But how, one might ask, did this most unusual emphasis upon distance, impersonality, and loss come to assert itself within Blanchot’s account of intimate relationality? Ironically, When the Time Comes, which makes impersonal relations one of its principle themes, is ultimately a récit inspired by personal events. It is difficult to read what Blanchot tells us about distance, intimacy, and loss, particularly in the text’s final pages, without thinking constantly of the name that reverberates silently throughout its margins: Denise Rollin.

Much of what we know about Blanchot’s relationship with Rollin comes from the Bident and Surya biographies. These studies are admirable for their scope and precision, but both are somewhat disappointing to the extent that they fail to offer us any serious discussion of Rollin’s influence on Blanchot’s work and thought. A likely reason for this is that, until now, the matter itself has remained largely speculative. We know that Blanchot was introduced to Rollin in the autumn of 1941, not long after the publication of Thomas the Obscure. Over the next year and half, the two of them would meet nearly twice a month, along with Bataille (who was her lover at the time) and others, at 3 rue de Lille.

By all accounts, the Blanchot who participated in these discussions presented himself as the very embodiment of modesty and discretion. And Rollin, who was fond of professing that there could be “no grandeur unless it [was] accompanied by a great humility”, was naturally drawn to him. “M.B. is the being with the utmost humility that I know,” she would later confide; “he resembles most incredibly Dostoevsky’s ‘Idiot’ . . . yet he is altogether unconscious of all this”. This unconsciousness, this absence from himself, as Bident claims, “is precisely what attracted her. . . . This movement of self-effacement, of being nobody, is what seemed to fulfill her”. 

By the time they met, Rollin was thirty-four (as was Blanchot) and recently divorced, with a young son. She was already well known in avant-garde circles and had cultivated, throughout the 1930s, close friendships with a number of surrealist artists and writers, including Breton himself. During autumn 1943, Rollin grew particularly close to Blanchot, and by the middle of 1945, as Bident tells us, the two had become lovers. What followed, over the next few years, was the most significant romance of Blanchot’s adult life, a relation amoureuse that nevertheless came to be disrupted, repeatedly, by the imposition of distances, disappointments, and deferrals. It was a relationship, moreover, based from the very start on a profound sacrifice: toward the end of the 1950s, Rollin would write to a friend, “This now makes fourteen years that I refuse Maurice Blanchot — who nevertheless is the being destined for me”. 

Counting backwards (some fourteen years) from the date of her letter, one arrives at November 1945; Blanchot’s important early essay on Nietzsche was about to be published, and Blanchot was leaving Paris for Beausoleil. He would return to the capital the following spring, only to leave again less than four months later. Such peregrination was, for Blanchot, less the exception than the rule. By the winter of 1946, he had moved again — this time to the little house in Èze where, in the months that followed, he would begin work on When the Time Comes — a text “written for Denise”. It was over the course of this year and a half that the refusal to which she refers in her letter began to take shape. 

Although the exact circumstances surrounding it remain largely unknown to us, in his biography Bident leads us to believe that the correspondence conducted
between Blanchot and Rollin during this period was considerable, with her letters, in particular, characterized by a high style and intensity. As for Blanchot’s letters — we can only speculate. Yet what we do know is that his critical writings from around this time are some of his most important early pieces, many of which bear witness to a burgeoning obsession with themes whose prominence would only increase in the years that followed: the affirmation of extreme distance, the contestation of teleology, the movement of eternal return.

From Joseph Kuma's excellent Eroticization of Distance: Nietzsche, Blanchot and the Legacy of Courtly Love

Walser’s assistants are made of the very same stuff – these figures who are irreparably and stubbornly busy collaborating on work that is utterly superfluous, not to say indescribable If they study – and they seem to study very hard – it is in order to become big fat zeros. And why should they bother to help with anything the world takes seriously? After all, it’s nothing but madness. They prefer to take walks. And if they encounter a dog or some living creature on their walks, they whispers: ‘I have nothing to give you, dear animal; I would gladly give you something, if only I had it’. Nevertheless, in the end, they lie down in a meadow to weep bitterly over their ‘stupid greenhorn’s existence’.

Agamben, Nudities

… when he was twenty-eight, Nijinsky stopped dancing and choreographing. He began his last recital, which he declared to be about the horrors of the First World War, by telling his audience, ‘I will show you how we live, how we suffer, how we artists create’. He then sat on a chair onstage for half an hour without moving. When he was encouraged by the spectator to begin his dance, he retorted angrily: ‘How dare you disturb me! I am not a machine, I will dance when I feel like it’.

from David Kishik's The Power of Life

WORLD FIXER:

Two very small eyes

appear to a very small child

in a pitch black night

and suddenly the child realizes

that the very small very kind eyes

are the lights of a locomotive

 

History digests all those people

The biggest monsters

the greatest atrocities

have already been digested by history

History has a good stomach

 

Voltaire I said

but they only gaped

When I say France

or Ireland

or Paraguay

they only gape

 

I can't stand strangers

They do everything wrong

nobody obeys

They don't hear anything

they don't see anything

but they incessantly demand

exorbitant payments

 

My tractate does not demand anything other 

than total abolition

but nobody has understood that

I want to abolish them

and they honour me for it.

from Thomas Bernhard, The World-Fixer 

FRAU ZITTEL:

Suddenly one day you discover your own children

are non-humans he said

we think we're raising human beings

and then they're just carnivorous cretins

hysterics megalomaniacs chaotics

 

PROFESSOR ROBERT:

I never contemplated suicide

your father toyed with the idea of it even as a child

I didn't even know what suicide was

when he was already thinking about it

 

the world today is all destroyed

and altogether unbearably ugly

go anywhere you like

the world today is just ugly

and meaninglessness through and through

everything ruined wherever you look

everything gone to the dogs wherever you look

one would rather not wake up any more

in the last fifty years the people in government

have destroyed everything

and it can never be put right

the architects have destroyed everything

with their stupidity

the intellectuals have destroyed everything

with their stupidity

the masses have destroyed everything 

with their stupidity

political parties the church

have destroyed everything with their stupidity

which has always been base stupidity

this Austrian stupidity is utterly repulsive

Industry and the church are to blame

for Austria's misfortune

the church and industry have always been to blame

for Austria's misfortune

governments are nothing but puppets

of industry and the church

it's always been like that

and in Austria it's always been the worst

people have always run after stupidity 

and trampled intelligence underfoot

Industry and clergy are behind

the Austrian sickness

Really I can understand your father very well

I'm surprised the entire Austrian people didn't commit suicide long ago

 

The Austrians were condemned to death long ago

they just don't know it yet

they haven't yet noticed

the judgement was passed long ago

the execution is just a matter of time

if you ask me it's imminent

 

The tragedy is not

that my brother is dead

but that we are left behind that's what's terrible

from Thomas Bernhard Heldenplatz

MINETTI:

We actors are constantly searching

trageduy

or comedy

if you really think about tragedy

with a clear head

you can see at heart it's really comedy

and vice versa

 

My creative instinct

has been butchered by too much thinking

now I'm facing catastrophe

 

I hate the Baltic sea

I love the north Sea

Ostend you know

Dunkirk

pivotal

very pivotal

 

One New Year's Eve

not far from Folkestone

I was thrown into the English Channel

by a pub owner

I was clinging on to the weekend edition of The Times

and they used it to pull me out of the water

so you could say I owe my life

to The Times

I have often asked myself

madam

if it might not have been better

had I let go of The Times

It would have saved me from all this

 

Life is a farce 

which the intelligentsia call existence

 

The artist is only a true artist

when he is absolutely mad

when he has dived head first into madness

into the abyss

to discover a way of working

from Thomas Bernhard, Minetti

He was a man like you and me, or rather he was a man, but not like you, because he was ‘The God Man’. If he suffered, it was almost as if He only seemed to suffer, because he could not stop suffering when he wished (which you cannot do!) and because even in his suffering he had the beatific vision. God can cheat like that and get away with it. But you can’t get away with anything. On the contrary: this suffering has become your condemnation to suffer without reprieve. All his life long, then, he was looking around at the men he has come to save, knowing he was not like them. Death could not hold him. He did not really have to pray. He just pretended. And by pretending, he set a trap for man. He made all suffering final and inexorable.

Rimbaud

Not abstraction but subtraction.

The fullness of nothingness. That is the reason for the insistence on the zero point.

Against the term ‘absurd’. It presupposes the meaningful as the normal. But that is precisely the illusion[;] the absurd is the normal.

Everything so meaningless, yet at the same time the way one speaks is so normal, i.e. modern language may have shrunken – compared with Kafka’s epic language, brought as it were to the point of indifference with the absolute subject – but [it is] never replaced by linguistic absurdity

Criticism of B[eckett] amounts to the statement: but all that is terrible, it simply cannot be. Answer: it is terrible.

The fact that B[eckett] retains the label ‘novel’. What has become of the novel.

Something infinitely liberating comes from B[eckett] vis-à-vis death. What is it?

From Kafka the most effective motif [is] that of the Hunter Gracchus. Death, silence, without voices, as the unattainable goal. Living is dying because it is a not-being-able-to-die.

Adorno on Beckett

… suddenly, amidst the sadness, the darkness of soul the pressure, his brain would momentarily catch fire, as it were, all his life’s forces would be strained at once in an extraordinary impulse. The sense of life, of self-awareness, increased nearly tenfold in these moments, which flashed by like lightning. His mind, his heart were lit up with an extraordinary light; all his agitation, all his doubts, all his worries were as if placated at once, resolved in a sort of sublime tranquillity, filled with serene, harmonious joy, and hope, filled with reason and ultimate cause.

Prince Myshkin, from Dostoevsky's The Idiot

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.

Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence do not belong among the favorable conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is scarcely possible.

Nietzsche

We’re sick with eternity: its chronic state is time, its crisis – love and death. But, on the other hand, isn’t it also pathological that we see sickness in the very thing that constitutes the meaning of life, that determines what it means to live? That we take the essential discontinuity of our lives – the fact that life ‘passes away’, ‘becomes’, ‘flows’ – for a sickness to be treated? That we try to fill this gap with concepts, to remove that internal diversification of life with the help of some truth underlying it, and thus to render our lives consistent and comprehensible? It is precisely this pathology that N calls ‘nihilism’.

from Krzysztof Michalski's Flame of Eternity (one of the finest books on Nietzsche I've come across)

The English never get beyond their teenage glee at being able to drink. They go out in order to “get pissed”, and they “get pissed” in order to release pockets of emotion which, made ugly or maudlin by suppression, stink of mothballs or sour milk, and evaporate with first light.  The English hate anything which doesn’t return them to the prosaic and the everyday. Grand passions and intellectuals are automatically suspect. They live under the sign of Necessity: "What can you do?" they burble, "It's a funny old world". They permit themselves the sole freedom of mockery.  To a script written and edited by others, they make ironic additions in the margins. By deprecating their own existence and “not taking themselves too seriously,” they silently abstain from living. They relinquish control of their fate, placing it in the hands of a They about which they can cynically complain – "They are now saying butter is good for you, They’re saying it’s going to be the hottest summer for 400 years, They're introducing a new tax".. and so on.  The English vote without thinking it will make a difference, for only They are voting. Each English person thinks of their own vote as superfluous. Politically, the English are among the most passive in Europe if not the world; or, if they are roused to passion, it's to rail against foreign bodies that threaten the stolid familiarity of what exists. The English, with few exceptions, are a nation of sleepwalkers. The English may have a “good sense of humour” and a historic litany of  many comedians, satirists, ironists of the best mettle. Fine. But the forfeit they pay is intellectual castration. The critical impulse, the philosophical force of the Negative, which might once have fomented revolution or toppled the King, is instead turned on themselves, shrivelled  to mere carping and grumbling.  The regime’s faults are inevitable; such is the way of the world. Whereas the Gallic shrug says "who can tell?", the English shrug says "What can you do?" The former shrugs off the world to win a yard of freedom, the latter is an act of surrender. The laughter of the English is their measly consolation for a world beyond change. It is not the laughter of Joy, of surplus vitality, like a baby's laughter when it discovers a new trick, but the laughter of deficit, life’s perpetual deficit and defeat, life’s perpetual falling short. 

Mark Bowles, from Piccolo

When can started I was finished with free jazz. I was not satisfied, they were not satisfied with me. In free jazz, there was no future, everything was destroyed. Repetition was not allowed, but for me, repetition was one of the basic elements in music.  I prefer music where you think rhythmically in cycles … with a cyclical rhythm you cannot change it, you have to obey the rhythmical movement. You can change some things but you must keep the basic shape of that rhythm.

Jaki Liebezit of Can (RIP)

… the joy of Can: their openness, their attentiveness to one another, to conflict as well as communion, a channel for the very electric energy of life itself, in all its variegation, its unpredictability, but also, when ears were open and egos suppressed, its potential for a harmony of which life itself has fallen short. Can were not just a group but a way of being, a way indeed of living forever, an infinite organic continuum. Said Michael Karoli, three years before he died: The soul of the entire thing was not composed of our four or five souls but was a creature named Can. That is very important. And this creature, can made the music., When my hour comes, I’ll know that, apart from my children, I’ve helped create another living being.

from David Stubbs, Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany

… much of Mark’s work amounted to the expression of a single message: there is no private cure for your problems. That unease you feel, whether it’s just a lingering anxiety or a deep full-blown depression, is not something that can be cured by way of individualised therapies or just pursuing a successful career. It can only be addressed by knowing it for what it is and by building relationships around it and despite it which are more potent than the forces which produce it. It can only be treated in struggle. I suppose I would say this – the critique of individualism has always been my overriding philosophical obsession – but it was an absolutely central feature of Mark’s thinking. You are not an individual (and this is the putative title of yet another book that I promised Mark I would one day write). You are never alone. Even when you think you are, you aren’t – and social relations will define your ‘interior’ life just as much as any aspect of your being. Connect, engage, relate, create, not because these are nice things that humans and other nice creatures do, but because they are what life is, what becoming is, and they are what Capital does not want you to do.

Jeremy Gilbert, remembering Mark Fisher

People like Lou and I are probably predicting the end of an era … I mean that catastrophically. Any society that allows people like Lou and me to become rampant is pretty well lost. We’re both pretty mixed-up, paranoid people, absolute walking messes. If we’re the spearhead of anything, we’re not necessarily the spearhead of anything good.

David Bowie, Press conference 16 July 1972

The End of History, which is the Corporate global slogan, is not a prophecy, but an order to wipe out the past and what it has bequeathed everywhere. The market requires every consumer and employee to be massively alone in the present.

John Berger (RIP)

Who cares if you've read all of Hegel? 'Humanities' started sounding like a disease. 'All you people are capable of is carrying around a volume of Mandelstam'. Many unfamiliar horizons unfurled before us. The intelligentsia grew calamitously poor.

Out of habit, I would go into the used bookstore where the full two-hundred-volume sets of the World Classics Library and Library of Adventures now stood calmly, not flying off the shelves. Those orange bindings, the books that had once driven me mad. I'd stare at the spines and linger, inhaling their smell. Mountains of books! The intelligentsia were selling off their libraries. People had grown poor, of course, but it wasn't just for spare cash – ultimately books had disappointed them. People were disillusioned. It became rude to ask, 'What are you reading?' Too much about our lives had changed, and these weren't things you could read about in books. Russian novelists don't teach you how to become successful. How to get rich … Oblomov lies on his couch, Chekhov's protagonists drink tea and complain about their lives …

In the camp, my father met a lot of educated people. He never met people that interesting anywhere else. Some of them wrote poems; the ones who did were more likely to survive. Like the priests who would pray.

… I was already sick of all those conversations from constantly hearing them at home: communism, the meaning of life, the happiness of others … Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov … They weren't my idols – they were my mother's. The people who read books and dreamed of flying, like Chekhov's seagull, were replaced by those who didn't read but knew how to fly.

from Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time (my book of the year, for what it's worth)

Behold the world, that it is a thing wholly without substance, in which thou must place no trust.

All works pass away, take their end and are as if they never had been.

Arise, arise, put off thy stinking body, thy garment of clay, the fetter, the bond.

Woe, woe unto the shaper of my body, unto those who fettered my soul, and unto the rebels that enslaved me.

Have no regret, for this place in which thou dwellest, or this place is desolate … the works shall be wholly abandoned and shall not come together again.

I no longer have trust in anything in the world.

 

Thou hast taken the treasures of life and cast it onto the worthless earth.

As it entered the turbid water, the living water lamented and wept.

 

Who took the song of praise, broke it asunder and cast it thither and thither?

I have come to know myself and have gathered myself from everywhere.

 

The tribe of souls was transported here from the house of life.

Who has carried me into captivity away from my place and my abode, from the household of my parents who brought me up? Who brought me to the guilty ones, the songs of the vain dwelling? Who brought me to the rebels who make war day after day?

Who has thrown me into the suffering of the worlds, who has transported me into the evil darkness? So long I endured and dwelt in the world, so long I dwelt among the works of my hands.

 

You see, o child, through how many bodies [elements], how many ranks of demos, how many concatenations and revolutions of stars, we have to work our way in order to hastened to the one and only God.

 

What liberates is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, whereinto we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what birth is, and what rebirth.

 

Adam, behold the world, that is a thing wholly without substance in which though must place no trust. All works pass away, take their end and are as if they had never been.

Arise, arise Adam, put off thy stinking body, thy garment of day, the fetter, the bond … for thy time is come, thy measure is full, to depart from this world …

I sent a call out into the world: Let every man be watchful of himself. Whosoever is watchful of himself shall be saved from the devouring fire.

Have no regret, Adam, for this place in which thou dwellest, for this place is desolate … The works shall be wholly abandoned and shall not come together again.

 

From the day we beheld thee,

From the day when we heard thy word.

Our hearts were filled with peace.

We believe in thee, Good One,

We beheld thy light and shall not forget thee.

All our days we shall not forget thee,

Not one hour let thee from our hearts.

From various Gnostic texts, from Han's Jonas's Gnosticism

Giorgio Agamben said in an interview that 'thought is the courage of hopelessness' – an insight which is especially pertinent for our historical moment, when even the most pessimistic diagnosis as a rule finishes with an uplifting hint at some version of the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. The true courage is not to imagine an alternative, but to accept the consequences of the fact that there is no clearly discernible alternative: the dream of an alternative is a sign of theoretical cowardice, functioning as a fetish that prevents us from grasping the deadlock of our predicament. In short, the true courage is to admit that the light at the end of the tunnel is probably the headlight of another train approaching us from the opposite direction. 

Zizek, from Trouble in Paradise

To some extent we all come to terms with Genius, with what resides in us but does not belong to us. Each person’s character is engendered by the way he attempts to turn away from Genius, to flee from him. Genius, to the extent that he has been avoided and left unexpressed, inscribes a grimace on Ego’s face. An author’s style – like the grace displayed by any creature – depends less on his genius than on the part of him that is deprived of genius, his character. That is why when we love someone we actually love neither his genius nor his character (and even less his ego) but his special manner of evading both of these poles, his raid back and forth between genius and character.

Agamben

If humans cannot in any way experience the transmission of culture, then they are left like the angel, to helplessly watch the past accumulate while the continuum of linear time, the storm of progress, prevents them from finding the space of the present that would allow them to appropriate their own historicity, to deactivate the continual and automatic falling of their own potentiality into a small range of actualities that are delineated by the legal categories of will and necessity.

Adam Hillyer, The Disappearance of Literature