering spirit whose presence confounds him, who lends her name to his book. Who is she? A woman who sees visions, who is close to what Breton would call the surreal. She surrealises the city through which she passes, seeing ghosts in the Place Dauphine and a fiery, spectral hand hovering above the Seine. She is unpredictable and enigmatic, playful yet grave, her conversation a mixture of the trifling and the profound; she offers startling exegeses of the essays of La Révolution surrealist, composes allegorical sketches and seems to be able to predict the future.

Breton is fascinated. What happens, though, when he tries to grasp Nadja in the book which bears her name? Breton risks appearing as a literary author among other authors, a writer for whom experience is the raw material for the creation of a work. For Nadja is more than the threshold of the surreal. She is also the woman who subsists on menial work, willing, as she tells Breton, to stop at nothing to obtain money. Breton finds her too demanding: she wants money and affection; her conversation is interminable and self-absorbed. The real Nadja who exasperates Breton, the woman who threatens to leave Paris to take up a position as a domestic servant, disappears from the book that bears her name. Breton tells us quickly and callously that she was incarcerated in a mental institution. He turns from Nadja to the woman to whom the latter part of his work is addressed – to the new lover who has, he writes, ‘turned me from enigmas forever’.[lxi] As such, Nadja is merely a stage in the author’s Bildungsroman. Breton turns his attention away from the woman who he presented as an enchantress. Far from opening itself to the risk of an encounter, Breton’s text appears to preserve itself from risk by taking refuge in a narrative in which the encounter with Nadja occupies a carefully allotted role. Nadja becomes, ultimately, a literary work of art and disappears into the literary establishment from which Surrealism was supposed to break. Breton would tell us a well wrought story about madness, about mad love.

Has Breton failed? Perhaps, as Timothy Clark observes, Breton aestheticised the surreal in his récit because he operated with an excessively determined and, in the end, thoroughly traditional conception of the surreal.[lxii] But perhaps Nadja allows an aperture through which the surreal can reveal itself. Yes, Breton incarcerates Nadja in the book that bears her name and in so doing bricks himself into his work, foreclosing the relation to the surreal he sought. But Nadja is haunted, a ghost passes through the walls and the surreal affirms itself as the absence of the work, of a worklessness that Breton cannot banish. Whilst to work is, in the broadest possible sense, to identify or to permit identification to occur, worklessness cannot be understood as a countermovement of equal force. It names, rather, a lability, a withering or differentiation that inhabits work. Blanchot indicates the failure of identification as it marks itself in Nadja, showing us that Breton’s work shelters a relation that testifies to the perpetual incompletion of work even as it calls for completion.

True, Nadja cannot become a work of pure worklessness; worklessness takes neither the form of a book nor tolerates any particular determination. Yes, Breton succumbs to the temptation to realise a literary artwork, but this temptation is the condition for the artwork appearing at all. His récit points beyond itself to worklessness, to what Blanchot calls ‘the absence of the work’ which, he says, ‘cites the work outside itself, calling it always in vain to its own worklessness and making the work re-cite itself, even when it believes it has its sights on “the outside” that it does not fail to include’.[lxiii]

This is why it is insufficient to indict Breton as the ‘Pope’ who prevented Surrealism from realising its potential. Breton fails as he must. One cannot, as Bataille would argue, understand Surrealism as a practice of existence that would preserve itself from particular works. The surreal, as Blanchot shows, is affirmed in those same works. Surrealism appears to fail in terms of its aspiration to join the artistic and political avant-gardes, yet it succeeds in another sense, that is, by affirming and redoubling the affirmation of an opening to the outside, to the unknown. This is Surrealism’s vigilance, its ghostly demand, the call for justice to which Blanchot responds in turn, where justice, now, is understood in terms of the call of or from what he calls the work, the absence of the book. But this remains too abstract. How is worklessness marked in the work? How does differentiation leave its trace?

*

Death, I argued in the previous chapter, is the condition of possibility of sense for the human being, the animal who speaks. This means there can be no return to life before language. As Blanchot writes, ‘man was condemned not to be able to approach anything or experience anything except through the meaning he had to create’.[lxiv] Adam’s act of naming is the start of a more general idealisation of everything that exists, but it simultaneously encloses the human being within the order of being. Yet the mastery over speech conceals a weakness or susceptibility to another experience of language. An experience which is vouchsafed when I cannot find the word I was looking for, when words fail me, or when, like Moses, I stammer. Who stammers? Who seeks a missing word? The one who, in this moment, has been swept aside by the great tide of a language which will not allow a speaker to emerge.

Blanchot figures this double experience of language by retelling Homer’s account of Ulysses’s encounter with the Sirens in the Odyssey. For Blanchot, Ulysses’s journey home stands in for the ‘I’ for whom everything that exists is opened and unfolded as to a unitary point of convergence, the ego. Like the Ulysses of the Odyssey, the task of the ‘I’ is to trace a circular itinerary through what is unknown, experiencing it, undergoing it, before returning to what is known. It is as if everything I meet came from me (from the hypostasis upon which I depend) since the heterogeneity of the thing is always and already subordinated to the measure of powers which belong to the ego. There is no possibility of heterogeneity, of anything that could occur that would outstrip its circular journey. It is this self-identification that lies at the root of both the solitary subject and language itself.

For Blanchot, however, literary writing suspends this circular movement. On the one hand, literary language is the same as everyday language; it must mean, conveying its signified to the reader. On the other, it attests to a struggle with which everyday language tries to have done. Literary language wants to preserve the materiality or physicality of language and, by doing so, allow language itself to become an image that would redouble the becoming-image of the world.

It is the ‘there is’ of language, its becoming-image that he presents as the Siren’s song. As he emphasises, it appears to be neither extraordinary nor inhuman; it possesses an extraordinary power to be sure, but one that lurks within all song. Nevertheless, to be lured by the Sirens is to be attracted by what is extraordinary in the most human of capacities. It is to discover another voice at the heart of the human one – a song that cannot be possessed by a singer. Human singing is joined ultimately to what is inhuman; to sing is always to sing ‘with’ the song of the Sirens – to join one’s voice to theirs, but in doing so, to relinquish one’s voice. The singer is joined by an inhuman voice, by the murmuring of language itself.

The ‘wonderful’ song of the Sirens was both ‘common’ and ‘secret’; it is ‘simple’ ad ‘everyday’.[lxv] The song was heard, and in such a way that it allowed more discerning hearers to heed a secret strangeness within ordinary singing. It stands in for the literary text, which, like the encounter with the song, belongs to ‘strange powers’, to ‘the abyss’.[lxvi] To hear the abyssal song of the Sirens is to realise that an abyss has opened in every utterance. The word ‘cat’ no longer vanishes in the act of successful signification but remains and along with it the whole of language, the il y a of language as it becomes image. But just as the literary writer is unable to realise the impossible ‘object’, to allow the poem to become a thing, the sailor cannot reach the source of the song.

It is for this reason that the Sirens’ song can never be said to be never actually present. Rather, it only implies the direction of the true sources of the song; the song of the Sirens is ‘only a song still to come’, one that would lead its listener toward ‘that space where the singing would really begin’.[lxvii] The Sirens seduce because of the remoteness of their song; their song is only the attraction of a song to come. Likewise, the unattainable ideal of the literary ‘object’ is seductive because of its very unattainability. Those sailors who are led towards the source by the song, steer their ships onto the rocks that surround the Sirens’ isle, finding that in reaching the ostensible source of the song, there is nothing but dying; they disappear. The sailors discover in this region that music itself is absent and their goal unattainable: there is no attainable literary ‘object’, no possibility of making the literary work into a thing. From this perspective, the writer is too early because the goal recedes and the work becomes unrealisable. The sailors have always weighed anchor too soon; the source of the song is always infinitely distant; they die broken-hearted because they have failed not once, but many times. But the writer is also too late; the goal has been overshot, she was already unfaithful to her impossible task.

Ultimately, the search for the ‘essence’ of the song, its source and its wellspring, disappoints because there is no such essence. The desire to discover the source of the song will always lead to disappointment whilst it is understood to promise a marvellous beyond. Yet one should not assume that the song is a mere lie. It calls the literary work into being; the song to come appears to dissimulate itself because it can never come to presence. But the search for the ‘object’ of literature remains admirable. Blanchot shows the relationship between the two demands in the example of Ulysses. But his is not Homer’s Ulysses: Blanchot’s Ulysses becomes Homer; he writes the Odyssey and, in so doing, he stands in for the literary author who sets out to write a novel just as his journey figures as the secret itinerary of the author.

*

Now it is true, Blanchot concedes, Ulysses did overcome the Sirens in a certain way. Indeed, he has himself bound to the mast, his wrists and ankles tied, in order to observe them, to pass through what no other human being had undergone. He endures the song; his crew, ears plugged, admires his mastery. Ulysses appears all the more impressive for the way in which his response to the song of Sirens allows him and the sailors he commands to regain a mastery that was challenged or had been lost: the mastery over song itself. Indeed, Ulysses’s apparent courage allows the sailors to regain their grip on the human activity of singing; they are no longer daunted by the inhumanity of the Sirens’ song. Moreover, Ulysses’s actions cause the Sirens to understand that the song is nothing special: it is merely a human song that sounds inhuman, and the Sirens are merely animals with the appearance of beautiful women. The Sirens can no longer delude themselves that they bear a privileged relationship with the song they thought was in their power. They recognise themselves in the sailors over whom they once had power, but they are fated to remain as far away from what they seek as the sailors. This knowledge turns the Sirens into real women; they become human because they belong, with the sailors, on the hither side of the origin they too would seek.

(Almost as soon as the Sirens become women, Blanchot tells us, they die. But he tells us nothing of the fabulous animals that are turned into women and undergo their own deaths (and perhaps their own resurrection). He writes of Ulysses’s death and resurrection, but Blanchot does not consider the fate of the Sirens after their deaths. Why does Blanchot kill them before they might explore their own form of existence, passing over the possibility of their return or resurrection?

Like Breton, Blanchot would exhibit a friendship for the surreal. But again, like Breton, one must not confuse those who are near the song with the song itself. Nadja is not the surreal but one who shares the opening to the surreal with Breton. Likewise, the Sirens are not their song, but share Ulysses’s fascination with the song. Implicit to Nadja and to ‘Encountering the Imaginary’ is the importance of separating the term from the relation. True, Nadja passes into insanity and the Sirens drown, but this is to say nothing of what might be possible for them. What would it mean to rewrite Nadja from the perspective of Nadja or ‘The Sirens’ Song’ from that of the drowned women? Nothing, if it is not done with respect to the relation to the surreal, which is to say, in the friendship that brings each together in an experience shared only as each becomes ‘il’. It is a question of equality; each is equal insofar as he or she exists in a unilateral and dissymmetrical relation to the surreal. Does this relation neutralise sexual difference? Certainly the ‘il’ is neither male nor female; in becoming other to myself, I am distanced from any attribute by which I might be identified. This is a claim emphasised by Blanchot when he writes of May 1968, even as one can identify in those texts a rhetoric of fraternity and filiation which Derrida will rightly claim to find problematic.[lxviii]

How, though to understand a claim which can be found in the pages of The Unavowable Community, ‘there are no run-of-the-mill women’?[lxix] Should this claim, by contrast, be extended to all human beings and, indeed, to every singularity (tout autre est tout autre, according to Derrida’s idiomatic expression)?[lxx] There is a tendency in Blanchot’s writings from ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ onwards for women to be made to stand in for the singularity of the ‘object’ of which the literary author would write.[lxxi] After noting that certain poets ‘have felt that the act of naming is disquieting and marvellous’, and making the point that the name ‘may give me its meaning but it first suppresses it’, Blanchot uses the example of a woman: ‘for me to say, “this woman”, I must somehow take her flesh-and-blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her’.[lxxii] In so doing, he substitutes a woman for the flower Mallarmé uses as the example of singularity in his ‘Crisis in Verse’ upon which Blanchot draws. But why does he do so? As an act of misogyny or to remember that the annihilation of women in their flesh and blood is the basis for the circulation of words?

Against those who would object ‘with barely withheld indignation’ that the main example in ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ of the destructive power of language is a woman, Rodolphe Gasché protests that ‘the choice of the example is not fortuitous’. Reflecting upon ‘the linguistic and ontological conditions under which a thing in general […] can become Other to begin with’, Blanchot can do this most ‘poignantly’ ‘by taking “woman” as the example’.[lxxiii] How should one understand this poignancy? Is it because Blanchot knows that woman is a privileged figure of the Other who is excluded from discourse? This would account for the way in which Blanchot allows his retelling of Greek myths to form the centrepiece of both The Space of Literature and The Book to Come in which a male hero, who stands in for the literary author, is made to approach a female figure of alterity who stands in for the auto-dissimulating ‘object’ of authorial desire.[lxxiv] This comes perilously close to reinforcing the traditional image of woman as the Muse who grants a male artist the power to create whilst absenting herself from the creation.

What would it mean for a woman to speak of herself and her adventures? Écriture féminine does not escape the economy of possibility once and for all.[lxxv] It is a matter, once again, of permitting an indication to occur, to name the possible and respond to the impossible. Is this response one which would be specifically feminine – or is the feminine just one of the names for those who have been traditionally excluded from the discourse of the master? If the latter is the case, then there is nothing absolutely specific and different about écriture féminine. That the Surrealists are guilty of a casual sexism mirrored in the avant-garde groups which succeeded it (typing out revolutionary documents, according to Guy Debord, was women’s work; Marguerite Duras would later express frustration that women’s role would be to make tea for the male revolutionaries) does not count against what they affirmed as automatic writing. The same goes for Blanchot, insofar as automatism becomes, with him, the way in which human beings are given over to the impossible. Automatism is for everyone, anyone, male, female, male-and-female or any of a thousand tiny sexes – for anyone, which is to say, for the ‘il’ that comes forward in each of us. It is no surprise that Blanchot will figure the ‘il’ as the uneducable child, the untameable beast, and the Other who falls beneath the proletariat. To become ‘il’ is to be given all at once to a becoming-child, to becoming-beast, to a becoming-Other, and perhaps, too, to become woman.[lxxvi])

It would appear, then, that the literary object is, in the end, just a special kind of language, an imitative re-echo of the song human beings have always sung to themselves. The literary work, that would strive to be something more than another cultural artefact, more than a novel that would reflect the world back to itself, must be content with this modest role. Just as the Sirens become real women, the unattainable literary ‘object’ appears to become a goal just like any other; the literary writer is a human being like other human beings.

Yet the story is more complex. Blanchot suggests that although the author might appear to want to strike out and make a thing of words, he is held back by cowardice. Blanchot condemns Ulysses because the hero of The Odyssey exposes the Sirens’ song for what it is without exposing himself to the risk of seeking its source. The bravery of his exposure to the Sirens’ song is only apparent; Ulysses holds himself back from the greater mystery as to the relation between the human and the more-than-human implicit in singing itself. Whilst the sailors might believe Ulysses is heroic, Blanchot knows that Ulysses does not want to succumb to the desire that would lead him towards the source of the Song. Ulysses is reluctant to fall, wanting to maintain his mastery. He cannot let himself disappear, but would endure and save for posterity the experience that is granted to him because of his uncanny privilege. Likewise, the writer conceals a similar reluctance, simultaneously heeding the abyss in every utterance and refusing to heed it, refusing to hear what would overcome his powers and cause him to disappear. Like Ulysses, who would endure the Sirens’ song without letting himself be seduced by the Sirens’ song, the writer merely feigns adventurousness.

Ulysses stops the ears of his crew with wax and has himself bound to the mast of his ship; the novelist is able to write. Yet this cannot preserve Ulysses from the Sirens’ song; nor can the novelist withhold himself from the effects of the language he employs. Unbeknownst to Ulysses and to the sailors who watch him grimace in what they take to be ecstasy, he does indeed succumb to the enchantment of the Sirens’ song. Ulysses is not free of the song; his technical mastery does not prevent it from enticing him on into the other voyage which is, Blanchot explains, the voyage of the récit. Ulysses’s ruses do not prevent his fall. Although it appears that Ulysses emerges from his encounter with the song unscathed, returning to Ithaca to reclaim his wife, his son, and the domestic hearth, Ulysses drowns just as others have drowned before him. Ulysses is ensorcelled by the song and dies; he has embarked on another voyage.

Likewise, the novelist appears able to successfully navigate through the process of literary creation; he is the virtuoso who re-invents our world and enriches our language. Yet a struggle marks the birth of the novel – one which is dimly figured in the stories of alcoholism and suicide. How might one explain this ‘other’ voyage? It may appear Blanchot is on the trail of a secret desire that leads him to despair. Yet for Blanchot it is not a question of the will; ‘no one can begin a journey with the deliberate intention of reaching the Isle of Capraea’; the ‘other’ voyage, the one which begins with the disappearance of the author, is marked by ‘silence, discretion, oblivion’.[lxxvii] Silence, discretion and forgetfulness dissimulate the voyage from the narrative of the novel – this is why the author does not know of the fascination that rules over what he takes to be ‘his’ creation even as he seeks, at the same time, to anchor himself in the world, to console himself with literary prizes and to keep a journal which anchors his writing in the passing of days.

Ulysses is a cowardly figure who seeks to preserve himself against his disappearance, but he really does ‘fall’ or ‘disappear’; the encounter with the song overcomes his mastery. Although we can imagine Ulysses regaling Penelope and Telemachus with stories of his exploits, there would be one tale he is unable to recount. If Ulysses were to begin one day on a book of reminiscences – if he were, as Blanchot suggests, to become Homer himself, relating the story of his exploits, an entire dimension of the encounter with the song would hold itself in reserve. Yet it is this encounter with the song that allows the author to assume the power to write; Ulysses-Homer could not begin his book without having undertaken the journey as Ulysses. For every Homer, every novelist, there is, for Blanchot, always and already a drowned Ulysses. In asking us to entertain the notion that Ulysses and Homer were one and the same person, Blanchot separates out the moments of the composition of the novel in accordance with the two versions of the story of Ulysses’s encounter he recounts.

Imagine Ulysses-Homer sitting down in peace to begin his memoirs. Telemachus and Penelope are close by; he writes under the protection of his home, his Kingdom, and is confident in the powers that accrue to him as a novelist. But even as he picks up his pen to write, Ulysses-Homer undergoes a peculiar transformation: this novelist is no longer the real Ulysses who cleverly resisted the song, but the ‘other’ Ulysses, one who is stirred by the dream that he could follow the song to its source. This Ulysses sets himself the impossible goal of laying bare the power of song itself, and as such, must be defeated in this aim, which demands, as its toll, that he, Ulysses, disappears as Ulysses. Likewise, no novelist as a novelist can endure this disappearance. The source of writing does not reveal itself to him. In refusing to allow itself to be measured by the wiliness and native cunning of Ulysses, the origin envelops Ulysses himself, drowning him as it drowned the Sirens when they became real women. The Odyssey, and this title stands in for that of any novel, is the tombstone not only of the Sirens, but of Ulysses the sea-captain, the novelist-adventurer. The fact that the real Ulysses survived his encounter with the Sirens does not mean that the other Ulysses can secure his grasp upon the source, the potency of writing itself. That potency is denied him because he can never reach it as Ulysses. He falls, he must fall (and he even wants to fall) because he cannot seize upon that which he would seek.

There is thus another voice and another event; there is a Ulysses who is the shadow of the first who does not return to Ithaca, completing the circle and thereafter settling down to write his memoirs. The novel that Ulysses-Homer writes likewise depends upon his drowned double who lies at the bottom of the ocean. The human time in which Ulysses-Homer sets himself the task of writing the novel called The Odyssey gives way to that suspended instant when he is sent on another journey. The birth of the novel cannot be understood without reference to this aneconomic suspension. The psychologist of creativity will never grasp the relationship between the power of creativity and the other voyage into the impossible. Nor can the philosopher broach the question of the temporality of time without taking this inordinate instant into account. It is only the critical commentator who could attend to the hidden vicissitudes of the birth of the novel, who is privy to the instant that secretly inscribed itself in the novel. Blanchot tells us that the novel tells another tale, a récit that is unknown to its teller and to an entire industry of cultural reception.

*

The récit, a history of French literature might tell us, names a literary form of which Breton’s Nadja and Duras’s The Malady of Death and Blanchot’s own Death Sentence and When the Time Comes are examples: short, novella- or novelette-length fictions that are focused around some central occurrence. As Blanchot writes in ‘The Sirens’ Song’, although ‘the récit seems to fulfil its ordinary vocation as a narrative’, it nevertheless bears upon ‘one single episode’ in a way that does not strive to narrate ‘what is believable and familiar’ in the manner of the novelist.[lxxviii]

In Breton’s récit, it is the series of meetings with the young woman who bears its name. In one sense, Breton is aware of the singularity of the récit – he insistently rejects conventional genres; Nadja, unlike the novel is not keen to pass for fiction. It does not draw attention to its artifice, presenting itself as a form of entertainment, as a diverting series of episodes. Breton’s récit narrates an encounter that is extraordinary not only because the young woman its narrator meets is exceptional but because this encounter transforms the world. For Clark, Nadja enacts ‘an unprecedented mode of writing whose provenance is a new experience of the streets as a space of inspiration and mediation to the unknown’.[lxxix] As Clark observes, it is neither simply a fictional work nor an autobiography; it does not relate anecdotes from afar, but indicates its own relation to the events: ‘the actual writing of the text is affirmed as part of the writer’s own exploration of the events he is living’.[lxxx] It does not merely imitate Breton’s experience but is part of the articulation of an event as it escapes the measure of the experiencing ‘I’. Breton is not, like the Blanchotian novelist, the creator-God who freely and sovereignly sustains his creation. His récit would interrupt both the assurance of the novelist who creates and preserves a world and the assurance of the reader for whom the world the novel imitates is the same world he inhabits.

Breton’s récit narrates an extraordinary event, but it also names the unattainable ‘object’ of literary fascination, the source of the Sirens’ song. He insists that the récit does not recall or re-stage the event, but brings it about:

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

It might appear that Breton seeks to write about his encounter with Nadja, but his récit hides another and more fundamental encounter, one that is the condition of possibility of any narration. The event that Breton would narrate is joined in his récit by another narration and another event – that of the interruption of his capacities as an author, the figure for which is the song of the Sirens. Breton, in short, has forgotten what he set out to remember; he has lost what he sought to find.

To recall: the sailors were too impatient, and dropped anchor because they thought they had reached what they sought. But the only way to find the source of song was, Blanchot said, to undergo a prevoluntary fall or disappearance. Just as it is impossible to endure this disappearance in the ordinary course of events, it would also be impossible for anyone or anything, the récit included, to endure the event. Ulysses is condemned only to approach the event until he disappears; likewise, the author of the récit can do no more than approach until he too disappears, and in so doing, is caught up in what happens as the récit.

Is this what Breton understands when he asks, in his final query in the last lines of the penultimate section of his book, ‘Who goes here? Is it you, Nadja? … Is it only me? Is it myself?’[lxxxii] These lines, responding like an echo to the opening question of Nadja, ‘Who am I?’ mean for Blanchot ‘that the whole narrative is but the redoubling of the same question maintained in its spectral indifference’.[lxxxiii]

Who writes? For Blanchot, Breton’s récit testifies in an extraordinary way to the encounter with the Sirens’ song as it redoubles his enigmatic encounter with Nadja. True, Breton encounters Nadja and sets out to write a book that relates this encounter. But writing Nadja, recasting his adventure on an ideal plane, Breton must lose her anew, making do with a papery Nadja, made of words. The redoubled loss of Nadja calls for another loss, for Breton yields himself up as a writer, that is, as one who freely, sovereignly, would sign his name to the book that is ostensibly his. It is as if the act of narrating set a trap for him. To take up writing, to narrate an encounter, is to allow himself to become the lure to a trap which threatens to snap shut. That the author escapes it, recovering in order to finish a work, is not a tribute to his ingenuity. To be sure, Breton finishes Nadja, but his narrative depends upon the detour he was compelled to undertake as soon as he took up his pen. He is lost, as Blanchot writes, ‘in a preliminary Récit’, in an event that begins when he starts to write.[lxxxiv]

What does this mean? On the one hand, novel and récit name two separate genres; a text like Nadja, which bears on a single event, is different from that of The Last Chronicle of Barset which ties together a whole cluster of events. On the other, they name tendencies within the act of telling itself, to the extent that anyone who begins to write a literary fiction does so as a ‘novelist’.

The récit is also a name, for Blanchot, for the suspended instant, the reduction which is implicit in literary creativity. What appears to be completely new about Surrealism, breaking it from the entire history of literature, is the way it would attempt to seize this reduction through the practice of automatism. In one sense, surrealism must fail in this ambition – no one can transcribe the ‘there is’ of language, the great impersonal murmur so that it could become present on the page. But the murmur in question, like Levinas’s ‘there is’, does not exist as something separable from this world. It is part of language, belonging to it, even as it can only be indicated.

It is the greatness of Surrealism to have maintained this indication by struggling against the notion of the work of art or a conventional political practice. The ‘preliminary Récit’ of which Blanchot writes is one name for the event which awakens this struggle, or, as it were, the happening of the surreal itself. The greatness of Surrealism lies in the vigilance it maintains with respect to the surreal.

To claim that vigilance happens in Nadja or Mad Love, which is to say, in literature, is not to betray Surrealism by understanding it in terms of the artworks which are linked to its name. To be sure, the reduction sought by the Surrealists – the coming together of dream and reality – indicates itself in the text, but it is also marked into the practice of friendship, of that relation between the Surrealists in which it was the surreal that was at stake. The latter is a second order vigilance, aiming to preserve what has already happened as the ‘preliminary Récit’.

*

Homer’s Odyssey traces the journey of Ulysses to his homeland, but it does not bear upon those intermittences and discontinuities that would expose the economy of the journey to a troubling event. The Ulysses of the novel is always safe; even when he risks himself, he does so assured of his survival. He is always the man who undergoes adventures without risking a profound self-alteration: his ruses allow him to accomplish deeds that appear brilliant, but are actually hollow. This Ulysses seems to have mastered the song itself and to be able to recall the vicissitudes of his encounter at leisure, writing safely beside Penelope and Telemachus. But the watery death of the other Ulysses, for whom The Odyssey is a tomb, is testament to the fact that the contrivance of Ulysses could never allow him to endure what he could not endure in the first person.

The novelist believes, like Ulysses-Homer, that he is in command of that which he would narrate, but Blanchot argues otherwise. On Blanchot’s account, he is like the wily Ulysses – he can only become a novelist by refusing to relinquish himself to the call that solicits him. If he is able to write books it is only because he is cut off from the original source of his inspiration by his own ruses and machinations. But his work attests to an inhuman effort to heed what the novelist cannot endure: the narrative voice, the récit.

The Blanchotian récit marks the memory of the experience that the novel leaves behind in order to become a novel. The struggle at the birth of the novel is therefore the struggle to do away with the event to which the récit bears witness, that is, to leave the ‘dead’ or ‘disappeared’ Ulysses in the water, abandoning death in favour of the deathless life of the whole, discontinuity in favour of continuity, the absence of work for the labour which gathers everything together. In leaving behind the récit, the novel also leaves the event itself behind. The novel is, for all its riches, only a narration of what it is has already lost. Yes, it dazzles; the novel reproduces the richness and detail of the world. The Blanchotian novelist dreams of the Unity where discontinuity would be merely a sign of the failure of the understanding, a mark of our finitude. In this way, the novel appears to exert, in advance, a grasp of the whole, of the time and space in which everything unfolds. At the same time, the Blanchotian récit inscribes itself into the novel, continually differentiating itself from it such that the ‘there is’ of language indicates itself.

Blanchot’s account of the ‘other’ voyage of Ulysses stages the joining of the inhuman voice of the récit to that of the novelist. The journey of this Ulysses is not circular. The primordial relation through which he would constitute himself as a self-centred and hedonistic subject is interrupted by a call that contests his self-realisation. The closed circuit of interiority is opened; Ulysses no longer experiences himself as an ‘I can’ who can pass unhindered through the finite order of being. The song of the Sirens is unintegratably foreign. Ulysses can only give himself over in response to this call and, thus summoned, is prevented from recoiling or turning back upon himself. The infinite resistance of the song to Ulysses’s powers cannot be understood in terms of a clash of contradictory wills because Ulysses cannot exist with or alongside the song. His disappearance means that he is henceforward unable to unfold his potentialities in a realm in which willed action is possible. No higher synthesis will allow him to mediate the song of the Sirens and integrate it into his own endeavours. Rather, he is co-constituted by the call; his selfhood is simultaneously economic and aneconomic. He is defined by the wiliness and the cleverness that attest to the auto-affirmative strength and vitality that permit his boundless curiosity; but he is also steered by a lethal susceptibility to the song of the Sirens.

At once, Ulysses is driven towards what satisfies the circular demand that would permit his economic return to himself and towards the aneconomic differentiation that denies this return. It is precisely this irresolvable play of economy and aneconomy that allows Ulysses to stand in for both the writer of the novel and the récit. It is this play that determines the relationship between novel and récit, preventing their resolution into a higher synthesis, that is, the incorporation of the récit as an episode in a novel. The récit does not name a literary genre that is separable from the novel, just as the Blanchotian event is not separable from the ordinary course of time. Novel and récit are moments of the same movement of invention. The dissension between novel and récit in Blanchot’s writings can be found in any action. Literature and the reduction it carries out attest to this dissension.

*

In Blanchot’s retelling of the encounter with the Sirens, Homer’s Odyssey becomes a memoir: it is the story Ulysses tells of his return, of the completion of the circle. Ulysses not only undergoes his encounter with the Sirens, but relates this encounter himself. Nothing happens to him that he cannot relate: his is the memory that can recall everything, lifting it out of oblivion and recounting it in turn. Ulysses becomes Homer, the virtuoso of memory, the adventurer who, after his adventures, can relate his own story to entertain others. Ulysses-Homer writes, in the narratorial voice, of his triumph and his return.

Yes, Ulysses returns to his kingdom and sets right all wrongs. But the Ulysses who returns to Ithaca, to the family hearth, to settle down and write, is followed by another Ulysses. Blanchot, in the guise of a sea-traveller, has followed Ulysses on both voyages, remembering what Ulysses does not, and disclosing this gap in Ulysses-Homer’s memory in his ‘The Sirens’ Song’. Who would recognise this worn and threadbare Ulysses who returns to his home in order to remember what outstrips the memory of his homeland? Yet it is this trauma that is marked at the heart of the novel as the récit. This Ulysses, ineluctably marked by death, has been vouchsafed a secret that cost him his intimate relationship with his and any homeland, rendering his Odyssey infinite. This Blanchotian Ulysses drowns; at the same time, he is able to bring us, his readers, tidings of the ‘other’ voyage the literary writer has undertaken.

It is this Blanchotian Ulysses who waits at the elbow of the Ulysses-Homer, composer of the Odyssey. This Blanchotian Ulysses remembers the other story, the exile or the wandering of Ulysses. As the critical commentator who follows Ulysses, losing and then rediscovering him, Blanchot triumphs because he alone can retrace this journey. Blanchot is capable of remembering what Ulysses forgets. His is the power to bear witness to the extraordinary happening of the récit but, as such, is a mastery of that which cannot be mastered.

How are we to understand the adventures of this Blanchotian Ulysses? Blanchot is not the adept who has had an experience and would teach others about it; he does not keep a secret. He remains on the lookout, waiting for the chance for his writing to be seized by an unknown current. He relinquishes his grip and allows his mastery to be taken from him, but this is what allows him to escape the trap, to recover himself from the preliminary Récit. Blanchot is thus open to what the author of Nadja is not. He writes, with ‘The Sirens’ Song’, a text suffused with the origin, a text that lies within every literary-critical essay he has written and every work of literature.

Surrealism fails and redoubles the failure implicit in any literary text. Automatic writing strives to become impersonality itself, the product of the machine part which echoes the pre-personal freedom of language. ‘The Sirens’ Song’ maintains, as explicitly as possible, the struggle at the heart of literature, the ‘preliminary Récit’ that re-echoes in every novel. To claim simply that it does so as literary criticism and not as literature is to miss the point: literary criticism is also literature if it allows the récit, the event at the novel’s heart, to resound. The novel is only an account of that event and to this extent is already a work of commentary insofar as the narrative voice lets speak the repetition, the reduction, upon which literature depends.

‘The Sirens Song’ is not a récit of the récit because, like automatic writing, like Nadja and any work of literature it is made of words which mean; it names the possible and responds to the impossible. ‘The Sirens Song’ is not about the vicissitudes of the author so much as the experience of reading. As such, it redoubles the struggle literature maintains, setting itself back into the reduction, into the vigilance over which it watches. In this way it awakens in its readers one who might exhibit a vigilance over vigilance, watching out for the experience of the ‘il’ who suffers from language, from the neutral double of language.

Back at work on Wittgenstein Jr.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

Blanchot meditates on the paragraph I quoted:

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

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

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

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

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

Blanchot:

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

Or, once again,

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TChris reviews Spurious at Tzer Island.

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

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

Nothing Must be Illustrative

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

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

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

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

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

What Cannot Be Told

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commenting on these lines from Kafka, Blanchot writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Event Itself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Truth of Suffering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Infinite Inadequation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relation Without Relation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Truth of the Event

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

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

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

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

The Experience of Writing

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

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

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

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

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

The Spiritual Animal Kingdom

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inadequacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rejection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author, Actor

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

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

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

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

Let us follow Blanchot's argument a little further:

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

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

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

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

Invited in 1975 to lend his support, in the form of unpublished or other material, to a special issue of the journal Gramma to be devoted to his work, Blanchot declined, courteously but firmly, explaining his reluctance to be seen to authorise that project, and thus limit its freedom and independence, with the following words: 'My absence [i.e. from the issue],' he wrote, 'is a necessary step rather than any decision on my part. I would like nobody to be surprised nor disappointed by it. Publishing is always more difficult. Publishing on the basis of my name is impossible. 

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

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

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

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

New review of Spurious by TChris at Amazon.com.

Let us Enter this Relation

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

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

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

Neither One Nor the Other

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

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

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

A Primal Scene?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tone

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

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

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

'It – the Sea'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Space of Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Thoughts at Once

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

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

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

The Tone of Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Between Parentheses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Merciful Surplus of Strength

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

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

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

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

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

The Test of Inspiration

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

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

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

Martrydom, Witnessing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Darkness and Forgetting

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

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

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

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

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

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

Swimming in the Real

Hypermnesis

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

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

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

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

Aesthesis and Aesthetics

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

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

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

The Scramble Suit

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

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

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

I Will Not Believe It

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

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

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

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

And now Rose:

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

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

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

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

The Burden of Hope

Blanchot's answer seems thin:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Blanchot, Foucault writes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Foucault:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow me at Twitter: UtterlySpurious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few loose, casual notes on this experience.

Language and Death

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Survivors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Other Side of the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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