Lars Iyer's Blog

The Sphinx Within the Sphinx

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

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

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

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

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

The Negative Absolute

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Preliminary Flood

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

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

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

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

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

The Work is the Measure

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

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

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

Discretion

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

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

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

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

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

The Merciful Surplus of Strength

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

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

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

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

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

The Test of Inspiration

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

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

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

Martrydom, Witnessing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Darkness and Forgetting

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Thoughts at Once

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

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

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

The Tone of Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Between Parentheses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let us Enter this Relation

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

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

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

Neither One Nor the Other

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

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

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

A Primal Scene?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tone

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

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

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

‘It – the Sea’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Space of Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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