Chan Marshall the Crow

What gives us an performer like Chan Marshall also takes her away from us; if she seems to present in her music what echoes in response to a future that has not yet come about it is the same future which seems to withdraw her from our presence. Even she seems to feel it, which is why, perhaps, when I saw her live, she demanded the house lights be turned on and the stage lights be dimmed to blackness. I asked myself: where are you, Chan Marshall? Where are you, behind the songs you refuse to play, beyond your yelps and chatter?

I could say seeing her perform live was a disappointment – she was, as Cat Power, the performer I wanted to see more than any other at All Tomorrow’s Parties. But something else happened, which I would say was fascinating if it were not also marked by frustration and a kind of sadness: she was, I think, too close to that uncanny place from which her music seems to arrive. I remembered, watching her, the obscure piping of Kafka’s Josephine. But also I remembered Gide’s account of seeing Artaud speak at the Sorbonne: Artaud who, at that time, had already disappeared into madness.

Artaud was not as pathetic as Chan Marshall, and Josephine was not as enlivened. The audience, in the brightness of the house lights, chatted and catcalled. Chan Marshall, in the darkness – just her, I think, though there may have been another playing with her (it was too dark to see) – played only three songs in a set of one hours duration. And when she played them, they appeared in the midst of her tomfoolery, which meant their profundity was as though adrift, as if Chan Marshall were ashamed of what she had made, as though she could bear what she could sing and play only by laughing at the uncanniness to which strange genius exposed her. Her tomfoolery, then, appeared in the midst of songs which Chan Marshall was given to be able to sing, to play and this was not by chance. For what gives us her music also gives itself as the unbearable.

Chan Marshall falls below the level of her songs – how can she not? But in seeking to rise to the level of those songs, performing them, she breaks against them as against the heaven which will not admit the crows in Kafka’s aphorism. Heaven means: the impossibilty of crows. Chan Marshall’s songs mean the impossibility of Chan Marshall. Her performance: the fluttering of a crow already broken against heaven.

3 Live Bands

Slint: a hard name, suggesting stone, flint, a dark surface which reflects nothing but darkness. Is it because it refuses to reflect us that Spiderland is loved? Do we love it because it brings the unknown very close to us? Because it passes by us without allowing itself to be recognised according to the signs to which we are accustomed to classify our music?

Spiderland, enigmatic meteor, an album from the day after the last album is recorded, music from the other side of the end of time. Rigid, hard, austere, it gives us nothing we can accommodate. What words can one throw at this dark event? Unease? Disquiet? Above all, this is a sober album, it is dry, it opens a kind of desert through which it is difficult to pass.

Album without precedent and without successor.

2.

The singers of Modest Mouse and Arab Strap are burly, angry men who swig from wine bottles. They move from fearful sincerity to drunken laughter to ironic bonhomie and all the while tremble on the void. Marvellous to note thes elf-deprecating humour of the singers: men afraid to take themselves too seriously lest they usurp the void.

3.

The members of Explosions in the Sky are men interchangeable with anyone else, plaid shirted, bejeaned, and who speak between songs with simpleness and humility. Theirs is a music, unlike Slint’s, on this side of the end of time, music of the novas and shooting stars, of deafening roar that might be like the music Pythagoras claimed roared all around us.

Here is an impersonal joy, a correlate to the impersonal anguish of Slint. A music of the upper atmosphere, the fiery element where the aurora borealis burns. We were carried, the audience, into the ghostly light where the air is on fire.

The Day After the Revolution

‘Language has been given to man so he may make surrealist use of it.’

Surrealism is the faith that language might permit the great overcoming of the antimonies and contradictions which prevent us from realizing our total existence. All difficulties will be resolved; this new language we speak will attain what language always struggled to be (the places of struggle? Lautréamont’s Maldoror, Rimbaud’s Illuminations, Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Earth …). And what does it want? To attain itself as thinking itself and not a means of thinking, to attain the truth of immediacy, of immediate life and not its mediation. Language will no longer be an instrument through which the human being might realize its freedom: automatic poetry is freedom, not freedom incarnated, but freedom absolute – freedom acting and manifesting itself. My freedom does pass through words, it is realized in them; I discover, through writing, a relation to myself without intermediary. Whence the surrealist attack on the hackneyed notion of individual talent, on the artwork as hallowed cultural object, on the great museums and galleries of our culture. For it is an equality that is issue; we are equal with respect to the gift of automatism.

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

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

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

Frayed Time

Fear of the afternoon when you fall below the level of work, of the capacity to work. And then what? Drifting time, the moments lead nowhere, seconds swell into hours, hours into days. You focus on nothing in particular, you notice nothing, no changes. Impersonal attention. The blank, white sky. You can’t say: I can do nothing – you can’t find the words, or any words. Pass an afternoon like this and it is as though you have lived forever. As though the afternoon had happened a million times over and is now worn down and exhausted. Frayed time, time worn down. Space drawn thin over the void.

Six Matchboxes

A favourite Giacometti story repeated by Michael Kimmerman, via Cahiers du Doute.

In 1939, Giacometti chose, for a while, to make figures from memory rather than from life, but no matter how hard he tried, the figures kept turning out smaller than he wanted. The problem persisted two years later when he decided to visit his mother, who was then in Geneva, promising friends and also his brother Diego that he would return to Paris with works of a less absurd size.

But with one exception, the figures he made in Switzerland came out tiny, too. He would start over and over again on the same one. It was a sculpture of his friend Isabel standing one evening on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. The memory stuck in his head. “It isn’t the lack of a visa that’s stopping me coming back,” he wrote to her. “I can come back when I like. It’s my sculpture that’s keeping me.”

It kept him in Geneva from 1941 through 1945. When he finally boarded the train back to France, he took with him three and a half years’ worth of work in six matchboxes.

Nudity

I cannot resist commenting once again on these lines from the last piece I am aware that Blanchot published (‘The Watched Over Night’).

Slowly, during those nights when I sleep without sleeping, I become aware – the word’s not right – of your proximity, which yet is distant. And then I convinced myself that you were there. Not you, but this repeated statement: ‘I’m going away, I’m going away’.

And suddenly I understood that Robert, who was so generous, so little concerned about himself, wasn’t speaking to me about himself, not for himself, but about all the extermination sites – if it was he who was speaking. He listed some of them. “Listen to them, listen to their names: Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec, Maidanek, Auschwitz, Sobibor, Birkenau, Ravensbruck, Dachau”.

I’m going away: but is Antelme who is speaking, or, somehow, the extermination sites themselves, these terrible names.

“But”, I say, speaking, not speaking, “do we forget?”

“Yes, you forget, the more because you remember. Your remembering does not keep you from living, from surviving, even from loving me. But one doesn’t love a dead man, because then you escape meaning and the impossibility of meaning, non-being and the impossibility of non-being”.

One doesn’t love a dead man – one doesn’t love the dead: but why not? Is there something about death which prevents love? Perhaps, in loving, we love the other because of the singular way of being, of his or her particularities, because of all that makes him or her familiar to us. And in the death camps? It is difficult to recognise the dying and the dead. Difficult, too, to retain a hold upon oneself in confronting them. Can you love? It is not a question of capacity or potential. Do you love? Yes, if you love the other as the unknown and are, as a lover, yourself the unknown. Yes, if your love strips you down to your nudity and you love the other who is no longer anyone you know. But is this love?

Impossible love. But why is it neither non-being nor the impossibility of non-being? Because it will not settle into a simple negativity which could then be put to work, nor indeed into a simple thesis which could then be negated. Nor will it allow itself to translated into meaning even as it refuses to disappear into non-meaning. Neither one nor the other: ne uter, it trembles at the boundary of sense and non-sense, being and non-being.

Rereading these lines, I realise that I have already lost sight of Robert Antelme, of the incomparable friend I had known. He was so simple and at the same time so rich in a knowledge that is lacking to the greatest minds. In the experience of servitude that was his, even though he shared it with others, he retained that true humanity from which he knew not to exclude those who were oppressing him.

The SS, as The Human Race attests, are driven to a compulsive rage to destroy because they know the prisoners belong to the same human race. What does Antelme know? That to so belong is to belong as no one in particular.

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

I commented on these lines a couple of posts back.

This is why, Robert, I still have my place beside you, and this watched-over night where you just saw me is not an illusion where everything disappears, but my right to make you live even in that nothingness I feel approaching.

It is our nothingness, our common unity which binds us together.

Slash and Burn

The gods to whom we sacrifice are themselves sacrifice, tears wept to the point of dying.

Poetic genius is not verbal talent (verbal talent is neccesary, since it is a question of words, but if often leads one astray): it is the divining of ruins secretly expected, in order that so many immutable things become undone, lose themselves, communicate.

Remembering the question from the last blog, asked with respect to Bataille: what does the poet sacrifice? This, perhaps, is the wrong question, for the slipping word is not merely a strategy among others in the poet’s armory. Even if it is a question of writing of this silence or this forest, it is still not a question of making this word or that slip, but a slippage of the whole of meaning, of the economy of sense. This, of course, counts only for the Bataillean poet, who is unconcerned with literary reputation. This is the poet who would sacrifice sense itself, and sacrifice herself just as sense is sacrificed.

I wrote – crudely, quickly – of a component of language which refuses to allow itself to be taken up into the idea. The philosopher, perhaps, regards it as only the remnant of language – a kind of appendix or vestigial tail (this is a characiture …). But for the poet, it is, this same richness, the very richness of language, it is what cannot be removed from language; it is the plenitude which remains when language is no longer employed to make sense (sense and non-sense must be thought together, sense opening against a background of non-sense and non-sense struggling in turn to present itself in its withdrawal as the ‘richness’ in question …)

It is this material element, which, in the articulation of sense, allows language to sacrifice itself, which the poem offers to the sacrificial fire. The ‘matter’ of the word (the vestigal tail, the remnant …) is the poet’s fuel. It is akin to the wicker man or the potlatch which, through its destruction, points to the world which burns within our world (towards our burning world …). If Bataille writes of a ‘sovereign silence’, this is not the silence one might see and not say. It is not a question, here, of ineffability. A sovereign silence arises from the interruption of the struggle between sense and non-sense.

Heraclitus associates what he draws the logos close to a kind of cosmic fire, which periodically scorches the cosmos only to let it be reborn again, like those tribes who slash and burn the forest in order to renew the fertility of its soil.

Let’s say I am the Bataillean poet who writes the word fire (I admit, I haven’t clarified this at all …) The sentence slips. The poem, transforming itself into a thing, would enter the flames, giving itself up, yielding itself to the flames. A blazing poem, pure sacrifice. A blazing incarnation of thought without determinable content: a thinking born and killed over and again in the crucible of the poem.

For a moment, then, it appears the poem is the salamander who lives in the flames. What is sacrificed? The dream that the poem can reach pure immediacy – that it can achieve, by itself, the silence, the forest … It is not, then the immediate which commits itself to sacrifice, but the dream of recapturing the world in the poem. It is mimesis, understood crudely as the representation of the world, of the shackling of language to a shackled understanding of the world. Then the Bataillean poet is the enemy of the novelist whose ambition is to represent the world back to itself. One might say this: at some level or another, the novelist fears the poet – for in the poet’s words, the novelist knows there is a flame which might leap across to the pages of his own book. Bataille’s poem is on fire. It is not the torch that would illumine the night, but the night itself that burns. And Bataille? The salamander in the flames. The one who lives from his death, his continual dying.

Set the novel aflame. Watch five hundred pages crinkle and burn. The poem has been awoken in the novel. A poem that is language, that is the matter, the dregs of language, which has been set aflame. Nietzsche: Night itself is a sun.

Perhaps it is possible to write of an autopoetry – of a fire which is always burning in the words one normally pushes around like coins. It is as though the currency we most trust, the general equivalent which mediates all value, transformed itself into the unexchangeable. ‘Fire is an exchange for all goods’ Heraclitus writes; yes, but it is the exchange which ruins exchange, which replaces coin with the destruction of coins, where the coin is valuable because it destroys itsely. Autopoetry – because sacrifice is automatic, because it is ongoing and the poem is only one site of the great sacrifice that the world also is.

It is said whoever sees God dies. The poem turning itself towards the immediate comes face to face with what sets it aflame. Face to face? But the poem does not have a face which could bear the face of the burning world. Heidegger says somewhere when we walk through a forest we walk through the word forest. The Bataillean poet, as she walks, awakens a conflagration in the ideal trees. The forest is burning – not the real forest, with its shade and its brightness: it is the word forest that is on fire. But the fire spreads from the world to the page and then from the page of the poem to every page in every books …

Holderlin: ‘Now come, fire’. Come, then, in the poem which puts fire to the names in order to reveal an experience which burns at the heart of the flames. Heraclitus allows that physis itself is fire; that beings burn in the light of what withdraws as they come to presence. To which one might say: everything that exists is sacrificed at every moment. Further: there is only sacrifice. What there is is sacrifice. And perhaps the word ‘is’ is sacrificed (it is there the poem lives, opening up a difference in the ‘is’ and as the ‘is’ …)

Hear the roaring of the logos, and know the fire which burns in all things. What does the poet sacrifice? The world, the poem – but isn’t the poet herself sacrificed (but then it is not a question of the poet’s accomplishing anything – doesn’t sacrifice begin as soon as everything begins? Doesn’t a poem – or the movement of a sacrificial poetry – burn within the most sober sentence? And in the place of the poet (occupying her place), do you, the reader, burn in turn?

Perhaps this is how Bataille’s Inner Experience gives itself to be read (this is how what there is gives itself to be experienced in its pages)…. Thus, as for Heraclitus, the cosmos is killed and reborn from fire, but now it is the fire of the poem that is the crucible from which everything dies and rebegins. Blanchot: ‘I am alive. No, you are dead’.

Sovereign Silence

Among various sacrifices, poetry is the only one whose fire we can maintain, renew.

If I have known how to produce the silence of others within me, I am, myself, Dionysus, I am the crucified. But should I forget my solitude …

The poet sacrifices, Bataille writes in Inner Experience, but what is it that is sacrificed? A first answer: that of which shthe poet would speak; the world, in its presence, its immediacy. Think of the word silence (this is Bataille’s example). The poet celebrates a silence she remembers – a singular silence, which belongs to a particular time and place. But to write of silence is, in one sense, to lose this it; ‘the word silence is still a sound …’

Compare it to a performance of Cage’s 4’33″. Of course, what Cage gives us is a singular silence, the silence of this auditorium, of this orchestra before this audience? 4’33″. is not made of the sound, but of silence; here, silence is another kind of sound; something resounds even when the musicians do not play. Is Cage’s ruse open to the poet? Might one write a poem called Silence and leave the page blank? Or must poetry be made of words?

If the poet cannot do without words, or if words are in some sense important to the poem, then one can only indicate silence by way of words. To invoke the materiality of the word, the heaviness of language, may not be to lament the awkwardness of matter, as Hegel lamented the heavy obscurity of Egyptian statuary, from which form had yet to free itself. True, these are heavy images, but it is the weight of language – its rhythms, its sonorities – which are perhaps the poet’s chance.

For the one Bataille calls a philosopher, this heaviness is an obstacle; classically, the philosopher attempts to leap over the idiom of a natural language in order to write of the thing itself. The philosopher’s doctrine elevates itself above its expression; language is a medium, the tool which subordinates itself to the delivery of the message. Rhythm and sonority – the material of language – are, from this perspective, just so much static and noise. And for the poet? Perhaps it is possible the poet might the poem answer the presence of that silence by deploying the rhythmical and sonorous properties of words. But isn’t this, once again, to have lost the silence of which one would write, or at least, to have regained it in a manner which can only disappoint?

What does the poet sacrifice? A second answer: the dream that language would be merely the outward garment of thought. Poetry rebels against the instrumental notion of language, its subordination to the order of signification. Isn’t naming – poetic naming itself something more than signification? To indicate, to point – but towards what? To the silence which has already been lost?. But this is still too simple. Rather, to the distance between the immediate and the mediation which appears to occur through language. ‘Appears to occur’: because it is not clear that silence is mediated when I call it ‘silence’ – or at least that such mediation is not a loss of that silence, a deafening roar. The word silence is too noisy. But isn’t silence, for this reason, Bataille asks, ‘the most poetic’ of words (16)? ‘Most poetic’ because it reveals both the limits of one conception of language (signification), disclosing what lies, in language, beyond a servile representation of the world. Here, we have passed beyond the question of the ineffable.

The word silence undergoes a kind of slippage. It slips in the sentence. And through that slippage, by means of it, Bataille can attend to the ‘incessant slippage of thought’; this is how, through language, he can attempt ‘the project of abolishing the power of words, hence of project’ (22). The movement of mediation is interrupted. The slippage of the word has released another experience of language and, perhaps, an experience of a thinking which does not mediate or abstract. A strange thought: to open, a sovereign silence by means of poetry (‘by means of’ … surely this is wrong).

A sovereign silence? This is no longer silence which awaits mediation through language, nor indeed what is mediated in the word silence. A silence of discourse – or, better, a silencing of what subordinates language to signification, to the articulation of sense. To attain a sovereign silence is to make contact with a reader such that, in that reading, there is a break with the demand which governs signification, that is, the subordination of the world to the demands of the project, to identity, to unity.

Ordinary language, let us say following Bataille, is servile. But then, because the poetry is composed of the same words as ordinary language (even if signification is suspended), it cannot help but fall back into the regime of sense. The poem can appear to be an edifying work. Can the Bataillean poet – the one who struggles towards a sovereign silence and whose poetry might be said, for this reason, to be itself sovereign – avoid this fate? But the Bataillean poem is made of words; even if it does more than signify, it also signifies; it signifies nonetheless and therefore must bear the risk of falling back into servility. This means the sacrifice of discourse in the poem is never pure; it cannot happen once and for all. It is necessary to begin and rebegin – to read, to write over and again …

Sacrifice, sovereignty, the disobedient. Perhaps this is a struggle which occurs ceaselessly, at the edges of sense. A secret battle which reveals itself only for those who cave hears to hear what presents itself even as it disappears (presents itself in disappearance, as what withdraws, as an indication) in the rhythms and sonorities of our words, in laughter and tears?

It is not a question of severing ordinary language from poetic language, because this is already to forget laughter and tears. Might one hear a sovereign silence in a kind of irony that is quite different to the one Socrates and Kierkegaard employ in order to allow their readers to discover the truth, the hidden truth, by themselves? Imagine, instead, an irony which does not seek to recover truth, a madness by which words dissolve into a laughter which carries them in another direction: the contagious giggling of children, the buffoonery of Dostoevsky’s underground man.

And perhaps, too, there is a thinking of sacrifice – no, that is the wrong expression – a sacrificial thinking which attempts to bear within itself the sovereign silence towards which the Bataillean poet struggles. Here, I remember Artaud’s early letters to Rivere (I do not have them to hand). One finds in those pages a suffering-thinking, a thinking which is suffered, passively undergone (but the word ‘passive’ is too simple …). A thinking which cannot help but sacrifice itself, which is mired in suffering and cannot lift itself from the crucible of the instant.

Common Presence

Common presence: these two words, translating a poem and an anthology by René Char, indicate what I would like to be able to think.

Char’s anthology Commune Présence, published in 1964, includes no records of the dates of the poems it collects in eight main clusters; there is no chronological ordering here. To what does its title refer? To an experience shared by poet and reader – to an experience of the poem that allows a presence to be shared. One cannot help but be reminded of Heraclitus, always an important presence in Char’s poetry, for whom the logos is said to be common. Common presence: does this refer to Char’s version of the logos which maintains itself beyond what we take to be opposites, but which Heraclitus tells us are always in struggle and interchange?

Char’s poems are shards, fragments. Each poem is comprised of autonomous phrases – one leaps from phrase to phrase. There is not harmony here – or if we are to use this word, it would in accordance with Heraclitus, for whom harmonia names a kind of accordance. Do we know what harmonia is? Do we know what this word meant to Heraclitus and how to read Char alongside Heraclitus in view of the stakes of this word harmonia? Thinking of the last few blogs, which were an attempt to understand the phrase ‘commune présence’, I would like argue that Char’s poetry returns us to the harmony-without-harmony of Heraclitus.

‘Harmony-without-harmony’: why this cumbersome and ridiculous phrase? Because the accordance between the fragment and the matter to be thought, to be indicated by the fragment is a harmony of strife, a struggling discord. Here it is a matter of attending to an event which Heidegger indicates when he writes of physis – of the coming-into-appearance of things as it is accompanied by a withdrawal; the process through which things are given such that they come to stand even as this determination is accompanied by an indetermination. Ah, but it’s more complex than that – for are determination and indetermination not given in the event that physis names?

The Simplest Speech

From Leaves of Hypos, trans. Jackson Matthews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding Endgame

One reads with Heidegger of the first beginning [Anfang], the Ereignis, the originating event of the West through which the great names physis, aletheia, logos appeared etc., etc. What then of the event called Auschwitz – or for which the name ‘Auschwitz’ is a synecdoche? Did it give us a new set of primal words, or does it exacerbate the ones we already have? Did it accomplish a glorious new Dichtung, bringing names forward in the fire of a new experience of the logos, or did it, rather, mock that same Dichtung and that same fire?

Adorno on Beckett, in the famous ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’: ‘Understanding it can mean only understanding its intelligibility [Unverständlichkeit], concretely reconstructing the meaning of the fact that it has no meaning’. It has no meaning? It is set after an indeterminate disaster; the apocalypse has happened. In postwar Europe, ‘everything, including a resurrected culture, has been destroyed without realising it; humankind continues to vegetate, creeping along after events that even the survivors cannot really survive, on a rubbish heap that has made even reflection on one’s own damaged state [Zerschlagenheit] useless’. They talk, the characters, they repeat lame jokes, they babble and mutter. There is nothing to talk about, nothing to do. Movement is ritual without meaning. What happens will happen again. Dead time.

In the face of this, understanding cannot, as for Kant, bring intuitions under concepts. Do not try to understand Endgame – but do not try, likewise, to grasp it under the heading of Heideggerian Dichtung (which itself bestows understanding, bringing beings to a stand). Does it call for a new beginning – for us to dream of a new Dichtung, a new happening of the Ereignis? Or does it attest, rather, to the impossibility not only of such a happening but of the ‘first’ beginning [Anfang] of which Heidegger writes?

The War Machine

Of the translations I have read, I fancy Jaeger’s might capture the gnomic, terseness of Heraclitus’s Greek. ‘Character-man’s demon’ , ‘Dry flash–wisest and best soul’, ‘Way up and way down–one and the same’ , ‘Invisible harmony–better than visible’ , ‘One man–to me ten thousand, if he be the best’. Jaeger links this terseness of expression to Hesiod’s Works and Days and to the collection of Theognis of Megara – ‘Here again we meet long rows of apophthegms strung loosely together’. But they are strung together by one who loved wisdom (there was as yet no word for philosophy …); like Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Parmenides, Heraclitus brings a tone to philosophy different to the Ionians who were content to dispassionately report their observations and research.

Heraclitus, separate and proud, having removed himself from the common run, presents himself as a man who has awoken. He addresses us, the sleepers. Do not heed what he says, heed what resounds through what he says. Heed the logos and wake up! His discourse is a war machine. It must be; it is in harmony with what he teaches.

War, he says – the clash of forces, with its associations of carnage and horror – is ‘father of all and king of all’. This is shocking, but Heraclitus is insistent: the division of the world into gods and mortals, slaves and the free is premised upon war, which is to say, the struggle of opposing forces and their interchange. Contra Homer, who laments the strife in the world of men and gods, and against Hesiod, who does not understand why the day is also the night, Heraclitus presents strife as the hidden principle behind everything. This is what one should hear in the logos.

This is illustrated through examples, each of which has to be grasped intuitively. Tension – the lyre – a joining together or harmony that allows opposing forces to work in unison. Thus the lyre can make music through a redoubled tension and the bow, whose name is life (a pun on bios, which means life and a bow), can accomplish its work of death. Take this fragment: ‘They do not understand how that which draws apart agrees with itself: a fitting-together with counter-tension, as of the bow and the lyre’. Harmonia, Jaeger argues, is the third term which arises out of ‘the dynamics of two opposing forces stretched together so that they work in unison’.

Harmony? This word, which suggests peace and reconciliation, cannot translate harmonia. In another fragment we find ‘Invisible harmony–better than visible’; hidden, all we have are symbols which can point us towards making the right intuition. But the logos is common even if it calls each of us to separate ourselves from the others. Heed the play of the logos in the war-like language of Heraclitus. Heed the common-uncommon logos which attends to the countertension to what appears peaceful and calm in the visible world.

Kafka and Abraham

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

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

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

One might say that it is not a question of Kafka’s choosing to sacrifice everything to writing; he has no choice. But what is it that he sacrifices everything for? What does he sacrifice by writing and through writing? Read his notebooks. Kafka begins stories again and again; he does not complete them or trouble to rewrite them. They begin; another story begins, and it is as though it is not completion he wants, but something else. It is as though writing is nothing at all, as though his hope lies in an impossible writing that demands he complete none of his stories, that he sacrifices them to a still greater demand. Hardly a kind of writing, the labour to produced a finished and complete work, it is an unwriting, an unworking – Blanchot would perhaps call it a désoeuvrement.

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

None of this matters when you think of the horrors that awaited many of those close to Kafka. The struggle of a writer with writing – what significance does it have? And the struggle of those of us who read in a manner analogous to the way Kafka writes – who feel the demand of a writing which draws us beyond a simple faith in verisimilitude, beyond the novel which would give us back the richness of the world, beyond a literature content to represent the world?

With Frenzied Lips …

I very much appreciate Finkelberg’s observation on the changing role of poetry in Plato. As she claims, the earlier dialogues which present link poetry to divine inspiration, the Apology, the Ion and the Meno, give way, with the discovery of the pseudo-crafts in the Gorgias, to a developed theory of mimesis in the Phaedrus and the Republic. This allows Plato to make the following observations in his account of divine madness in the Phaedrus:

There is a third form of possession or madness, of which the Muses are the source. This seizes a tender, virgin soul and stimulates it to rapt passionate expression, especially in lyric poetry, glorifying the countless deeds of ancient times for the instruction of posterity. But if any man comes to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill alone (techne) will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought to nought by the poetry of madness, and behold, their place is nowhere to be found.

Technique is not sufficient; one has to be inspired in order to be a good poetry. Enthusiasmos, inspiration, is required; when present, the poet belongs alongside the philosopher. And when it is absent? The poet is an imitator, concerned with mimesis alone. One finds the same distinction between inspired and non-inspired poetry in The Republic. In book 3, Plato distinguishes mimetic poetry, which works through impersonation, taking on roles (dramatic poetry) and non-mimetic poetry or ‘plain discourse’ which ‘the report of the poet himself’ and is exemplified by lyric poetry, in the dithyramb. There is a third category – mixed poetry, which contains elements from the previous two categories. Epic poetry is a good example of this. Mimetic poets of all kinds – tragedians, comedians, and even epic poets like Homer – are to be expelled from the city. Lyric poetry may remain, but only on the condition that it is purified; henceforward, it will concern only the gods and good men, performed in a standardized rhythm and mode.

Aristotle, of course, presents a very different view of poetry, considering poetic mimesis admirable since it allows the poem to present something truly universal, purged of the accidental qualities of empirical reality. Aristotle does not celebrate Homer’s plain discourse, condemning his deviations into imitation, like Plato, but celebrates him for those same deviations; likewise, tragedy, far from being the lowest of the arts, is, for Aristotle, the highest. What is interesting, as Finkelberg points out, is the fact that Aristotle’s emphasis on mimesis leaves no place for Plato’s ideal of a non-mimetic poetry nor indeed an idea of divine possession, of mantic inspiration (since the two, in Plato, go together). Inspiration is relegated to the status of a ‘natural sympathy’ which enables the poet to realize characters more vividly; it is not the wild enthusiasmos of Plato’s inspired poet. There is no special place for lyric poetry, for Aristotle. The Aristotelian poet employs a techne, a technique, an art.

The distinction between these poetics is a fascinating one. Does something like it lie behind Plutarch’s comments on the poor quality of the oracles delivered at Delphi (inspired, enthusiastic) when compared to the sublime work of Sappho (polished, artful)? Finkelberg suggests just this, and proceeds to quote a favourite passage of mine:

‘Do you not see’, he [Sarapion] continued, ‘what grace the songs of Sappho have, charming and bewitching all who listen to them? But the Sibyl "with frenzied lips", as Heraclitus has it, "uttering words mirthless, unembellished, unperfumed, reaches to a thousand years with her voice through the god."’

The quotation from Heraclitus is marvellous, reminding me of another fragment, ‘The Lord at Delphi does not speak but gives a sign’. Marvellous, too, to be reminded of an unexpected relationship between Plato and Heraclitus. For how should one understand the broken fragments of Heraclitus? As remnants of a book, as Aristotle claims? As a cluster of aphorisms nearly sufficient unto themselves, resonating with one another in theme, and hanging together in a fragmentary array? The divine law, the logos, for Heraclitus, can only be heeded by those who, he says, are awake. How might we awaken? The fragments are his answer. Listen.

Ontological Tumefaction

Levinas wavers on the ethical significance of May 1968, but here is what he writes in ‘Without Identity’, newly translated by Nidra Poller in her edition of Levinas’s Humanism of the Other:

It is interesting to note the dominance, among the most imperative ‘sentiments’ of May 1968, of the refusal of a humanity defined by its satisfaction, by its receipts and expenditures, and not by its vulnerability more passive than all passivity, its debt to the other. What was contested, beyond capitalism and exploitation, was their conditions: the individual taken as accumulation in being, by honours, titles, professional competence – ontological tumefaction weighing so heavily on others as to crush them, instituting a hierarchical society that maintains itself beyond the necessities of consumption and that no religious breath could make more egalitarian. Behind the capital in having weighed a capital in being.

Communism at the rue Saint-Benoit

1

The writer, discontent with writing, miserable at the loneliness of the writing life, can always enter the political world. Bind yourself body and soul to a political cause and you tie your misery to something determinate. It is the state of the world, you will mutter, that makes me despair. And thus you can dream like Kafka of travelling to Palestine and beginning a new life there, or, like Mishima, of the great deed which will, as it were, set fire to your literary works, binding your name henceforward to the Emperor. The writer’s dream: a community like Lawrence’s Rananim in which all will live frugally and in peace; here is a work of creation that is now communal and egalitarian.

One finds the desire for a collective labour in which each works alongside another in the days after the liberation of Paris: the experience of the Resistance is paramount; a new optimism is born. With the reading of Hegel – or with Kojève’s Hegel – it is a matter of transforming society and the human being by the same stroke in the same movement. The dream of communism begins: we will work together, struggle together, in view of the glorious future. We will learn the ‘diamat’ (the name for Stalin’s distillation of Marxian philosophy into several key theses) and recite it; we have all the answers. An admirable, optimistic dream, but one that threatens to shatter itself when the horrors of the Stalinist Soviet Union become clear.

Another communism kind is born in the groups who break themselves free from the French Communist Party. The Arguments group – Axelos, Lefebvre, Mascolo, Chatelet and others – remain highly significant. Axelos studies Heidegger and argues that Marx’s metaphysics remains productivist; the notions of work and production become problematic. Communism is no longer bound to work, to actualisation, but set in a much more complex fashion into the history of metaphysics. The lessons of Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism have been learnt. Lefebvre had already drawn on the image of the total human being one finds in Surrealism and, like the other thinkers linked to Arguments, was tremendously excited at the publication of the writings of Marx’s youth (the 1844 manuscripts). Here was a Marx who placed alienation at the heart of his work (close, perhaps, to the Marxism of Lukacs). It is also necessary to tell the story of Socialism or Barbarism … another time.

Alongside this group there are others including those who gather at rue Saint-Benoit – Duras, Antelme, Schuster, and Mascolo. Some are writers; all are readers. Blanchot and Bataille are also affiliated with them; Barthes and Des Forets are frequent visitors; they reach out to the Italian writer Vittorini and to the German Enzenberger. Some of them have passed through the discipline of Party membership; Antelme bore his expulsion from the Communists with great pain; this is also true, I think, of Duras. I have tried to sketch some aspects of their shared journey elsewhere; for now, I want to underline the fact that it is in this group that one finds a peculiar communism linked to what Bataille was first to call worklessness [désoeuvrement]. It is no longer a matter of shared work; of the unitary project that would bind each to one another in pursuit of a common goal. Is there a goal held in common? There is – but it is not shared only according to the ordinary understanding of this word …

2

Pain: Duras, the older Duras, capable of writing (and rewriting) books like The Malady of Death and The Year 1980 invests her money in property; she becomes rich, famous, and, according to the accounts I have read, intervenes clumsily in public affairs, misusing her prestige. Why do I condemn her (what right do I have)? Because she was one of the communists of rue Saint-Benoit, married to Mascolo who was on the editorial board of Arguments and affiliated thereby to thinkers like Lefebvre who, moving from Strasbourg where he taught some of the Situationists, to Nanterre (alongside, I think Levinas and Ricoeur), which was, of course, the home of the March 22 Movement, is some argue the finest exponent of Marx in France. Because she is was bound first of all in marriage and then in friendship to Robert Antelme, author of The Human Race. And all are bound in their admiration of Bataille (who died, too soon, in the early 1960s) and in friendship to Blanchot, who returned to political activity as soon as he read the pages of the first issue of 14 Julliet, edited by Mascolo and others.

More than all of thus, there is her writing itself which is always more than the sum of its influences. Why, though, be disappointed with the political actions of a writer? Why because Duras is a writer is it appropriate to condemn her for investing in property? But she is not any writer. The author of The Ravishment of Lol V. Stein and Destroy, She Said has moved, in these works, towards an affirmation of a language as far removed from authoritarianism and self-assurance as possible. It is as though she has assumed a kind of powerlessness specific to literature which is no longer understood in terms of great works, sturdy masterpieces, but according to a demand which passes through books. There is now a discordance between the writing this demand names and the work, all work, even the necessary labour of working alongside one another in the attempt to transform the world. Does this mean that writing, bound to worklessness, thereby escapes responsibility? Or is there, rather, a responsibility specific to worklessness and even a form of communism which is bound to the literary (to the movement of writing which Duras’s books do not fail to answer)?

How absurd, how peremptory these questions must sound! For now, I will content myself in making unsubstantiated programmatic remarks … hopefully all will become clear (to me, first of all – and this is the only reason I write here. This is a workbook, nothing else, in which I try out ideas which I have no easy way to formulate and do not want to assume the responsibility to defend. I will do that elsewhere, and in my own name. Why write, then? Because others are struggling with analogous ideas, and a kind of community binds us to one another because we share a desire to work alongside one another without rushing into the language of results and outcomes.)

3

It is hard to work collectively. Sometimes it is necessary to communicate frequently, to speak and to write – one must submit to organisation, rules, protocols. But it is also necessary, at other times, to retreat from communication in which thoughts can be too quickly transmitted, in which an experience of thinking is translated too rapidly into the language of outcome and result. We work together – but sometimes this work requires a gap sufficient to allow another experience to occur.

There is the danger that the militant group is liable to express itself in terms increasingly more crude and simplifying; there is the risk that one can reduce everything to slogans like ‘counter-revolution’ or ‘defense of the proletariat’. Still, militancy is necessary – or at least a certain militancy (I am remembering Deleuze and Guattari’s analyses, as they are retraced in a book by Thoburn). And it is also necessary, in a time when there seems no alternative to the system in which we find ourselves, to relearn the vocabulary upon which these slogans draw.

Today, there is no official communism in the countries of the West; we are not in the situation of those of the Rue Saint-Benoit, exiles from an official communism who nevertheless retained the word communism as an indication of the direction in which their thought and their lives were moving. Communism: here it comes to name a refusal of the aggressive, commanding language of the orthodox left which, in the period of the invasion of Hungary, had lost its meaning, functioning, as Blanchot writes in an uncollected essay from 1958, as ‘signals, ethical forces, allusions to formidable transcendent principles which it is forbidden to approach, especially for the purposes of a precise analysis’. It is values that are signalled; but, Blanchot writes, ‘it is against the very notion of value that thought must defended’.

To understand these claims, a lengthy detour is required. And if one does not undertake this detour? There is a danger in language itself – or in the dictare, the imperious repetition through which one supplants a language which makes itself felt in the literary work of art. There is the danger of value, signal and principle. One can resist through a minute analysis which takes place alongside militancy, not supplanting it, but not allowing, at the same time, the militant’s voice to drown out another, quieter voice.

But there is another danger here, indicated in one of the essays Blanchot circulated anonymously during the Events of May 1968. Science can supplant the experience of language to which I am here linking literature – the science which, in the late 1960s, presumbably under the influence of Althusser, sought to retrieve the hard kernel of Marxism from its anthropological appropriation (from those who would focus on Marx’s 1844 manuscripts). There is no yet science, but only ideology – that, I think, was the claim. Nevertheless, there was a science to come – a science which would complete human knowledge. Blanchot identifies the danger that the patient voice of the scientist, whilst it is not the peremptory voice of dictare, nevertheless threatens to silence the murmuring or idling to which literary writing is linked.

THe Heavenly Fire

1.

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

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

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

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

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

3.

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

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

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

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

4.

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

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

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

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

Kafka’s Failure

Recall the readings (Brod’s amongst them) which suppose the castle of Kafka’s novel is an image of another world. True, there are always motifs of salvation in Kafka’s work – they were there from the start, but to assume the castle – which is, as the landsurveyor K. sees, only a collection of village huts – is a symbol for a heavenly beyond is to commit the same impatience as K. Do not think K. will find what he seeks; the castle, which is always there, and Klamm himself – an ordinary man, seated in front of a desk – do not hide themselves. To understand them as the goal itself is to be content with intermediary figure.

Blanchot asks: ‘To what extent did he connect the ordeal of his heroes with the way in which he himself, through art, was trying to make his way toward the work and, through the work, toward something true?’ A crucial question. For K’s fault, like the novelist’s, is the impatience which seeks to find a substitute for the goal. Kafka’s greatness: his stories are unfinished, his diaries and correspondence, to which so much of his writings are confined, remain provisional and incomplete. Has he failed – or is this failure, measured against the success of the award winning novelist, testament to his fidelity to a demand implicit in the work? Accept no intermediary substitute; do not take refuge in the artful dénouement; be content to fail without nostalgia for success.

The River of Action

Ostentiously, perhaps, Mishima leaves the completed manuscript of the fourth part of his tetralogy on the desk in the hallway of his home as he sets out to commit ritual suicide. It is not by chance that the Sea of Fertility closes with a kind of denial that anything it recounted had actually taken place. Thereby Mishima underlines the errancy of fiction, its falsity; he is ready to leave the sham behind him, to follow the course of action he had adopted to its end. He will take his life; his body, trained, supple, ready, awaits the blade of the sword; his head will be struck off by his ‘second’. He dies, because to die already attests to a desire for truth which is the opposite of fiction. But it is only its correlate, and Mishima’s delusion is that action can overcome the inaction to which writing is linked. Writing escapes the measure of action; the life of action is only an attempt to escape writing.

It is Mishima’s greatness to know the limit of the books he wrote – to allow them, especially The Sea of Fertility, to unravel themselves (it is often awkward, ungainly). He is not content with the masterpiece, even though he is capable of them (this is why, indeed, he recognises himself in Bataille – remember Mishima’s remarks on My Mother). But he compensates for this discontent in his fervent nationalism, his militarism, his worship of the emperor. Each member of his army, the Shield Society, is supposed to be related through him to the Emperor. But the Emperor is the idol who must himself be shattered. It is unsurprising that Mishima admired de Gaulle – unsurprising, but disappointing, too, for it is in this temptation he avoids the demand of writing.

Kafka’s Misery

Kafka’s Zionism: he has hopes for everyone except himself. For himself, he is an anti-Zionist; he does not have hopes for himself. Blanchot: ‘He wants it even if he is excluded from it, for the greatness of this rigorous conscience was always to hope for others more than for himself and not to measure mankind’s unhappiness by his personal misfortune’. Yes, this is an extraordinary gift. Remember Kafka’s aphorism: ‘Some deny the existence of misery by pointing to the sun; he denies the existence of the sun by pointing to misery’; the latter is not Kafka’s vice. But isn’t his misery assuaged by the writing towards which misery leads him – the writing which is the ‘merciful surplus’ through which he rings changes on his misery? Perhaps it is this which permits him to affirm Zionism for others but not for himself.

Renunciation

Kafka dreams of Palestine. What will he do there? Renounce writing; like Rimbaud, he will have left the world of writing behind him in order to step into the world of action. In this, he is like Mishima, too, who alongside writing his great tetralogy begins to practice manoeuvres in his own private army, which will lead him towards ritual suicide.

Renounce writing? Renounce, rather, the impatient renunciation which would measure the demand of writing by the world.

Splinters

Certainly it is necessary to refuse the forms to which we are subjected; necessary, too, to resist the banalities of discourse (political, literary critical) which uphold, without reflection, a particular notion what we are and of what we might achieve. Steve’s writings at Splinters exemplify this resistance sometimes through direct confrontation, sometimes through laughter.

Who refuses? Who resists? I would say the self or the subject – but there is a danger of passing over the movements and processes specific to self-formation. In particular, to attend to literary writing, as Steve does at In Writing , is perhaps to understand that the individual self, the one who writes, is only an after-effect of a more discreet movement.

I admire both the righteous anger and the humour of Steve’s blogs at Splinters. What binds them to his more ruminative blogs at In Writing? It is, I think, a question of a style – of the way in which a life is given style in writing, through writing, according to the demands to which this life has subjected itself. Subjection, yes, but the ascesis of writing and commenting is not reactive, as Nietzsche suggests, but might be bound (as Nietzsche also suggests) to a practice that is both active and affirmative.

Above all, refusal must not be understood negatively; to affirm the resistances specific to a writing linked to what is called literary modernism is to answer to what, in the literary work, demands that it break with the idea of the chef d’oeuvre, the work that is achieved, sufficient unto itself.

A writing splintered in order to write of the splintered – or a least, a practice that never relinquishes the modesty required to draw close to, say, Bernhard, Blanchot and Beckett. Read the longer essays gathered at The Gaping Void and the demand of what is generally derided as ‘literary modernism’ becomes clearer: responding, seeking to write of Bernhard, Blanchot and Beckett, it is necessary to find a style in which to illuminate what flees in the literary work without, for all that, preventing it from fleeing.

wood s lot

wood s lot is another discrete weblog, admirable because its author is hidden, like the demiurge, behind the links he creates. All the world opens itself to you here; everyday there are new places from which, once again, you can receive the power of beginning. To begin, to rebegin: how pleasant to find openings that redeem afternoons of administration and bureaucracy: look, there is a link to a translation of some of Celan’s poems, and there to a painter whose name you half knew, and there to a photographer whose name you had never heard until it arrived by chance from wood s lot. Everyday it is as though a net has been cast into the ocean of the world wide web; everyday it is dragged in full of wonders.

The Poetics of Decay

I like The Poetics of Decay all the more that it retreats from accountability: you cannot intervene with your own comments; there is no possibility of trackbacks or permalinks. It is discrete – but here is a discretion which shelters the most delicate movement of writing. It is for you to read in admiration and, perhaps, recognition and then to continue the movement of writing, or what you take to be its movement which is only its resonance in you. I would quote from The Poetics of Decay here – much of it lends itself to be quoted, but to do so would be to remove the lines I would quote from the movement to which it belongs, from a singular momentum and intimacy.

At the Threshold

One of the avatars of Vishnu could not, it was said, be killed during the day or the night, either inside or outside. They killed him on the threshold of his house at dusk (or was it dawn?). In the last fortnight, I have become an insomniac – which is to be exiled doubly: from sleep’s repose, and from the waking world; I belong to neither. Then, remembering what Kafka wrote about the merciful surplus, I wonder whether what insomnia prevents it might also make possible: that there might be a writing of insomnia, born of an unexpected strength. But no – here, at the threshold, belonging neither to the day or night, I can’t write a line.

Covac

I have only read the script of Bergman’s The Touch but it has remained with me for many years. David Covac has to smash everything up; he shatters the happiness of a married couple; the wife leaves her loving but stodgy husband, but then Covac destroys that relationship too. Why? It is as though Covac were a moving storm; what makes him exciting makes him dangerous. If he destroys everything it is not because he wants to, but because the storm wants to destroy everything he wants.

Why am I reminded, thinking of this, of Bataille’s remarks on philosophy – it is too boring, he writes; nothing is at stake for the philosopher, above all, there is never the laughter in which the thinker grasps that he or she is a buffoon with respect to what he or she is trying to think. The Hatred of Poetry – this is the name of the first edition of a book that was later republished as The Impossible. Is it possible to write of a hatred of philosophy? And then to envisage a storm that would carry philosophy away because it would show that this destruction is what, all along, the philosopher sought?

Invention

From an interview Beckett granted to a French newspaper:

– I never read philosophy.
– Why not?
– I don’t understand it.
[…]
– Why did you write your books?
– I don’t know. I’m not an intellectual. I just feel things. I invented Molloy and the rest on the day I understood how stupid I’d been. I began then to write down the things I feel.

The Idled Word

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poietic Thinking

It is hard to summarise the arguments of the secret writings currently being published in division 3 of Heidegger’s collected works; they demand a transformation of our vocabulary, of the familiar modes of argument and exposition. Fortunately, Daniela Vallega-Neu provides an impressively lucid introduction to the Contributions, in which she foregrounds what she calls its ‘poietic’ character, drawing thereby on the Greek word, poiesis, bringing forth.


‘The language of the Contributions is poietic in a twofold sense: it enables the event of being to appear as it appears in thinking and – in turn – it enables language and thinking to appear as events of be-ing [Seyn]’ (3). This is beautifully put. First of all, this is a text on the way, in passage – thinking is occurring in this text as we read it; the Contributions performs what it would think. Text as enactment, as shelter: the ‘how’ of this text is bound up with the ‘what’ of its topic. The event in question happens as a movement of language and, thereby, indicates the way in which this movement of language and thinking might happen elsewhere, outside of the Contributions.


Vallega-Neu notes, ‘Contributions to Philosophy is more a site of struggle than a systematic book that presents a step-by-step development of thoughts. This does not mean that it is without rigour or shape. But the shape arises in and as a struggle of rigorous thinking in which one can perceive an attempt to give shape to emerging thoughts, thoughts that, at their inceptual stage, echo their ungraspable source’ (4). Yes indeed – and what its author struggles against is our language, the same language the philosophy would attempt to clarify. This means he struggles, too, against the failure [Versagen] of his first magnum opus, Being and Time. But how did it fail, and why would a poietic thinking be necessary?


Perhaps this struggle might be understood in terms of witnessing.


Attestation, witnessing – how does philosophy, as it were, take account of that which is most important? What is it that points the way to philosophical reflection? In Being and Time, it depends upon the existentiell phenomenon of wanting-to-have-a-conscience. To recall, Dasein experiences its wanting-to-have-a-conscience in response to the call of conscience. The one who is called is Dasein is the everyday ‘they-self’ [Man selbst] lost in idle chatter and aimless curiosity. The call erupts silently, which is to say, by cutting through chatter, summoning Dasein back to its own proper self [das eigene Selbst] and to the possibilities (and impossibilities) that belong to it.


Who calls? The call is indefinite – the calling comes from me, in a sense, which is to say, from my finite and unique self. But it manifests as ‘Dasein in its uncanniness, primordially thrown being-in-the-world, as not-at-home, the naked “that” in the nothingness of the world’ (255). Authenticity is a way for Dasein to take over the fact that it is the not-ground, of its nothingness [der nichtige Grund seiner Nichtigkeit].


What does this mean? There are various ways of understanding the significance of nothingness. First of all, the fact that Dasein must assume those possibilities into which it is thrown, taking over this ‘ground’ for itself. Secondly, that Dasein, in choosing to actualise certain possibilities leaves others unactualised. Thirdly, the fact that Dasein will die – that it is always thrown towards death which is the ‘absolute nothingness of Dasein’ (BT 283). However, from an existential perspective, Dasein can take over this fact by establishing the right kind of relationship to being-towards-death.


To grasp what this has to do with the question of the meaning of being, it is necessary to understand the resoluteness through which authentic existence becomes possible in relation to what, for Heidegger, is the temporal meaning [Sinn] of care [Sorge]. Vallega-Neu’s elaboration of this point is superb. First of all, she quotes Heidegger on meaning: it is ‘that in which the intelligibility of something keeps itself, without coming into view explicitly and thematically. Meaning signifies that upon which [woraufhin] the primary project is projected, that in terms of which something can be conceived in its possibility as what it is’ (BT 298). She comments: ‘It follows that, as the meaning of care, temporality is that upon which Dasein is projected. Heidegger again: to expose that upon which a project is projected […] means to disclose what makes what is projected possible (298). Vallega-Neu: ‘In other words, that upon which Dasein is projected (temporality) is the condition of possibility of the being of Dasein. The primary projection of which Heidegger speaks, the projection that first allows something to mean something, is the pre-theoretical understanding of being. In this projection the meaning not only of the being of Dasein but of all being of beings is disclosed’ (19).


What about the Contributions? In what sense does it renew the struggle with language that is already ongoing in Being and Time?


This is, as Vallega-Neu makes clear, a poietic text; it performs what it advocates and thereby, if I can put it this way, provides a shelter for Seyn, being, in its pages. What does this mean? The ‘what’ of the text cannot be separated from the ‘how’ of its textual performance: rather than set out, in a manner which still resembles transcendental philosophy, the way in which being is as it were disclosed and the question of the meaning of being becomes possible, the Contributions would be an event of that disclosure itself. It is what Heidegger might call in the language of Being and Time, the existentiell attestation to the disclosure of being. It calls us because it is able to provide a shelter for what is now called the truth of being.


With the Contributions, the question of being in its truth must be retrieved, must be won anew, insofar as being withdraws when we focus only on beings and do not attend to the way in which they (those beings) belong to the disclosure of being. Once again Da-sein is the locus of this disclosure. But Da-sein is now hyphenated because it is not simply the topic of an existential analytic, but that which we must become (‘human being has become too feeble for Da-sein’ (6)). It names the opening of a site – a place in which sheltering occurs. In one sense, this is what Heidegger was trying to indicate in Being and Time. It is still a question of thinking the disclosure that occurs in this site – of thinking Dasein in its abyssal ground. In another, the Contributions is such a site, answering to the difficulty and the strangeness of this task – of thinking a Selfhood [Selbstheit] that is not the self [Sich], nor in any simple sense, the ‘I’ or the ‘you’. Selfhood, here, is given as the ground of the belongingness to being, once again, der nichtige Grund.


I cannot resist quoting Vallega-Neu again: ‘selfhood names an aspect of be-ing’s occurrence as enowning, namely the “owning-to” through which humans find their “own”, their “self”’. As the trajectory and domain of the “owning-to”, selfhood is also ‘the ground of belongingness to be-ing, which selfhood includes in itself the (inabiding) owning-over-to [Über-eignung]’ (223). This means that selfhood names an aspect of be-ing’s occurrence as Ereignis, namely the “owning-to” through which humans find their “own”, their “self” (85). Selfhood is grounded in ‘ownhood’ [Eigentum] as she puts it – ‘the reigning of the owning [Eignung] in enowning’.


But what is the existentiell attestation to such belongingness? How does it as it were disclose itself? In an experience of reading, of response that would bring us into Da-sein. Through a call, certainly – but one which resonates in the pages of the Contributions itself. In the penultimate section of his book, Heidegger writes of those who are able to open the sites where the sheltering of be-ing might occur, in which Da-sein becomes historical. These are die Untergehenden, those who go under. Then come the ‘allied ones’ who respond to those who go under in their own poetry, thinking, artistic creation and other practices. Finally, Heidegger looks towards the Volk, the people to come who would follow the ‘allied ones’. Doubtless the Contributions would be a work which witnesses the truth of being; it would open a space, a Da-sein that we, its readers, must try and sustain. Heidegger and Hölderlin are the ones who go under. The Contributions, responding to Hölderlin, is as I have said, a poietic text, but whom does it bring forth? The allied ones. But who are they?

Eden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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