Bootstrapping

The wheelie bins, the straggly plants: always begin with the yard, I told myself once, and then you’ll always have something to write. As though the yard worked a kind of reduction on the one who, on the other side of the window, would write of what it contained. Write of the yard, and you’ll at least be writing of something. You’ll always have that, the north-facing yard, in its open mediocity.

Baron Munchausen was able to pull himself out of the ocean by his bootstraps. To bootstrap writing is to as though lift writing out of the details it is made to record. As though you could separate writing from writing. As though there were a pure ‘to write’ that sought to free itself from what is said.

And isn’t this a beautiful thought, that that writing would lift itself through everything you write of your life? That it would set fire your entire life in order to rise, phoenix-like, from the flames. Unless there is a way of living that is like that burning, and life is separable from life as writing is from writing. ‘To live’: but what would that mean?

Mediocre life, open on all sides. Who is that leans over me, offering me a mirror for my perfect nothingness? I am the host of the one who is mirrored thus, who lives in me and by way of me. A life, a writing: at the heart of my mediocrity I burst into flame.

Erasure

Chance must be allowed to play because no one wants to force the issue; neither of us is to act or be acted upon. Chance: we may meet again; we may not; it will happen or will not. From what strange coincidences is our relationship made and unmade.

The field of chance is the day, the everyday. Will we meet there? Will we fail to meet? I know I cannot phone you; that would be too active, and too demanding. Do not force events. But it’s been eighteen months. How old am I? Twenty, twenty-one? It’s been too much of my life.

Then – one day – we met by chance. There you were, with your mother. And if we hadn’t met then? I wouldn’t know you now. And if I hadn’t ran into you in the stationers? For a long time, I would sit in town on a step by the street, waiting, or cycle through the park where we had once walked.

No appointment had been made. Was it that I believed you would appear because it was what I wanted? Rather, I think I liked that belief, that it grew around me like an arbour. Somewhere, in those eighteen months, I was being looked for. Somewhere, as from a far corner of the universe, chance had set out to find me.

How else to pass my summer, except by watching for your return? But you did not appear; and the whole world shaped itself around your absence. I think it was that when I knew the thickness of the everyday, its blindess, its indifference. Fate had no place here. The great rivers of history ran out here; everything was neutralised, and if this was the end, it was the endless end, when nothing was to happen.

But, I met you, didn’t I? Chance came to find me, and when I wasn’t expecting it. I had waited until I’d forgotten I was waiting. When I saw you I knew what my life had been. But it would have been more perfect still if you had failed to see me – failed to remember who I was, as the Abbess had forgotten Honda in the last book of The Sea of Fertility, or the grandmother her own grandson in Tarkovsky’s Mirror?

I would have been found, but by whom? You had forgotten me, and my life had become lighter by that forgetting.

I’m growing older, I know it, as day lies down upon day. Older, and the days that turn will one day do so without me. The earth turns into the sun as it will turn into darkness; this, the long afternoon of my life, will fan out to its evening, like a river that fans into a delta as it reaches the sea.

Sometimes I dream life is already over, and I am living backwards, not forwards, opening doors into rooms in which I’ve been before. Is there a way of watching your own traces disappear from the world, like footprints in snow? One day I will arrive at the point where I am not yet born. Perfection: the work of erasure done, it will be time to pass from my life.

The Ghost

Up early to write and then nothing to write. Read instead. I pick up a travelogue, and envy the narrator who could feed the desire to write with stories about his passage. Wandering in the world is the correlate of writing; what hope is there for me who travels nowhere and has no desire to travel anywhere?

In the end, I put the book down, telling myself its narrator was frightened to face himself as the ghost of his writing – that he travelled only to remove himself from the double that was set back within him as soon as he began to write. He would become something like a ghost, I told myself, but a ghost of this world, hungry for experience.

But isn’t this the avoidance of writing, or the attempt to answer its demand by throwing everything into its sacrificial flame, and letting its flames rise higher? In the end, it is the flames that triumph, dying down so there is nothing left but a low flickering and white ash. Writing will not extinguish itself, though it will burn everything you feed it.

Writing’s revenge: one day you will no longer have the strength to write. One day, you’ll fail writing, by having nothing to offer it. What will you write then, traveller without the means to travel? Writing will let you wander from yourself as though you had been buried at the crossroads. You will not find a place to die: so will writing have its revenge.

But what of those who were never able to write, who had not life enough, adventures enough, who lived in the same quotidian world as anyone else? I have a friend who visits crack houses in order to have something to relate; filling himself up with drink for Dutch courage, he wanders into the most dangerous parts of his city. He saw a man die in front of him, and defended his dealer from an attack; who, at dawn that morning, when they sat together in Platt Fields, told him he wanted to give up the business and lead, like him, a regular life.

All this my friend tells me on the phone, along with his new plan to join the Foreign Legion. Imagine starting a chapter, he says, ‘And so I joined the Foreign Legion.’ Then my friend would fill his life with events in order to feed the demand to write. Sometimes he charges me with writing his adventures. What matters, for him, is that a record be kept. He is like the Greek hero who writes so his deeds will reverberate across the world.

In the East and West, the ghost is often thought as having unfinished business, whether it is a desire for revenge or for justice. Buddhist traditions call the ghost ‘hungry’, since it is still attached to the world; a Vedic purana has ghosts living on the excresences of the body: on piss and vomit, on tears and coughs.

I think my friend is haunted by a hungry ghost. But does he know the ghost of writing, writing’s demand, will eat up the whole of his life, his tears, his coughs, his vomit and his piss? He moved from one flat because he soaked a sofa with piss after his binges. He moved from another because he was beaten by rivals to his dealer. Writing will lick up piss and blood and more besides.

One day, my friend will find his way back to prison, and lie again in the upper bunk, smoking weed. One day, once again, he will again have to show himself the tough man of his wing, and send me letters about life inside that I am to keep as a record.

Meanwhile, outside prison and spreading everywhere, the mundane world, the quotidian, which seems to deprive writing of all topic. The world is the world, and nothing besides. The world is the world, and there are no more adventures. How, then, to write? How to let rise your own ghost and stir the fire of writing?

In Chinese traditions, I learn that some ghosts, especially those of the drowned, try and murder the living to steal their right to reincarnation. To be killed thus is to be substituted, to become a tìsíguǐ (a ‘substitute death ghost’, a ‘substitute devil’) as your capacity to die and to pass into rebirth is taken from you.

How to substitute for writing? How to steal from it the capacity for rebirth, its return as the same gaping demand? But I know it is I who have already been substituted by writing; that there is one in me who is always the tìsíguǐ, who writes with me and dreams with me, all the while drinking the tears from the corners of my eyes.

The Icon

When Jesus is called ‘the image of the living God’ – isn’t this a sign that he, too, was an icon? And when God made the first human beings in his own image, was it the first icons he had made?

I remember well the wet marks made by kisses on a framed picture of Mary in the church in Stockport, and the icon of Jesus that used to stand in the corner of our living room with a vigil candle burning in front of it. Then, too, there were images of the saints all around us, cut out from calenders and then mounted on wood.

We used to talk, my landlord and I, about icons, about the Incarnation. Christ, he said, was perfectly divine; he was perfectly human. Christ was the God-man, my landlord said, joining image and prototype. St John of Damascus argued that something similar counted for the icon: like Christ, it was also a hypostasis; it too let God dwell in matter.

I learnt that according to the dictates of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, in which the bitter struggle between the iconoclasts and iconodules was resolved, to venerate the icon of Jesus, Mary or the Saints is to venerate its prototype; the mundane touches the divine.

This is why we should be censed along with the painted icons in a service, I learnt, and he remembered a priest who would wave incense out of doors, censing the whole of nature, as if it, too were an image of God.

An image of God? And of whom, then, was I an image, who was outside the charmed circle of believers?

I fell into that house after a long period of hardship, and lived there safe in the network that reached from there to the corners of the world. Many guests came; many tenants lived alongside me in the rooms of the house. Never was I tempted to convert; I knew nothing of churches, of Christianity, but I enjoyed it that the house was somehow set back from the world; it did not belong to the last decade of the second millenium.

Above all, I had time to seep back to the space that should surround work. No more madness, no more penury; in the stillness of a room at the back of the house, I set up my computer. A whole year had passed since I’d begun my studies, and what had I written? It took another full year for me to find my way to the beginning. And in the meantime? I wandered out on the streets, from cafes to bookshops. Days passed without marker.

I read Lossky’s classic account of Orthodox theology. The mundane is touched by the divine; matter becomes a cradle for spirit. But what if the mundane itself were divided? What if it could be said the mundane became a cradle for itself, or touched itself? What if I myself turned around a point that remained mysterious to me?

In my imagination, an icon was bound to no prototype; or rather, it spoke only of itself, of a kind of doubling of itself, by which it was set apart from the ordinary world, even as it showed how that world, too, might be set apart from itself. Then it was as though the icon was a way to unhinge the world, to break apart that vast and secret labour that allowed it to make sense.

A way of breaking oneself apart too – or rather, that part of what I was that was set against the other for whom wandering was possible, and whose descent into the streets could be followed by a period of work in his room. How to live from the time between when the world became a threshold and wandering without term? How to know the world as icon, and to cense it by writing?

To write – but that was impossible. I lost myself on other paths; I wrote, I published, and found myself in another city. The question that had died away returned: how to let the mundane be touched by its double? How to write of the wanderer, or let him type within my typing fingers? How to double in writing the opposite of hypostasis – that undoing which lets the world wander from itself?

The icon is the double of the Incarnation. But now now to think the disincarnation, the fleeing of matter from form, but by way of form? How to let the world let slip itself within itself, for the detour within the same to escape the same?

Questions without answer, and ones it has taken a long time to form. And yet I must also say they asked themselves in me – asked and thereby demanded formulation, searching for themselves by way of writing. As though to write was to come into contact with what wrote against me, or that the intention to write was met by the intention of writing.

What did it want? To be born, to be written. What did it ask for? To determined in matter, the questioning that was without form. To come to presence, that which was without presence.

Tonight, the summer spreads before me. Should I work? Should I find a new project? Or is there a way of writing to be found by writing, to let writing turn on itself and to look back at me through eyes that are something like mine?

I saw you, writing. No: you saw you in myself. Saw and said: I will rejoin myself by this seeing. Writing said, I will return to myself, and through you, hinge, point of articulation. For where you are the world is broken.

The Simulacrum

In occult literature, I read the simulacrum refers to a small image of a whole: a particular person can be represented by some of his hair, or a fingernail, which can then find place in a ritual. Didn’t Parmenides press the young Socrates as to whether there were Ideas of these offgrowths of the body? And wouldn’t Bataille have included them in the (non)category of the formless?

Either way, it is as though we could be known, each of us, by way of what is sloughed from us; the path to the essential is to be gained via the inessential. But magic always placed faith in secret correspondences, in the connection of symbols and the order of things. The simulacrum would be just another symbol; the image grants the chance of the manipulation of the whole. This is what the child believes in writing the name of his infatuee on his exercise book. If I have her name, then I have something of her. How many times do I need to write it for the love-spell to be cast?

The poppet, I read, is a doll that is meant to be substitutive of a person to cast spells of healing, fertility or binding. A physical trace of its object is unnecessary; the poppet can be made from wax, clay or branches, or any number of substances. But the effigy so produced stands in for the person it is meant to represent; to act upon the poppet is to act on the person. This practice, which is called ‘image magic’, is to be distinguished from those famous practices from New Orleans Voodoo that centre on ‘voodoo dolls’, which are, I read, ‘power objects’ rather than proxies.

Image magic: isn’t this what I work when I speak about you, rather than to you? As adolescents, I remember learning the power of speaking about others. Immense power: alliances were formed and dissolved, secrets kept and broken. X. spoke about Y. to Z., and then Z. spoke to Y. about X.: our relation to each other acquired a new kind of depth. Where was the immediacy of our childhood friendships?

Add to this the drama of the diary, of written confessions; every relationship was doubled. Strange discovery that to write was to begin to reconstitute the world, to discover patterns and correspondences. To keep a diary was a magical operation; if it allowed the development of interiority this was only insofar as it made an image of the world, and even an image of oneself. Who were you, the writer? And what was the world you were writing about?

Could I say I began to relate to myself as to an effigy? That something of my substance was captured in the ink covered pages of my five year diary? Now I was like the fairy-tale ogre whose heart was buried outside of him. Then writing was something like the hair or fingernails that were the basis of the simulacrum. I had doubled myself using my own substance.

But wasn’t there another, more difficult lesson? To double myself was only to separate out that doubling that belongs, also to the original. To speak, to write, was to redouble a doubling that had already set itself back into the conditions of my life. For isn’t language already the outside inside? Isn’t it already what has turned me from myself?

It is Plato, not Aristotle, who understands the threat of writing. He banishes the poets from the polis because he fears the power of a language that no longer refers, that doubles itself, that belongs to the alogon rather than the logos (Schmidt). Aristotle accommodates the tragedian; but Plato knows the tragedy embodies something more frightening: a struggle at the limits of the polis, a struggle against the Ideas and for the proliferation of the magic of the image.

Alogon: the double of language. Or, language become simulacral, material, all hair and fingernails. Language that lets itself be carried in the direction of the formless (Bataille). But what if there are no Ideas, and the sky is empty? Then language was always made of hair and nails, and the logos is always doubled. And I, too, the speaker, the writer, have a kind of double, a companion, like a vestigal twin, who speaks with me and writes with me.

He is writing now, his ghostly hand within mine. And when he speaks, I hear his murmuring in my voice. Sometimes I want to confront him, and ask him who he is. But from what angle can I see him, he who is also me? How can I turn so as to meet what gives me the power to turn? In the end, I have to look for him in my own face.

But what mirror will show him? I wonder whether writing is the mirror in which he seeks to find me, and that somewhere he is as though reaching out his hand to press against mine. But his hand is already mine; his reaching is my reaching; we are joined, but we do not occupy the same time. I imagine he lags behind me, that he draws me back into the past, but also that the future is only his return, the return of the past. I don’t know which one of us is writing this.

The Doppelgänger

A former astronaut speaks of a planet hidden from the earth because it is always on the other side of the sun, a planet that is almost the exact double of earth, then he runs his wheelchair into a mirror. As a child, I saw the last few minutes of a film I learnt just now was called Doppelgänger. Travel through space, and you only return home (Solaris). Earth is the only alien planet (Ballard). But this astronaut travelled to arrive somewhere that was only like home; a planet alien because it was only the image of what he had known.

And I remember another childhood experience of the doppelgänger, this time from the Six Million Dollar Man, where Steve Austin was displaced by someone who looked exactly like him. Fear: what if it happened to me? What if I were displaced by the image of myself, my double? But not entirely fear, for wouldn’t an adventure begin for me then, as I left my old identity behind like someone who had faked his own death.

X. tells me on the phone he wants to join the Foreign Legion: they’ll fake your death for you, and, providing you can do fifty press ups, will disappear you into the desert for a minimum term of six years. You’d end up speaking fluent French, X. says, who has only a year to decide, the Legion refusing to accept anyone over the age of forty.

Some traditions take the doppelgänger to be a vision of death. When Abraham Lincoln saw two images of himself in the mirror, one of them pale and deathly, his wife knew he would not serve the second of his presidential terms. Shelley’s doppelgänger appeared to him in a dream just before he died.

In folklore, the doppelgänger appears to give you advice, but this advice might be misleading. Furthermore, the double casts no reflection in water. I suppose this means the doppelgänger has no doppelgänger, that he, who is all image, has no image himself. The play of mirroring limits itself; or it is as though the doppelgänger belongs to something like the blindspot of sight, fow what shines darkly back through the eyes of your own reflection.

‘Is that me in the mirror?’ – ‘It is and is not.’ – ‘Is it me?’ – ‘You cannot see what allows you to see who you are. The doppelgänger is the blindspot of your seeing.’

At one point in Mirror, a young woman sees herself grown old. She wipes the mirror with her hand. Sometimes I imagine my image is like that: elderly and looking back from the end of life. As though we had met at a crossing point, he heading backwards to my birth, and I forwards to my death. I will be born, he says; I will die, say I. But sometimes I imagine the image of a mute child. Who are you?, I ask, and though he does not answer, the corners of his mouth turn upwards. He smiles, and I do not understand him. Then he is gone.

Doppelgänger: the double who goes, who passes. The one who walks alongside you, the companion, but you see only when you come close to death. ‘Were you really with me all this time?’ – ‘I was with you.’ – ‘Were you watching me all this time?’ – ‘I watched, and inside your own watching. I breathed inside your breathing. I lived for you, I dreamt for you, but now you must die for me.’

The Homunculus

There are several recipes for the Homunculus, a golem-like minature of the human being, who, when generated in the right way, is supposed to become a willing servant of the alchemist. For Paracelsus, who claimed to have made one, not more than a foot in height, though his little servant quickly turned on him and escaped, you have to take sperm, a bag of bones and fragments of hair and skin, and lay it in the ground encased in horse manure for forty days.

Later alchemists claimed the sperm must come from the final ejaculations of a hanged man; where it falls to the ground, a mandrake will grow, which must be picked at dawn on a Friday morning by a black dog. Pour it with milk and honey and the mandrake will become the little human being it resembles.

David Christianus, in the eighteenth century, instructs us to take an egg laid by a black hen, and, after making a hole in its shell substitute a part of its white for human sperm. Seal the egg with virgin parchment and in thirty days, a homunculus is born, which you must tend with earthworms and lavender seeds. (Note that the alchemist Konrad Dippel, who lived in Castle Frankenstein, and may have been an inspiration for Mary Shelley’s book, was a student of Christianus at the University of Geissen.)

My impression is the homunculus is a more capricious creature than the golem, catlike rather than doglike, with sharp little teeth and wild eyes and no desire for death. But the word the homunculus is also used in contemporary theories of consciousness to designate that part of brain function that unifies experience. Then the homunculus is a principle of self-identity and preventing any infinite regress when reflecting on the ultimate locus of experience.

But this means the homunculus provides the condition of thought, the possibility of reflexivity, but cannot be reached through introspection. Other theorists suppose there is not one homunculus, but many – a thousand little witnesses who are born and die at each moment. But I like the idea that the homunculus is the blind spot of consciousness, which sees without being able to see itself. Unless one can imagine a thousand blindspots flashing open and disappearing like light-flecks on the water.

Obscure double, witness that cannot speak of itself: I think of those ancient Indian theories of the witness self, still alive, still there in the deepest sleep. Dreaming, I imagine – but of what? Of lifting itself from the Stygian depths, of showing itself to the one to whom it grants the unity of a self. Homunculus is a word too small for this most frightening of doubles, whose face is like my own but full of darkness.

The Golem

Adam, says the Talmud, was originally made a golem; only later did God give him human life. The latter is a power no human creator can imitate, but the latter – giving life to shapeless mud -lay in the power of the great Rabbis. The golem is obedient, but cannot speak: it is only mud, the formless, come to life, and what does formlessness have to say? If it speaks it is only as the reverberation of form, the stirring of an indeterminable life without contour.

Life – but it is the shadow of life, for who would say the golem is alive? Life’s shadow, the edge of life as that edge becomes a threshold and then a plateau. Are you alive? Are you dead? Or is it that you’re death in life, death given life, death that looks for itself on the ice-field like Frankenstein’s monster. How can death know itself except by way of the wilderness? Death looks for itself there, in the wilderness. Death looks for itself in the golem, whose soul is only death turning in itself, seeking itself, restless and insomniac.

‘I would like to die’. – ‘Only when you have done my bidding’. – ‘I would like to die.’ – ‘Death will be your reward, when you do my bidding.’ There are many stories of Rabbis who took golems as servants. And there are stories of golems summoned as figures of vengeance. Rabbi Judah Loew raised a golem from the clay of Prague’s Vitava river, to defend the Jewish ghetto. As it grew, the golem became more violent, killing without discrimination and spreading fear. Rabbi Loew rubbed out the first letter of the word he had inscribed on the golem’s forehead to give it life. Emet, truth, became met, death.

The golem’s prayer, even in the wildness of its violence: to return again to clay; no longer to give death contour, for isn’t that the greatest pain: to live death, to live death in life, death trying to find itself, to rub out the first letter on its forehead.

Other stories speak of the power of the golem to raise witnesses from the dead, who were allowed to testify in court. The golem once again at the threshold, but now charged with watching over the dead in the name of justice. ‘Let justice be done, and I will lie down to die.’ As though death itself were demanding justice. Or that justice holds sway over death.

But I prefer Loew’s wild golem, who has grown too large, too quickly, and whose growth is his pain. No – the pain of death in search of itself, death made to live a life in the world, and taking revenge on the others that live, returning them by violence to the state for which the golem longs. Death gone mad in the world, because it cannot die.

Eyes Without a Face

Back, relieved, after the last conference of the season. The silver sheen of my sink, which I scrubbed clean before I left; the plants, still alive despite the heatwave, and my computer, with my new broadband connection, gateway to Youtube welcome me home. But the thread I’d been following here has broken. What had I been intending to write?

Luckily, I brought Vertigo home with me, having opened it to read only two or three pages in the last few days (the narrator is in Vienna; his dining companion shouts ‘See in you in Jerusalem’, first in Italian, then in German as he is borne away by on a gondola into the night – but that was all I had time to read.) A prayer to reading: make a bridge through these moments, make a bridge across through the night and into the morning. But why the second prayer: help me write the sentences that will continue even after I close the book?

To sleep within the book. And then to wake up as though I had been given by the book into the world. Given: is it reading that gives writing? Or is it writing that gives itself through the gift of reading? I read to write. No: writing calls for reading in order to return to itself. To return as gift, as giving. And the book burns. Vertigo burns itself down like a candle.

But that is not it either. Doesn’t writing want to consume my life, too? Doesn’t it ask for narratives, for events? To pause before writing this story is to prevent writing from fulfilling this desire. And not because I want to save my life in its simple immediacy (as if that were possible). How to indicate writing as writing – writing as the threshold where it reveals its desire to set fire to the world?

No autobiography. No narratives, through which the wick of writing would run. Above the threshold, lights burning in the sky. Writing, aurora borealis. Writing that has nothing to consume, and burns only itself. But that doesn’t have itself to burn.

Then think of it as not yet arrived, or as arriving from the future. Think of it as waiting to be given a body and to come toward you like a living thing. And all the while knowing it cannot be embodied, and, like the faces the father scientist steals for his disfigured daughter in Eyes Without A Face, it must seek fresh stories, even as it knows they must wither and die.

How then to tell of writing that is without a face, without itself? How to let narrative seize on its condition, on the story that will not tell itself? To say: writing, I would like you to face me. But then to see it’s face is yours become no one’s; void without stars.

And isn’t that why I love Vertigo? For its moving forward, for the strength that pushes each sentence forward, that lets the narrative travel as the author travels. But a strength that runs into nothing like a river into sand: for what is vertigo itself, that state into which Sebald’s narrator succumbs from time to time, but the withering of the strength to narrate?

Then the book trembles with what it cannot contain. Writing looks for a new face; writing loses its face. Eyes without a face: how to meet this faceless book? But it is already that it sees from our own eyes, there where we are blind.

The Line

If I survived most of the instructors at my gym, this is not testament to my determination. In truth, I am the laziest of gym attendees; if I visit regularly, it is only to read on those cross trainers that allow me to wedge a paperback open. For a long time, I would write down the number of calories I expended over one hour on the inside cover of the books I read.

Thus, Gathering Evidence has 833 10/10, 851, 12/10; Extinction has 900 (but no date). But then long overdue, I changed my routine; I began to use the free weights as well as the resistance machines. I am still lazy, but today, I was pleased to put the largest weights on my barbell. Had I made progress? According to new research, I read in a gym magazine, aerobic exercise is much more effective when it follows severe anaerobic exertion.

So after warming up, I go straight to the weights, but now, on the cross trainer, I’m really too tired to read, and reading slows until books take much too long too finish. How many times did I carry Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting to gym? Long enough to forget the freshness of its beginning; long enough to tire of gratuitous intrigue. So many characters! So many scenes! And always that same authorial voice, too sure of itself, too steady; and the predictable sideswipes at popular culture.

But I remember starting the book a sunny afternoon a few weeks ago at St Margaret’s station in London; I continued to read on my journey back to the north along the East coast of England. As we passed the last of the hills of Yorkshire, I was already halfway through. But then my reading, confined to the gym, since I was busy at work, and my evenings were taken up with reading and writing things academic, stalled.

Finally, I finished the novel impatiently in my office; it was long overdue; now I could pick something new from the shelf. But what? My Muriel Spark novels had long since arrived, but I didn’t finish The Public Image. I went to the bookshop, wondering if Slow Man had come out in paperback. But then I remembered the book that I’d lost as soon as I’d finished it: Vertigo, Sebald’s Vertigo. Thankfully, they had a copy in one of the local bookshops; I took it to the gym, and after the weights, started reading it for a second time.

And what a marvel it remains! Happiness as I followed the vicissitudes of a single character, and the rise and fall of what seems a single continuum of mood; relief to be left along with the forward impulse of the narrative as it runs on into the dark; relief there are no authorial asides, and the text is not broken up, but seems to fall into itself, carry it with me. As I shower, it is as though Sebald’s voice continues inside me; I speak to myself of gym, of showering, of vanished instructors.

I have been given a voice, I think to myself, and the happiness of narration. MacIntyre would have it that life without narrative is chaos and noise, and it is true that if I am not in the company of a strong novel, the events of the day do not seem to settle in sequence. I want to be alone with a book, that’s what I say to myself, then, and am grateful for long train journeys, the voyage north or the voyage south, four hours as I am borne forward by what I read just as the train bears itself forward.

But what kind of narrative do I want to tell? Like Sebald’s narrator’s, Handke’s too are usually of a man apart, a wandering man. Is that what I want, then – to tell a story of being alone, or of coming to a wandering solitude, where neither word, wandering, solitude, can be thought apart from the other. But I am no wanderer. Only once in this city have I ever gone walking without a purpose in mind.

That was a few months ago, in the midst of turmoil and indecision. I discovered a route from here to there, a new secondhand bookshop, but I never revisited it, or retaken that walk. When I was young, it is true, I walked without purpose – across the square in front of the town hall in Manchester, across to the old warehouses behind Piccadilly Station, or to the wastelands still unregenerated along the ship canal.

But now I am older? No journey without purpose. No psychogeography, no drifting. A sense that there will soon be no chance to work, to write. Of urgency – or as if I had wasted most of my early life, as if I had lived in the wrong direction, and it was only now I had found a path. This is why I rise early; it is why I like to spend evenings after the pub reading, focusing upon what is to be written tomorrow.

Life lived in a single direction; the right one, and perhaps, in its way, a kind of wandering – but one, if this is possible, along only two dimensions. Life as a line, as the attempt to follow a line. Yes, that is the solitary wandering that can only be travelled alone. But then, too, there is always the pub, and company – my friends – about whom I do not write enough.

What is more wonderful than the evening drink with X. and Y. where X says, come and eat at my house, and we have an impromptu meal of whatever we can find in his fridge and the cupboard, or forage from the supermarket on the corner? Then we sit out in the little garden amidst the potted plants, and life is fine, the evening opens before us; it is summer; we are in the middle of our lives, and all is well, everything can be talked about, there will be no disagreement.

Remembering those times, I admire the lightness of The Girls of Slender Means: what a gift to be able to write like, so lightly! But even then, the day that follows such nights begins with the same demand: find again the unwavering line; follow it, attempt to follow it, as it breaks into the future. Or rather, receive it from the future, that line along which you travel; experience it as fate, as what is marked out only for you.

And then I think of the journeys of the protagonist’s seven friends in My Year in No Man’s Land – friends who seem only aspects of Handke himself, just as the characters of Mishima’s Kyoto’s House, dramatised in Schrader’s films, are aspects of the narrator. Seven friends – how to split yourself into seven pieces and let them wander on separate journeys?

But I am reading Vertigo, I must remember that. Vertigo will provide the orientation – and hasn’t it already given me this voice, the one in which I am writing now? But who is the ‘I’ that writes, and whose voice is this? To MacIntyre always the objection that there are so many stories that could be told, and so many narrators I might find myself to be.

But I know which narrator I want to be. Urgency, the single line to be followed: what distance is that I see myself crossing? Only that between the future and the present, as if I were bringing something back, not living forwards. As though I were protecting something I’d brought from there, the future.

I think of the ogre’s heart in fairytales, that is hidden far from the ogre’s living body. In a chest, at the bottom of a lake – and isn’t it possible to live from something of you that is buried in the future?

How many kilograms did I lift today? I barely lifted them. 5 repetitions, 6, and only 3 times over. That was nothing, but after, my left arm ached. I had an excuse: no more. Back to the cross trainer, back to Vertigo, relieved that with this narrative, my life lifts itself out of chaos and noise.

Fragmentary Writing

Undo a category like the ones on the left, and what happens to the posts? They are kept, but dispersed – kept without connection (although, unpleasantly, Google searches reveal the presence of posts on the net that I’ve long deleted). Kept, but dispersed. But hardly kept, since they can be found, now, only by chance. This gives them an uncertain future – for who will find them, and by what search? And who, finding them, will know the whole of which they were once part?

Perhaps blogging only appears to be a fragmentary form; posts are divided by a span of time – a week, a day, an afternoon; the white space around the post is a correlate of this temporal division. But is the post itself divided? In what sense does it embody interruption, rather than forcing it out all around it, and allowing it to mark as margin only the interval between writing and not writing?

This is so even for the post discovered by chance, as from, say, a Google search. A kind of silence surrounds it, that is true, made present by the space of the page, but this does not mean writing includes silence, or that it is fragmented in itself.

No writing without sense, without the horizon of sense; but is there a way for writing to break that horizon? A way of speaking that wears out sense, that pushes sense beyond sense? Continuity: the madness of a text that does not stop. Or then a disrupted speech, the line that breaks sense even as it appears to grant it.

How delicately it must be balanced! How difficult to let the fragmentary evidence itself! If it’s necessary to break with every notion of value, not just because today’s techniques are already outmoded (the fragmentary is not an avant-garde), but because the outmoded is the condition of what writing would point towards in the name of the fragmentary, of the fragmentary demand.

Then it is this indication that is important, not the external form of the fragment. Or rather, fragmentation begins only where writing points beyond what it is, where the said is doubled by a saying – not as it would be spoken by this or that individual, but by writing itself, by the fact that there is writing.

When does the chance of saying begin? In one sense, the place of saying was taken by the gods who spoke by way of writing. The gods, the Muses – then the Ideas, then God: what is writerly inspiration but the engagement with writing as it speaks itself? But haven’t the gods got to disappear, and this disappearance be experienced as it is before saying, infinite questioning, can speak in its own name?

It has no name – this is what is realised; or that the name God was only a placekeeper. No name – and what is it to write so as to allow names to undo themselves, to become indications – and then to allow the whole of what is written become a single quivering arrow?

The Same

From one day to another, the same pursues itself. Capitalise it: the Same; writing as writing, language as language: how to remain on the threshold where anything might be said, where writing trusts you to go on with your work?

To secure your tomorrow, that’s what you seek. Where the next day follows from the last; where a kind of circle begins to trace itself and what is before you returns to yesterday, and the day before summons the next day before it as a kind of witness. The past and the future meet here, in the moment of writing. They witness each other; they pass, each in their own direction.

The look back is the look forward; now the days lie down, one after another, in perfect continuity. Summer is this: the continuity of days. Summer is the ‘as’ of writing as writing, language as language. It is the silence around which the whole sky of stars, writing, turns.

Eternal summer, that gathers to itself all potentials. How is it you are young again, with possibility as your element? We used to meet as children with our bikes under the ‘great pine’ every morning. That patch of wasteland in between the houses seemed to draw to itself all potential, all potency. What would happen today, in the greatest of days? We would cycle away, sustained, each day, by infinite possibility. And to write from day to day? It is the same; it is the same of the same, the axis that is the summer turning.

Doubling

Typepad is down, so what will you do? You can’t transfer writing into the ‘post introduction’ from anywhere else, bceause the format goes wrong, and words as simple as ‘everyday’ are scrambled. Don’t write, then. But how to find yourself back to the writing compared to which everything else is a mere episode? Is it that I lead a double life everywhere else but here? Or is to write to separate life from itself in another sense? In the world, distance and I are no longer one. But here, where to relate to life is to double life by writing?

Last night, not writing, I rediscovered my flat, tidying and reorganising, finding again the framed paintings I had long since taken down from the wall. I cleaned the kitchen floor, and broke up old furniture to make way for the chest of drawers and wardrobe that are to arrive this morning. I found a flat within my flat, or it became, in these silent days after the departure of the students upstairs, a home. But what about writing?

Husserl calls an epoche that suspension of the world through which the phenomenologist must proceed in order to attend to the things themselves. But what if those things can only be written about, not seen with the theoretical eye of the investigator? I think the world doubled itself when the first human being stepped into it. Being was unjoined from beings; the creation was inverted or parodied as things appeared in place of themselves.

To speak of the world, to write, is to double the world. The capacity to speak already entails that doubling. And the speaker, the writer, is also doubled; we lead double lives. All at once, this is forgotten. Who can bear the shimmering where the world is unjoined from itself? Language, which was once allowed to be sacred, falls into the mundane. Literature is confused with the representation of the world as it is, rather that the undoing of the world, and the holding of the determinate into the indeterminable.

What is theory blogging, when theory still retains the etymological reference to sight, to that measuring of the world which abstracts from the world? Can theory be brought to know its own operation, the blindspot of sight? Blind theory, wandering like Oedipus who was led by his daughter to find a place to die, it is only now you experience the doubling of the world. Only now do you come up against the limits of knowledge, you who embody the new claims of knowledge itself against the ancient wisdom of the gods (Goux).

To write is not to see. Or, there is a writing that is not a seeing. Who are you double, coming close to write out this sentence for me? Who are you, distant one? Who are you, distance of the world, its doubling?

Sharing

1. There is an ancient fear of mimesis, of that doubling of the world in which beings seem to appear in place of themselves. The mimetic power of art is suspicious because it seems to tear beings from themselves – they are no longer what it were; no longer, that is, bound to what we thought they were according to the principle of identity.

Plato’s Ideas are supposed to marshall simulacra; artists are to be strictly controlled since art is only an aping of the Idea, a vulgar repetition which threatens to set loose a power of differentiation without identity loose in the world. What is more strange and terrifying than a world become other than itself? Who is more terrifying than your double?

Of course, writing, too, is to be distrusted, even as Plato is condemned to write. It was the living presence of Socrates that made him, the young poet, give up writing; it was the same presence that called for writing, since Socrates, the purest philosophy, never wrote a word. How strange that his writing bore the historical Socrates away; that Plato emerges as an author only as he lets Socrates become a mouthpiece.

But then Plato thinks he can provide answers to where Socrates only posed questions – answers, that, although written, give him clear criteria to distinguish the real from the simulcral. He sacrifices his literary gifts at the altar of philosophy; he writes in service of the Ideas, even as, with the Parmenides, he allows the Ideas to be ridiculed. For the real reader of Parmenides can supply answers to Parmenides’ riddle that the young Socrates cannot: this text is part of an oral teaching, of those lessons that pass from mouth to ear to mouth without fear of contamination.

2. What happens with the fall of the Ideas? Heidegger differentiates being from beings, breaking the principle of identity. He also ends up think of this differentiation in terms of language, which, as the ground of all relation, cannot, as with the being of beings, is too close to the human being to be thought of in relation to the human being.

(Here, he is unlike Nietzsche, for whom music, beyond language, attests in its continuity, its lack of grammar, to the real. Heidegger can only think music through language – as language’s sonorousness, its rhythms and colours – as what, in language, outbids its formalisation. This musical materiality, this power of differentiation, is where mimesis reveals its play. No music without language; but it is the musicality of language that would allow language to be experienced.)

3. Levinas would break with Heidegger because of this fearsome differentiation: who knows what the world might become? Without form, without limit, the being of beings is terrifying. And what is poetry but the drunken celebration of limitlessness, the participation in the whole, which has no room for the ethical? (My account is too brief, too dense, but these are only scribbles in a notebook.)

The presence of the Other, the silent address of the Other, breaks through this wild power of mimesis, and all language. That is to say, language begins again and the world is given again with the commencement of speech, with my response to the Other.

(Given again – how is it I always think of Kierkegaard here, of his notion of repetition? Given again, retaken – Levinas never claims simply the relation to the Other is a priori. The a priori a posteriori – the encounter which only then reveals the conditions of living, of existence: what is this but the repetition in which being is given anew, given as it falls away from its absoluteness, its primacy.

Perhaps this a priori a posteriori is analogous to what Heidegger calls the experience of language, from which thinking, for him, is to recommence. Most thought-provoking is that we are not thinking – and we are not doing so because we have not been brought into the vicinity, the holy precinct of this experience.)

Blanchot does not fear the strange power of mimesis. Once again, the invocation of the presence of the Other, the address of the Other, but this time, it is indistinguishable from that strange mimesis that lets being appear in place of themselves. Indistinguishable, that is, on the same plane? Is speech, for Blanchot, the equivalent of that literary writing in which it is the image of the world that speaks as the image of language?

What speech and writing have in common for Blanchot is that sharing in which a relation to language is given. Given to the writer, and then to the reader; given to the one who responds to the silent presence of the Other, and then to the one who responds as he becomes Other in turn. Sharing – each time, it is a relation to the same as the non-identical. Each time a strange resemblance.

(Kierkegaard again: repetition as the thunderstorm out of which God does not speak; the retaking of the world, of language, by way of an experienced given by the Other. Given by him (or her), without he or she being necessarily aware of it. How does this happen? One day you spoke, and in your speech, I heard a kind of silence, a saying that was withdrawn from anything you said. You did not mean to speak thus. It happened; on that day, I was ready, and I heard it, and by way of your speech, that doubling of the world, of all things in the doubling of language that happened as your address. Repetition, retaking, but this time without the shattering of being. Its infinite extenuation.)

Plato feared writing was only the corpse of true speech, its lifeless proxy. For Blanchot, the relation to the dying reveals what hides itself in the vivacity of the living: the corpse is the image of the body. What happens when speech begins to resemble itself – when, that is, it silently withdraws, as saying, from anything that is said, becoming sheer address, giving itself as language – as language as language? 

For Levinas, it is the Other who breaks into the world, and into the self-resembling of the world. For Blanchot, that self-resembling is experienced by way of the Other; it is shared in the relation to the one who addresses me, but also to the book I read in which language, likewise begins to resemble itself.

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.’ The right expression for the uncanny doubling of the world is not a proposition, but the ‘there is’ of language; language that comes to itself and speaks of itself in speech and in writing.

4. Language is the condition of all possible relations of the human being with the world. Is it possible to relate to language, to be brought into relation with language? Only when language – the performance of language – is interrupted. Only by following language until it comes up against its limits.

Language as language, the world as the world, where, each time, it is a question of the Same (capitalised) and the return of the same. Each time, it is given as interruption – as a kind of silence (language), or uncanny presence (the world  – but then language and the world must be thought together). But each time, its condition is a kind of sharing, for Blanchot.

But a sharing, a community, of a peculiar kind. The literary writer determines the indeterminable to realise a book. The relation, here, is between him and the indeterminable, it is true, but by way of the book, which opens itself to be read. Then the indeterminable is the ‘third term’ of the relation between writer and readers. The reader of literature is also brought into relation with the indeterminable in her encounter with the book, and she might, too, relate to the writer of that book not as a living person like her, but as one who determined that encounter, who gave it form.

(None of this, of course, is guaranteed – not all writers are brought into contact with the indeterminable, which is to say, to language as language. The same for readers. And even if they are touched by language as language, how can they retain this experience as what it is? This is the role of the Blanchotian critic, the philosopher – to know what has been encountered, and by way of the shared.)

Likewise in the case of the encounter with the Other, who becomes so only insofar as she brings me into relation with, once again, language as language, with saying. This encounter, with remains unilateral and dissymmetrical, may be redoubled for the other person in turn; I, too, can become Other. This is what Blanchot calls the Opening of community (his capitals).

(Once again, no guarantees. The encounter with the Other is elective; it happens by chance. And there are some relationships in which this encounter repeats itself with every meeting – in which it is the relation to language as language that is at issue in what Blanchot calls, remembering Bataille, friendship. Note, though, that he presents friendship in other ways, too.)

He also envisages collective bodies in which this sharing occurs. In the funeral march for those murdered at Charonne Metro station, each shares a relation to the dead. Among the students and workers in May 1968, each shares a relation to the revolution, just as, Blanchot writes to Mascolo, those in a seance bear a relation to a ghost. Each time, it is a question of silence, of an address, of the threshold of language.

5. Silence – but is this the word? What noise is made by the interdeterminable as it is made to resound in language? Nietzsche’s lament in the preface he added to The Birth of Tragedy fourteen years after its publication: ‘It should have sung, this new voice – and not spoken! How sad that I did not risk saying as a poet what I had to say then: perhaps I could have done it.’ To sing thought, to sing philosophy – what would this mean?

Silence is not sung, in Blanchot, but murmurs; there’s no getting rid of grammar, and the indeterminable rolls in the literary work like thunder. And doesn’t it roll between us, too – in what is held between us, in the relation of sharing?

(Thunder – not music. And no reference to those musical terms still found in Heidegger: fugue, tonality, echo, rhythm.)

The Translator

There are moments that do not pass, that lose their bearings. Lost moments that ask to be abandoned to the past, to fall back into time, and the streaming of time. The inconsequential: why should I remember walking from Holborn to the London Review Bookshop? Why do I remember crossing that road by the scooter shop?

I was on the way to the bookshop, true, but I can locate that moment only by way of the bookshop; in truth, the moment was indifferent to my destination, and to my point of origin. It detached itself; it was lifted from the course of time. How was I to live what would not settle? The moment passed – how could it do otherwise? – but it did not pass.

How is it that when I remember it, it is only by way of what occludes it? In truth, I am unequal to the moment; I who always know what to do next am unfit for a moment that admits no ‘next’. Now I understand why Peter Handke’s books are growing larger and larger: he would write of the moment without succession, not to catch it, but to allow it to fall back into time.

But what time? The epic – a new kind of epic, the great recounting of the insignificant everyday, which fills our lives, even by vacating our lives of content. The insignificant? No: the infinitely significant, the moment which promises everything, that clothes itself in every event in the world. Handke, writing of the day to day, steers the moment into a succession of diaphonous moments.

It is not continuity he seeks (his novels have purged themselves of plot, of character, of incident), or suspense – unless it is to suspend one course of time in favour of another. The epic of moments, of the momentary everyday: how is it I know he has no words of his own, and not even a name? How is it I think of him as the translator, as the one who lets speak the moment without fixing it in any particular language?

‘And Then?’

You’re never happier, says W., than when you’re planning something. A collaboration – a conference – yes, what is happier than having a plan, and of gaining thereby an orientation to those half-thoughts with gather inside me as iron fillings are shaped by the presence of a magnet: for a time those thoughts imitate form; for a time they point in a single direction.

It is as though those half-thoughts were streamlined, honed in a wind tunnel to the sleekest form that could then bear me to the future. Or it is as though it is from the future those half-thoughts come, welcoming me, reaching for my hand. Yes: I have a path to the future. Or it is the future that unrolls a path back to me, and says: come on: that is what my plan is.

An escape from the present, which turns my present into a threshold. I have a future; the future hasn’t forgotten me: that’s what it is to have a plan. In February, I spoke on Country Music; in March on New Wave music, and then on tragedy in Schelling and others, and then on philosophy and idiocy; in April on … I don’t remember. A paper for each month; I approach the future from a dozen directions.

And now, in July, I have to speak on – … but its content does not matter. How many days do I have left for my research? I ordered that book, and read that one; I looked up that article on the web, and Googled that topic. And then? And then?

A future without plans, what would that mean? To fall from all plans, all projects? ‘And then’: that’s what the future says. But what if there was no ‘and then’? Here, I write of little else, but there – in the world? I plan; I write, busily.

And then?: the other future, or the future furled within the future, like God speaking from the whirlwind. You will have no name. You will be no one in particular; every moment is a threshold. I will appoach the condition of Peter Handke’s protagonists: Andreas Loser in Across, the wanderers of Absence, the woman of The Left Handed Woman, who are blessedly lost from the course of their lives.

‘Only through walking do spaces open up and the spaces between them sing’; ‘rid of his name, yet certain that he is at last present‘; ‘the emptiness here no longer promises you anything’; ‘getting rid of our history, escaping into geography’; ‘… human clouds … we kept arriving …’

Blessed work, the effort to write the epic of the everyday, My Year in No Man’s Bay. How can a book be so boring and so necessary? I tell myself: do not keep your appointment with tomorrow. Miss the nexus of next morning’s writing. I tell myself: but miss it in writing, in another writing. Is it possible to turn a forgotten corner, to open a door miraculously unlocked, so that something of me stops, even if I go on?

I have time; I pause and look up in my work. No: time gives itself; it pauses and looks through my eyes. ‘Emptiness! The word was equivalent to the invocation of the Muse at the beginning of an epic.’ Yes, emptiness, which unlocks the door. ‘The present seemed so pure and uniquely luminous’. And then? And then?

Freiburg

1. W.’s favourite question, that he likes to ask and be asked, ‘When did you know you were a failure?’ When was it you knew you had intelligence enough to appreciate brilliance, but not enough to be brilliant yourself? When was it you knew a great book from a merely good one, and knew you would never write neither a good book nor a great one? When was it you knew you’d never have a single thought of your own – not one?

Yet we still the desire to to think, I say. Still a kind of reflex to try to think, and to write a good book. To do what you cannot do – that for which patience will never be enough, and learning about the history of philosophy will never be enough. That which the brilliant can do and you cannot. That which is effortless for them and remains the greatest of effort for you.

‘What’s your IQ, do you think?’, says W. – ’83. I was tested. But it’s going down, year by year.’ – ‘What is it now?’ – ’77.’ – ‘So you’re an imbecile?’

2. We are travelling to the city of phenomenology, and standing at the bar on the train. We like the rowdy Germans around us. They’re playing ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ on their stereo and smoking. We’re on the train! In Germany! And off to the city of phenomenology!

On the last such jolly, I wore Hawaiian shorts, W. reminds me. That was Poland, a few years ago. All day on an old European train, being brought cheap beer and snacks, we arrived half-drunk and rowdy, like children who need looking after. This time, we’ve organised the trip by ourselves. Or rather, W. has followed me in booking flights and a hotel. It’s all going to go wrong, we know it. Still, we’re off to the city of phenomenology! Imagine that!

W.: ‘What are your impressions of Europe?’. – ‘Very flat. Very green. A lot like England.’ – ‘And what are you going to bring to Freiburg? What will be your contribution?’

That night, we wander through Freiburg. ‘It’s lovely.’ We feel ashamed and dirty. Then we come across restaurant tables in an alley. For the first time, I eat sausage, sauerkraut and mustard – it’s marvellous. W. knows how happy eating makes me. I’m a little dizzy. And then he has me try some German Sekt. A new world opens to me. ‘It’s like Cava – but nicer.’ And so it is. Like dry Cava.

Where are the others? Have they arrived yet? But W., grim faced is determined to find an internet cafe. Up and down the streets we go, until we find one in a Burger King. The keyboard is metal and its keys are sunk into the table. Hard to use your fingers. The emails come out wrong. But we are happy to be in contact with the world. Now we can go back to find them, the others.

Our friends arrive the next day – X. and Y., and Z., too, who knows W. X. insists we have to go to the reception. So up to a lobby where we are charged for drinks, and then a big, round room where food is served. It’s ghastly. ‘I want to go.’ But we have to stay. On a big screen, photographs of previous conferences. ‘This is horrible.’

Later, in the lift, I become mildly hysterical. It’s too much! It’s all too much! All of them, all the others! Later, we calm down over drinks. Here we are in Freiburg! The home of phenomenology! And what are we going to bring to the city?

3. In dead time, travelling from here to there, I try to provoke W. with my sociobiological musings. What nonsense posssesses me! Pure streaming of nonsense! Sometimes, W. talks to me very seriously of love. It’s not based on fantasy as I seem to think, he says, but is an ethical act. ‘But you’re not capable of that, are you?’

Trains and buses, across Germany. We have to get out of Freiburg. It’s stifling. Our friends A. and B. have a hotel outside the city. I write down in our book of lessons, ‘never book to stay in the conference hotel’. And then another lesson: ‘Never attend receptions. Or anything.’ We are determined to learn.

At one cafe, our Polish waiter urges us to get away. ‘This is the wrong part of town. It’s too expensive here.’ He touches his heart. ‘It hurts me here for you.’ So we wander off, our whole party, to another part of town. Where should we go? We’ve no idea. So back to the ’emergency scheisse bar’ for caiperenas. These will save us.

Now we are jolly and light again. Freiburg falls away around us. We see a rat scurrying by our chairs. A rat! But what does it matter! We have our caiperenas! In the city of phenomenology! We’ve brought nothing here but British drunkenness and British lairiness.

4. A. makes a trip to Todnauenberg. ‘Did you shit in the well?’ You can’t get near the hut, apparently. Hermann, the son lives up there. Later A. meets him. Hermann says his father turned down the Rectorship twice, and only accepted it as a favour to a friend.

So we walk up the observation tower outside the city instead. There it is, all of Freiburg! Phenomenology’s city! And who are we, who have come only to soil phenomenology and the memory of phenomenology!

5. In the bar after our paper, we drink ‘Lady Velvet’: Sekt mixed with Guinness. The barman plays The Smiths because some of our party are for Manchester. In the urinals, tiny goals with balls you can move with the stream of your piss. It’s football season, the world cup. When Germany win some game or another, the Freiburgians are as loutish as the British.

When we return from Strasbourg, Pina Coladas in an Italian ice cream bar. We’re desperate. ‘Why did we have to come back?’ X., Y. and Z. are long gone; and now it’s time to say goodbye to A. and B. Back to the hotel bar, then, once again. The hotel bar, where we ended up every night!

Then a terrible spectacle: up comes X, whom we all want to avoid. There he is! In person! I stand and shake his hand. I simper – that’s W.’s word, after. Yes, for my shame, I simper. I handle it badly, simperingly. ‘You know about my problem with authority’, I say to W., afterwards. ‘And besides, I have to make it up to him – the beer, I mean.’ I’d spilt beer on his stetson. Beer on his velvet stetson! That was years ago, but I remembered his anger.

Do you think he remembers me? He remembers everything, I’m told. So I simper. I curry favour. It’s grotesque – my worst feature. W. is disgusted. I’ve let myself down again, he says. For his part, he handled the encounter well, laughing, and keeping his distance.

6. Initially, we are excited about our breakfasts at the hotel, and plan what we’re going to eat the night before. Gradually, it wears us down: the poor coffee and the heavy, farmed salmon, and take to leaving for a cafe in the square which does Orange Peking tea (is that what it’s called). We sit and drink our overpriced tea, and I always imagine we are right by a river.

What joy when we discovered the concrete channels cut into the road which let shallow, narrow streams of water run along the street between pedestrians and traffic! I marvelled, then and later – and especially when we found that alleyway where the river itself passes through the town. Later, when we took X. and Y. there, it was not nearly as exciting. We learnt not to try to repeat our experiences. ‘Write that down in your notebook’, W. tells me.

7. Conversations on trains, in bars, when there’s nothing left to say. ‘So what’s your next magnum opus going to be about then?’ Laughter. Or I will make pans for future papers and collaborations. ‘You’re never happier than when you make plans’, says W., ‘why is that?’

We grow tired of drinking, and of German sausage. Our visit to Strasbourg soothes us. We speak hushedly, and I enjoy hearing W.’s gentle French. Exquisite Alsatian wine, the finest I’ve ever drunk. Then the cathedral, and the river, which we follow along. So many beautiful buildings, one after another! It’s too much – but at least they are really old, and not faux old as are the rebuilt buildings of Freiburg.

We find one square, then another. Water, then espresso – the first good coffee we’ve had in a while. Yes, we are in Strasbourg, and carefree. Our souls expand. When we return to Freiburg we tell everyone to go there. ‘You have to escape Freiburg. Then everything will make sense again.’ We all agree: we’ve been here too long; every thought has been driven from our heads. Who of us has read a book, or even tried?

Sitting out with a beer outside the hotel, I try to read, but there’s no point. Later, in my room, which looks out from five stories over the town and to the hills and mountains, I manage to read three essays. This is an achievement. I feel slightly more real. I’m coming into focus. But then I grow blurred and hazy again. I’ve lost all hold on myself, I tell W. So’s he. But at least he has music. We listen to mp3s on his laptop. The world comes together again.

8. One day, the clouds parted, and I could delude myself there might be something to our collaborative projects. ‘Do you think we have a position?’ At least, for a time, the illusion of having one. We have a view of this, and that.

It was a moment of clarity, such as we had on a few occasions during our trip. ‘Write it down’, says W., ‘write down our findings.’ But I’ve no notebook with me; all that’s left now is the certainty that, for a time, we were certain about things. What luxury! It was the espresso, I tell W. It was caffeinated certainty.

9. In downtime, I like to exasperate W. by my musings on diet and on sociobiology. Then I like to trace grand philosophical motifs through the Greek and the Latin. Sometimes, we speculate on what makes our clever friends clever. W. likes to work out their IQs. ‘What’s your IQ’?

You’re never witty, says W., that’s a sign of intelligence: wit. W. says he is sometimes witty, but, more generally, he’s never witty. W. is more intelligent than me, he decides. But what about those illuminated moments when the clouds part, and I have ideas? It’s true, I do have moments of illumination, W. grants.

We wander on the shady streets, trying to find another route to our favourite cafe. Freiburg won’t let us become imperceptible. We were imperceptible in Strasbourg, says W. We think of the path along the river, and the street cafe in the French city where we drank a good espresso. There’s no good coffee in Freiburg, we agree.

10. What have we learnt, from Freiburg? Always book your own hotel – away from the conference. As far away as possible. This is what A. and B. achieved, and with what were they rewarded? The sight of Husserl’s grave. Of Edith Stein’s nunnery. And what did we see?

Husserl’s grave! Stein’s nunnery! And who were we to defile this city, the city of phenomenology? Who were we to drink beer outside the Novotel? We leave without regrets. What have we learnt? Never, never come back to Freiburg, says W.

Shortcomings

We drink at the Dolphin, in the old town. ‘You would break the phalanx’: whilst W. is loyal, I am disloyal. ‘Your whole life is a performance’: whilst he is sincere, I am never sincere. ‘You’ve never felt a thing’: whilst he is directly emotional, I am without emotion. ‘Have you ever loved anyone?’ Whilst he is eminently capable of love, I am incapable of love.

Like him, says W., only more so, I do not work hard enough. Like him, only more so, I will be broken by my sense of what is great, and by the fact that whatever I do, I will never be great. Unlike him, I will not have the courage to leave when it will have become clear for the millionth time that I will amount to nothing. 

W. says I have a desire to publish everything I write, but the vast majority of W.’s writing remains unpublished. I have a desire to be loved, which is why I publish so much, but he has no desire to be loved (or at least, it does not compromise his work). But above all, I must work earnestly on another book. It’s the only way you experience your inadequacy, W. tells me. In parts of the second book, he says, I was getting somewhere; but now I will get nowhere. For his part, W. thinks he might be getting somewhere. But he also has a pressing sense of his own inadequacy.

What work are you doing? What are you writing? The blog, W. tells me, has become very pretentious, mannered and self-indulgent. You’re good at comedy, he tells me. Write more about your failure, he tells me. I get up at 7.00 to work, but W. gets up at 6.00 to work (and sometimes earlier). What do you do at 7.00?, he asks me. For his part, W. read Rosenzweig in German. Now he’s writing about Rosenzweig. What are you reading?, he asks me.

Still, W. is perpetually, grindingly disappointed with himself. He suspects I am not as disappointed with myself as he is. In fact, I seem rather pleased with myself, he says. But he, W., is not pleased with himself. We get the water taxi across to Mount Batten. W. is impressed by my moment of illumination: over the course of ten minutes, I had several ideas; the clouds parted.

For the most part, says W., of us, there are only clouds, but then sometimes, for one of us, or both of us, the clouds part. And there was a real sunburst: as we walked along the spit, I speculated aloud on this and on that. Write it down, said W. I wrote a few notes. But it’s like Flowers for Algernon, says W., you’ll forget it all.

Up to the tower. It’s locked. W. tells me of his overwhelming sense of shame. We do nothing, he says. We’re parasites. Time for the pub. Through the boatyard. The moment of illumination has passed. What are we to do with our lives, with our non-careers? Appelfeld sometimes let his characters say, after all, man is not an insect. But we’re insects, says W., we put up with too much.

W. speaks of his dream of a community, of a society of friends who would push each other to greatness. We speak of our absent friends over pints of Bass. If only they were closer! Of what would be capable! They would make us great! Perhaps that is his last temptation, says W., the thought that something would make us great.

Brod and Brod

Know someone well, spend a lot of time with them, and they speak to you as they speak to themselves. So there is a great deal to learn about W. from the questions he constantly asks me: At what point did you realise that you would amount to nothing?; When was it that you first became aware that you would be nothing but a failure?; When you look back on your life, what do you see?; How is it that you know what greatness is, and that you will never reach it?; What does it mean to you that your life has amounted to nothing?; Why have your friends never made you greater?

A short interview with W. in the pub after lunch: ‘What do you consider your greatest weakness?’ – ‘Never to come to terms with my lack of ability.’- ‘What do you think is most distortive about your experience of the world?’ – ‘I have this fantasy of being a community, and this prevents individual action.’ – ‘What’s motivated you so far?’ – ‘Fear and anxiety.’ – ‘What’s your greatest disappointment?’ – ‘To know what greatness is, and know that I will never, never achieve it, even if everything in my life was right.’ – ‘What is your worst trait?’ – ‘Fear and anxiety cloud all my judgements and relations.’ – ‘What is your greatest academic gift?’ – ‘I don’t think I have any. I see my whole academic career as a crushing failure. I only carry on out of a debilitating fear.’

W. and I compare ourselves to our friend R., who we both agree is better than us. He gives, we take. He has ideas, we plagiarise. He engages with the real world; our engagement is utterly mediated by books we half understand. He tries to change the world; we are utterly parasitical on people who try to change things. He makes people feel witty, funny and intelligent; we make them depressed and unmotivated; we are interested only in asking them why life is disappointing for them. Every day, for R., something new might occur. Every day only confirms for us that nothing new, for us, will ever have happened.

Double Dissymmetry

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

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

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

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

The Passion of Determination

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

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

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

Nihilism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critique

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Double Dissymmetry

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

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

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

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

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

Communism, Community

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

What is the relationship between community and communism for Blanchot?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Make It So That I Can Speak’

Terror

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

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

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

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

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

The récit, Blanchot claims, bears upon its own happening, its own event. Indeed, the récit is just a name for this event, even as it needs to give itself body in terms of a specific narrative, and is nothing apart from what is given to be read.

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

Fascination

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conversation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Responsibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freedom

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

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

Protection

To give, to be given: do I envy what Gorchakov would have protected when he held a lit candle in cupped palms and went across the drained pool? Twice the flame was snuffed out by the wind; twice it was relit, until, on his third crossing, he fulfilled the promise he made to the madman: he was across, he had crossed. Then, a groan, off camera. The sound of a fall. Gorchakov has fallen; has he died?

Then I remember the letters Blanchot wrote to inquirers, ‘Although I might like to meet, the circumstances of my work make it impossible …’; ‘Henceforward I live in such retirement that …’ He no longer saw even his closest friends, he told one inquirer, and Jabes, in an interview, said his communication with Blanchot consisted only of those short letters, written in an exquisite hand, such as all his correspondents received.

Then, as he approached his tenth decade, his hand became unsteady, and those epistolatory exchanges, often marked by long breaks, began to cease altogether. What was he protecting, what did he need to protect, so that he could meet no one, and that what he called friendship passed only by way of the exchange of letters?

The silence of literature, that is one name, but it says very little. Silence? Rather a kind of murmuring, an indetermination that makes the most decisive speech tremble. Did he need to be alone to let that experience be kept? Or was it that his whole life had been lived so it could best experience that indetermination, so he could let it claim him as one who could not help but write?

Do I envy that retirement, that separation from the world? Do I envy the sense that it was only possible to speak in one’s own terms, or better, in the terms of that writing, that speech, that the course of thought, of a whole life was an attempt to honour? Light the candle; walk across the drained pool. Now I understand: to write here is also to protect writing. And to write of speech, of speaking, is, every day to attempt to cross again that pool.

Of what would you write? Or what, by writing, would you keep of speech? What you write must respond to what comes from afar, and unexpectedly. With, not alone – but with whom? Alongside whom? First of all, alongside oneself, which asks for that separation between one who writes here and the other who lives, who acts. To live alongside, to live that separation that holds the lit candle as between closed palms.

Do I envy him, the one around whom my palms are closed? But he is not here yet, as he will never come. Hope: I have cleared my life for his arrival. And what I have written is only that clearing. But there are others who also know that opening. Writers, readers: friends as they, too travel alongside themselves.

The Open Palm

No, there was no ‘teenage angst’, I do not remember that. The escape from the party, the walk to the lake at dawn in the frizzying rain: the world that had been closed opened to us like an opening hand. And we went across the open palm of the world, in the morning, that may as well have been the first morning of the world.

Of what did we speak? Of the others left behind, and, as all those do who are half infatuated, the chance of your meeting, its strangeness, and the kind of imperative it carries. With, not alone: we were always meant to pass here; the world was always meant to open. Now we are alone with the fact of our attraction; it is a fate held in common, and this first of all was the topic of our conversation.

But even this is wrong, for what conversation was there? Intervallic speech, speech that lightened itself in the opening between what is said: how was it that nothing seemed to say itself, or what we said was already undone, and there was the delight of letting those words float into the air and disappear?

What was said did not matter; that it said itself was everything, that, speaking, we were able to exchange the lightness of speech, able to lighten it: we were both smiling, I remember that. Smiling, and because we’d lent speech a kind of assistance. We had left the party; we made our way to the lake: you said you would always remember that.

So did I. But it stands, in my memory, as part a series of days, of nights we shared. A series marked by lightness, by the saying of nothing in particular, where what mattered was the lightness of speech, before what it was that speech bore. True, infatuation fell away, but wasn’t there retained a memory of that first infatuation, a sense of youth, of the morning, and the promise held in the open palm of the world?

Yes, that’s what lightness has always meant: it is youth, it is play of speech that lightens the world. Absolute youth. ‘We never said anything’, you said. Nothing was said, that’s true. But by that nothing was spoken the between of speaking, its its demand, which asked, over the years, to be maintained.

And that’s what held us together. Together? But who were we, speakers, in the exchange of the lightness of speech. No one in particular; no one, everyone, who gave up what they said to the sacrifice speech demands. A gentle sacrifice, a light burning, a flame in the drizzle of that first morning.

What joy there is to give, to be given! Joy of anonymity, of the open palm from which everything must rebegin. That’s what it means to be young, to be very young, and finally for youth to name what cannot be lived, but that streams all around us.

You will not step into the same morning twice. And not even once, for the step is a gift, a giving, that will plunge you into the streaming of youth. To speak is also to come apart.

And after you have spoken? After the morning passed? That morning became the brightness behind everything, a sky behind the sky, the backdrop of our lives, obscured sometimes, sometimes lost, but that burned like the flame in the rain, in the sacrifice to which we were given.

The Fire Balloon

To be lost in the middle of life, that’s it. Wasn’t that what X. said to me this evening, outside my office? He, too was lost. Very well, he should come out with us more often; what is the summer for but the pub, the sun? That’s how every evening must pass, and all the way to autumn.

But to be lost – or at least in a phase uncharted, that new, long period of crawling out of debt. I have a mobile phone contract, my first; next week, broadband, and the week after, a DVD player, a TV: this my reward for reaching my mid 30s (for clearing my debts). And I look back and say to myself, what have I done?

But I have an idea of prose that would bear everything that happened. Bear it – but be more than what is borne. More: and what could be borne would be borne along with everything, the whole world. Everything would speak; all would be spoken, in a prose, I imagine, that would intersperse great historical events with the most intimate occurrences.

But do not confuse it, this prose, with what is written here. It all goes wrong, I won’t labour the point, but it’s all botched – all this writing. But I’ve worn out that theme: writing botched and broken. Still, I tell myself that it is necessary to write because life isn’t yet itself. Because it hasn’t arrived, living. And what is lived repeats that non-arrival, it lives it, it is borne by it.

That is why the smallness of a life – mine – does not matter. I can’t write anymore about failure. W. thought I’d be melancholy after our return from Freiburg. No, not anymore, I told him. I’m too weak for that. Weakness, but in more than one sense.

A kind of indifference: the affairs of the day no longer bother me. What should I expect? It is as I would expect. And then, in the still nights at the flat now the students have moved out, a bland tiredness. The day has gone, and the evening in the pub, and now the night. Now what? Sleep; wake up again.

The earth turns into the light, and once again, morning. Gone that sense of urgency I once had. It will all end soon, I thought. You only have so much time. So I rose earlier and earlier, to get a headstart on the day. And now?

But still, an idea of prose. By what massive book could I let the smallness of a life be borne away? What epic could be written of this, my everyday? Mine – but it is not mine. Anyone’s; no one in particular’s. All lives are small; no one’s has begun. Life in lieu of itself: that too is life, and the life of life.

Nine o’clock, and it’s still light. The longest day of the year, and its vague and grey. Tilt your head back and look at the sky, my brother in law told me, it’s good for you. So that’s what I do, and there it is, the whole sky. The whole: you know it only by walking, and through an open space – the field, my field, where they keep cows over the summer, though it is so close to the city.

An idea of prose. No themes, no characters. A kind of wandering speech. Like the voiceover in Eloge de l’amour when the camera is still by the river. A still camera, speech. What are they speaking about? Oh I could find out; I could work out the plot. But better that they just speak, better that plot no longer carries them, better than they are not even characters, but just nodes of speech, senders, addressees, and then not even that, as what they say is not even said to one another, but to the whole night, the whole sky and the river.

Worse for them, perhaps, that they speak by that river, and in that city.  I’m fortunate to live nowhere in particular, in the high latitudes, where there is light on the horizon at midnight. And now it’s time to round off this post, to finish it. Think instead of that prose that could not end, laying itself in short paragraphs across a large page.

I think of the opening pages of The Decay of the Angel, in the collected Sea of Fertility. An absolute book. The book of the end, that’s what I think to myself. Mishima was already beyond death when he wrote it. He wrote to us from the other side of death; and how could he mark its completion by his extinction? But I wonder if that wasn’t his impatience: that he should have been condemned to live and condemned to write a prose that could never end.

Write. Write until nothing is said, or when what is said does not matter. Write until indifference blows through your words as through the fields. Write like a stone, or the river as it speaks back to the nameless speakers of Eloge de l’amour. What does it say, the river, the whole night, the whole sky?

There is a way that writing might come apart in writing. That by writing, what is held by writing would itself disappear. There is a way of lightening speech, the whole of speech, until it floats into the air like a fire-balloon.

Indifference

Introspection? No, not even that, for nothing is seen here, and nothing belongs to the inside. By writing of them, events become lighter. Write of them, and they begin to rise into the air. But nothing is seen. Writing, just writing – the sound of words, the rhythm of prose, and the play of concepts. It barely interests me.

Write, half-attentive. Write, after writing several posts, and only then might you attain that writing-indifference, that writing-disinterestedness that lifts itself from the particularity of your life. I want to write nothing special. To write nothing in particular, to join my prose to the great streaming of prose.

My prose? But it is not mine, and that is what I want: to relinquish what is mine, my life and my memories; to lighten them, and let themselves drift into the air.

Fantasies

Childhood fantasies. Novels of Diana Wynne Jones, where the gifted one never knows he is such until the end of the book, when it is revealed that his ordinariness hid his extraordinariness, and the others turn to him, modest one, in wonder. But my fantasy was that what was revealed thereby was only the absolutely ordinary, the more ordinary than ordinary, and it would be seen, in the end, that I was just like anyone else, but only there where (second fantasy) I was dying, or at least close to death.

How nice to be ill, and being drawn sweetly towards death. Who told me that dying of hypothermia was like falling asleep? To fall asleep into death, and that point to be the most ordinary, and anyone at all. Do you see, they would say, around my bed, or, better still, elsewhere, even far away, living their own lives – do you see, he was just like anyone else. Anyone, no one: what was the name of that girl who scratched my arm, just to see how I would react? But I let my arm lie there, and thought: this is how I will die, just lying there.

And a stronger memory: letting a boy, weaker than I, wrestle me to the ground. I was stronger, but I was weaker too: by what weakness did I let myself be brought down like a wild animal? I kept quiet; I said nothing. I liked his meanness, and the meanness of his brother; I thought: here it is, here at last, and now, before their meanness, I am anyone at all.

Thunder and Silence

‘Write our story.’ – ‘There was no story.’ – ‘Write it.’

But it did not begin; it never stepped over the threshold. How can you speak of what does not belong to the continuity of time?’ The story: the attempt to reach a story. Or a story of the failure of stories – not, now, of the limit against which stories are wrecked, but of a detour so vast, you can never come to a place from which to begin. How to speak of what has no contour?

‘Speak. Tell me what happened.’ What happened? Do you think I could tell you? Is that what you want – to be told, to round off the event? But it did not end and it will not end. Who can speak of it? ‘But it speaks.’ It speaks, saying nothing, saying itself, thunder and silence. And who are we except the speakers it elected, the relays it called for, that speaking that speaks only by withholding itself in what is said? But what was it apart from us, this speech? What was it, apart from its speakers?

But I know that when it used us, when it spoke in our speech, it was only to lighten itself, to disperse itself, to make it that it did not weigh upon anyone. It was to be kept afloat – alive, and by passing from the one to the other: yes that’s what it wanted.

‘Tell me what happened.’ With what kind of telling? How to narrate a story that never reached a beginning? How, when that beginning will never be reached? It is deferral itself. It is detour. Why do you suppose that there’s anything to be reached, or that we would have the means to reach it?

‘We lacked the means.’ Yes, that’s true. But wasn’t that why we were selected? Wasn’t it our weakness that selected us? It was by our weakness that we found one another. And weakness that made us sink down, each beside the other.

To sink down – to rest: that’s when we heard it, the thunder, the silence. That’s when it was heard, in the background, withdrawing, and sounding in its withdrawal. ‘That’s what we exchanged, that speech.’ No: we were what allowed it to lighten itself, to be heard, to be lightened. It was what spoke by what was said. ‘What we said.’ What spoke itself between us.

‘Literary Responsibility’

Ulysses and Homer

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Demand of the Récit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Passion of Determination

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Récit and Critique

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weakness

What happened? You detain me, is that the word? Detained – but from what? What was I doing? Something failed to happen, that’s true. Or was it that what happened lost itself from the course of time? Detained – and how to reach the moment when something could happen? That it failed to do so is the way it continues to happen; it is its claim.

What does it want? To be past – to be let go – or is that what I want, to release the event into forgetting? It wants to belong to the future – yes, this is what it wants for itself -, but only by breaking the horizon of expectation, of bringing the future very close, so that it seems to burn between us.

But what burns? Nothing that could happen to us. Nothing possible. And yet that joins itself to what is humanly possible, and for us. Joins itself, unjoining the course of time. We are detained; we are held here, and we will always be held. This is the crossing, the crossing point. Which of us is here? Who am I for you, and you for me? What do we share?

Either way, there will be, for both of us, a way of feeling responsible for the event. As though it elected us, we who were not worthy of its demand. As though it called upon the ones who were least responsible, or least able to measure its demand. Why were we chosen, the weakest ones? Why when we will always be unequal to ourselves with respect to what occurred?

But it is by that weakness that we were chosen. Or weakness is its sign, that choosing. Henceforward, you will belong to the detour, that is what is said. You belong to what you cannot accomplish. It is by weakness that you will be responsible, even to the extent of wanting to repeat what happened – even in your weakness to want to re-enact it again, and as if for the first time.

‘Let it happen again, and this time so that I can master it. Let it happen, and be brought under my control. I will make it happen. I will bring it under control.’

But this desire is only a sign of your weakness, and of your failure to complete the event. How can it be brought back into the course of life? How can it be let go, neglected, so that it joins the other moments that pass so quickly? But it will not allow itself to be neglected. Or it is neglect itself – it is what turns its face away from us. This is what we suffer, and suffer together.

‘I can’t help it.’ – ‘We can’t help it.’ – ‘I’m too weak.’ – ‘We are each too weak.’

Weakness

There is more than one Stalker – Porcupine, who used to be called the Master, is mentioned almost straightaway. Porcupine who in some way watches over their passage through the Zone, Stalker and his two clients, known only as the Writer and the Scientist. Yes, he took his life – he hung himself after becoming immensely wealthy.

The Room in the Zone had granted him his wish – but it was not a wish he wanted to recognise. He thought he had wanted his brother brought back to life, but he received money. The Zone knows; the Zone knows what you do not want to want. And so Porcupine, who taught Stalker, hung himself.

What of the other Stalkers, who can read the signs Porcupine left – who know this nut, hanging from this threshold, is a terrible warning? We hear nothing of them. Stalker (this Stalker) stands in for all stalkers. This Stalker – but he is wretched. A poor man, a broken man. Hadn’t he sworn never to return to the Zone? And yet he is returning to the Zone. This is his weakness, his susceptibility.

But this weakness is the call of the Zone; he has no choice. True, he has been there before, he knows the secret entrance, and knows of some of the traps which remake themselves around those who visit the Zone. But what does he know? Not a path – a way to reach the Room – so much as an immense caution. We must be careful – that’s what he tells them, those whom he guides.

And he has an immense love for the Zone; he belongs to it and speaks for it. The Zone, he says to Writer, when he draws his gun, will not tolerate weapons. Look what happened to the tanks! And we remember their rusting bulk in the still greenery. But he is also hesitant, immensely so: he knows the Zone cannot be interpreted, that caution is their only protection, and even this may not be enough.

Caution – and a kind of sincerity. For those that attempt to make their way to the Room must be broken men. They must have come to the limit of their strength. Their weakness is their fellowship; it is what will allow Stalker, after, to call Writer and Scientist his friends. Weakness: but isn’t it by this that you are called to the Zone? Isn’t this the way it claims you?

Then to be a Stalker is to be unqualified to be what you are. To be a Stalker, or one who follows a Stalker, is to be unequal to one’s own strength. You must have failed, and failed yourself. Sometimes Stalker is grotesquely weak. When he fights with Scientist, he is weakness itself, ineffectually thrashing about. How grotesque! But when he sinks down, and weeps, his weakness becomes a kind of strength, a command.

He speaks of the Room, and of the desperation that brings those he guides to the Zone. Now Scientist dismantles his bomb. Writer puts his arm around Stalker. They sit in the dark, at the Room’s threshold. In weakness. In a kind of friendship, and by way of their weakness.

You will always be too weak to reach the Room. You will not reach it, and because of your weakness. Even as you drawn to it precisely by your weakness. How is it the Room opens only when you sink down, motionless, before its threshold? How is it that it is closed even as it opens, that you must have always failed the Room and failed yourself?

Then Stalker guides you only to the threshold of the Room. Guides you to where you cannot enter. He told you it was not for him, a Stalker, to enter. That would be impossible. Told you that he could only bring those in absolute need to this place, and that the Zone would know, as it always knows, what is in the hearts of those who come.

Then the Zone brings to itself only those who would fail. Or it destroys those who would make a success of failure, and thereby would have failed the test. What do you want? The Room is the test. You must want nothing, and not even yourself. To suffer yourself: this is what the Zone wants. To suffer and no longer to bear your suffering. For who is there? Who suffers?