The publication of Awaiting Oblivion in the spring of 1962 occasioned great amazement, even for Blanchot’s staunchest supporters. The book, which had been written over nearly five years, mixes together fragments of narration, description, and commentary to such a degree that no one could identify the object being offered to readers. And yet Awaiting Oblivion remains a récit, with its location, duration, and characters; it belongs to the succession of récits begun by Death Sentence. Like each previous récit, it fulfills a contract in autofiction and furthers this previous line of research.1 What is therefore surprising—more obscurely perhaps—is the way it draws on this research so as to explode it, exploding not only the récit but its origin too, the place it “always already” opens to thought. “Suddenly, forgetting has always already been here” (45), Blanchot writes at the beginning of the second part. In a final Nietzschean gesture, this break at the origin of memory’s relation, the entretien, and love makes one free for the interplay of patience, attentiveness, listening, and the possibility of thought.2
We are presented with a hotel, a narrow, long room, a sofa, an armchair, a table, two windows, as in Èze, and a man and a woman who talk—sometimes distantly, sometimes wrapped around one another—without tiring. The man tries to uncover a secret that the woman has, a secret comparable with “the reserve of things in their latent state” (85), but that nonetheless does not belong to her, which she perhaps does not possess. The man is attentive, listening to the way oblivion allows this memory to be given space, but never does the woman recognize what he believes he can tell her about herself. Between them, successive movements of attraction and of withdrawal, advance and retreat, take place. We learn little by little that the two figures met well before this encounter, and that this presence of images from their past invades their memory, burdening their minds. What place can be given to this awareness? Is there any justification in believing that it can act as a foundation, or is it just another obstacle to the secret being told? As for the writer, who begins by putting down his pen (“he was obliged to stop,” 1), what will he be able to say or not say about it? How far is attention capable of piercing, sculpting, marking, supporting, caressing, nourishing oblivion? How far is awaiting capable of waiting for oblivion without its force causing it to disappear? What succinct, spare speech can still exist, still breathe without being forced to participate? How to access violence, tenderness, love, friendship? What is this entretien that contains everything and maintains nothing, if not the permanent possibility of an event that does not come about? How can its radicality, a point on which neither character gives any ground (this is their constancy, their seduction, their marvel), claim to open onto thought?
A natural extension of The Last Man and a critical reworking of the previous récits from which it borrows constantly, Awaiting Oblivion brings such questions together without organizing them, disperses them through the fragmentation of a language divided and unfolded in a thousand ways. In this way it interrogates the source of all possible utterance, the flux of previous narration, and the pertinence of its own thinking. The latter stretches the verisimilitude of the events recounted, causing a crisis for what Levinas named a “condensation in opposition to erosion” in order to see what remains of it: what remains of the encounter with the other, the other sex, how can this forgotten relation still give rise to speech, to thought?3 What is this constantly interrupted and yet unshakable duration? How do things stand with these depths of being, of which there is no better image than that of the two bodies together on the sofa and their untiring disinhibition, which is exquisite and yet almost atrophied? How do things stand with this intimacy, returning to its own source to better allow for writing, to allow for what makes writing possible? And how do they stand with what today makes it possible to comment on entretiens that stem from different intimacies, as well as being given over to entretiens on commentary? What of the infinite resource of the entretien’s fatigue, the exhausted breathing of a fragmentary thought clawed back from the violence of disaster, from long-standing misfortune?
Awaiting Oblivion provides a mode of access, still timid and yet already scandalous, to the dramaturgy of fragmentary writing, showing the very real effects of—and the distance traveled by—the previous récits. It takes up their discreet theatricality, elevates their vocal sensuality. The scenes and the characters had always moved from one text to another; now they are brought together in confrontation. Thus the feeling of nakedness produced by fascinating encounters, the fantastic callings, and the nocturnal appearance of bodies in doorways, the ability to resurrect by uttering a name, or the insistent repetition of “Come”; all of these are replayed identically, repeated intensely even as they are torn apart.4 The man and the woman are those of When the Time Comes; Claudia’s rough, seductive phrase “no one here wants to be connected to a story” is cited as the narrator remembers “words that had one day burst into his life” as an “almost faded memory that, nevertheless, continues to haunt him” (9).5 They are also the characters from The Last Man, which Awaiting Oblivion extends, almost like a serialization. The final words of the récit published in 1957 are a caesura of speech and give a feel of potential to the suspension they represent: “Later, he asked himself how he had entered the calm. . . .” “Later, he . . .”6 The same words are taken up here in a retrospective tone, the return to a previous event: “Later, he woke calmly, cautiously, facing the possibility that he had already forgotten everything” (45). This is done in such a way that this shared questioning seems to suggest that the same character is present, conversing with the same young woman who has returned from death, gone back to her final agonies (for like in Death Sentence, “the dead came back to life dying,” 28).
Thus the narrator attempts to listen in a condensed way to the other, to this woman with whom he shares his room more and more often, and thus also listens to the other women in the previous récits (but perhaps it was always the same one), as well as—ultimately—listening to his own experience as a narrator which has led him in turn to J., to N., to Judith and to Claudia, to the last man and his female friend, to his own companion. This listening is so condensed that it becomes a pure listening to the self, or to the very capacity to listen, a listening to one’s own listening, called into question by the presence of a partner who now does not stand apart from one, before ultimately being effaced. This listening is so condensed that it saturates one’s sense of suffocation, inviting speech to be constantly taken up again, breathlessly, with words and fragments. Doing so allows the pressure of dialogue to alternate with the repetitions of commentary, the dialogue becoming serious due to the light and rapid nature of the exchanges, the dizzying commentary adding layer upon layer of waiting as attentiveness (l’attente comme attention), and of attentiveness as “opening onto . . . the unexpected in all waiting” (21), so much so that it is barely tolerable and difficult to listen to, thus forcing the reader to return to a slow rhythm, deciphering these aphorisms as if they were poetry.7 If Bataille stated that he could not read The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom in one sitting, what reader would claim to be able to read Awaiting Oblivion without the breaths provided by the pauses (allowed for by the fragments)? The two works share the same ceaseless recitations, the same constant reworking of a limited vocabulary, the same almost technical but always poetic, rhythmic, sometimes incantatory language, the same infinite attentiveness to the other, to the other’s body and to what their memory can bear, sometimes the same violence in trying to learn a secret, the same infinite movement leading away from any mystical center (“the center as center is always intact,” 69). How, in this tension of listening and this saturation of respect, having nearly arrived by imposing one’s concern at the break from ethics, how “to act in such a way” that speech can come about? And what can the nature of this speech be, a speech “as if behind,” “a different utterance with which hers had almost nothing in common” (11). Can this speech of withdrawal and thus of creation even have a nature? “Act in such a way that I can speak to you”—the demand that provides the motif running throughout the récit—is repeated six times (10, 11, 11, 28, 43, 57), worn down until it is negated: “Act in such a way that I cannot speak to you” (82), with this last version throwing doubt on how it originated and on the space reserved for it. To what extent is it a command? And does it come from the site of speech or a site prior to speech? What tone would allow a body to speak it, a voice to utter it? Does such a tone even exist? Is it not open to all tones? Are these not the words that any woman, any being or any work could speak to those who—whether out of powerlessness, ignorance, or clumsiness—make listening their profession or their faith?
It is the major question asked of the writer; he is asked whether he knows in what “way” he would be able to respond to it. The récit is the most unsuitable format of all: its space is worn down, deficient if it excludes poetry (this had been Blanchot’s deep conviction since the beginning of the 1940s; he refers to it in the prière d’insérer written for Awaiting Oblivion).8 To be open to the poem is to be open to the space of the poem. As these two worlds meet, what is shared most of all is fragmentation. Blanchot quotes this phrase from René Char: “in the breakup of the universe that we experience, how prodigious! The pieces that come crashing down are living.”9 This phrase is something like the model for the literary event represented by Awaiting Oblivion, with the writing of these blocks that are juxtaposed even in the title, of these groups of nouns already seen in The Last Man, these fragments leading into fragments in a stifling way, ultimately giving way to the broken writing of the epilogue, where citations from the dialogues and from the narration finally fuse together in the entretien of commentary: “ ‘Face to face in this calm turning away.’—‘Not where she is or where he is, but between them.’—‘Between them, like this place, with its great staring look, the reserve of things in their latent state’ ” (85).10
Fragmentary writing gives tremendous new vitality to a speech that it does not allow to come about, but whose misfortune and secrecy it speaks to. It is the writing that almost breaks with ethics: that borders on indiscretion. It is indeed the space of thinking that opens up here, beyond any aesthetic laziness or cover-up, in its desire to know that goes as far as hatred,11 in the violence of nakedness,12 in the indiscreet attention to the other’s exhaustion (the other, which here meant the woman: “what an extraordinary state of weakness she was in,” 11). The two characters are armed with waiting as a possibility of thought and with oblivion as the interruption of it; they are confronted with a suddenly neutral space in which speech has rejected the categories of the visible and the invisible (it is nonetheless invisible, not because it has no appearance but in the manner of the gaze of a present body that blinds all sight, touching without touching); carried along on a nonknowledge that strips them of all knowledge, and yet they remain superior to this knowledge through the community of their understanding (“I do not know it,” says one, “Together we know it,” the other responds, 41).13 As an inheritance for writing, they bequeath the care they take in setting out their speech and in exposing how the folds of their memory allow for multiple strands of discourse. For instance, the monologue or dialogue sometimes appears in the narration; inversely, the latter sometimes features in the dialogue, voices come from all sides, condense spaces, superimpose different times, dispropriate one’s imaginary and divide people, creating a vast echo chamber in which attentiveness to the other’s body is constantly undermined by the void of possibility, by true oblivion. How then can we rely on such attentiveness? How can it be represented beginning with a point of suffering that often becomes empty, returns as eternally empty? The written word, that in literature which is always more, has the simple task of saying this, of indicating “the space of a different speech, always interrupted” (79); it is a silent word masking a secret piece of knowledge, refusing to shelter itself from the story, indicating the unknown power of whoever possesses it, making the relation of one to the other possible. The writing describes how this singular, extraordinary, decisive attentiveness to the other makes thought possible, beginning with this real movement whereby difference appears at the heart of proximity.14 The object of this abstract movement of writing is what is most concrete: nothing less than what makes it appear. “What you have written holds the secret” (37).
With the patient, untiring movement by which Samuel Beckett recognized himself in the words of Awaiting Oblivion, writing suddenly discovers its object through this infinite attention, this always improbable listening, this indiscretion of the exhausted woman.15 What she is still recounting by this stage, even as she seems to be about to stop, is the characters’ long death, “speaking instead of dying” (73), speaking in the very stead of dying, offering their fictitious bodies in order to allow the origin of thought to be exposed. A digging into thought by means of the entretien, in this way made possible by the récit, is palpable in the dialogues of the final pages which no longer set two fictional characters—the two characters of all Blanchot’s fiction—in opposition to one another, but instead the two characters of thought by whom they have been effaced. “Motionless, they went, and allowed to come, presence.—Which, however, does not come.—Which, however, has never yet come.—From which, however, all future comes.—In which, however, all presents disappear” (84). This rapidly developed power whereby thought moves by way of advances, confrontations, contradictions, jumps, returns, and steps-beyond, is enough to make one mad: a “madness par excellence,” a redoubling of strangeness through the alienation by the void that is created by disalienation to all stories (perhaps what Blanchot calls, in the prière d’insérer, “a certain rupture of internal linkages”). However, this final movement of Blanchotian narration opens on to a new adventure of the cogito, which should now be conjugated in the neuter or the plural; it opens on to an eidetic reduction where oblivion remains (“being is yet another word for forgetting”) as the endless guarantor of thought’s fragmentation, as the unceasing demand to think this fragmentation of thought (for “the other” is another name for oblivion).
The characters’ disappearance into oblivion is their true gift to thought. Such is the movement of this research, returning to an extreme state of vigilance thanks to the friendships it has had (let us cite here Levinas, Bataille, Antelme, all three of whom are present in the new indiscretion that the rupture of history has imposed on thought). “Ask[ing] so calmly to do the impossible” (44); such was the ethical demand imposed on the violence and gentleness of thought. At this time Blanchot can think only of bringing it back to the play of friendship from which he had taken it, of giving it form through collective writing. This latter put into play the infinite attentiveness demanded by history’s dead-end, the rupture of time, the rifts in the real. “No stories, never again”: The prophecy, if you will, of The Madness of the Day has now been fulfilled. The récit can now only find a meaning by losing its singularity, by allowing itself to carry the fragmentary, international, collective demand of the Review, of its columns: All that remains is for it to be the récit of thought.
In this sense, Awaiting Oblivion is the most sublime “preparatory text” ever written for the International Review. It matters little whether its form was decided upon before or after the project began. The necessity of opening speech to a violent, indiscreet, clear-eyed intelligibility, in the gentleness of friendship and the terror of what is most literary, responds to the development of Blanchot’s thought. “It is gentle and attractive, it attracts one constantly” (80). “It”: this understanding beyond all understanding, this oblivion of everything except the movement for equality. Blanchot’s research had arrived at this point by making the characters of his thought bear this demand: “As if their words were searching for the level where, even with each other, they would allow to be established between them the silent evenness, the one that comes to light in the end” (80). It was this provisional point of arrival that he allowed to speak through the dedications he wrote in Awaiting Oblivion for his closest friends. To Bataille: “Thinking of the goal that we share”; to Mascolo: “Thinking of all that we share”; to Antelme: “The vestiges of a journey, the premises of a speaking.” One day, this speech of equality would rise up.16