The narratives aside, The Step Not Beyond was Blanchot’s first work that, on publication, was composed mainly of new texts. When it came out in fall 1973, it produced great astonishment among its readers, if only due to its form. Yet Blanchot had been repeating since 1969 the impressions made by this pas—a step, a negation, a passing-away, impressions without any transcendence except the undialectical one of the wholly other.1 These impressions were made in a temporality outside time, withdrawn from the present and inscribing the return of what never was, what would only ever occur through exposure, through the vacuity of the subject; this temporality could only be written through traces that were immediately erased. This first fragmentary book still addresses inner experience, a mass of inner experiences that in their fragmentation are foreign to themselves and, due to their natures, to the time in which they take place. This return to the disorder of what is torn apart, to the truth of impossible witnessing, breaks any links to the récit and, in this nonfictional(or not only fictional) exposition of thought, gives rise to Blanchot’s first noncritical, nonfictional work. This speaks volumes to the movement that this author gives his work after 1968 in order to remain faithful (at a distance) to the demand for anonymous tutoiement, for the unworking of authority, thus remaining as close as possible—even in apparent solitude—to rupture, and as far away as possible from fruitless wandering. Everyday decisions and the sheer chance of existence also have their part in this thoughtful writing, which represents a mise-en-abyme in the body of life.
This concern for fidelity, this permanent quality of a thinking carried out in the name of the other, the life of this thinking which ends up pushing one to extremes, to the point of irreducibility and invisibility, this attention to the wholly other: None of these can find a place in another “author’s book,” at this time when the only meaning to be found in individual authority is in denying it, and opening it up to anonymous community. In 1969, as he is about to publish the longest book of his lifetime, The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot gives himself over to the movement of writing’s exteriority, which, beyond all the possibilities of transgression, puts his name to his past body of work by taking on its authority and responsibility for it, but also prevents it being straightforwardly attributed to him as an individual thinker. He is careful to indicate, in a final note, that the texts collected in this volume are already old, “for the most part written between 1953 and 1965”: in doing so, he sets their author at a distance and underscores, however vain it is to do so, the welcome that the movement of writing extends to the “fictitious partners” of thought.2 The fact that there are many texts and that they are diverse assists in this process; criticism’s desire leads it to take on the forms of the entretien, the dialogue, the fragment. Any additions Blanchot makes to the preexisting articles comes in the form of short italicized texts named “Parentheses” and which, shifting the commentaries from their critical role, repeatedly throw the work off center. He also writes, a year and a half after the apparently final text, a last piece glorifying “the absence of the book,” “the attraction of (pure) exteriority,” “the exteriority of saying-between” that the Law has not given up on.3 He makes space for some notes, like the two that close the volume, displacing critical homages in the name of the other, and moving toward what, in each individual author, meets the nameless name of what is wholly other: Thus, the texts of The Infinite Conversation do not belong to any subject, any critical subject or any object of criticism, but to what within them touches on the “lack of a name” or on the “nearly anonymous.”4 Almost as if it were a treatise—though this “almost” is important—criticism takes to the streets; to follow the metaphor of The Step Not Beyond, it plays out in the city. Blanchot declares that the movement that attempts to gain exemption from the order of unitary discourse is fully possible, and opens to what he once named the “Course of Things.” This movement is separated from any faith in immediacy by the book’s status as a site of knowledge that is also open to nonknowledge; it traces something like the embodied future of writing in a disseminated, although sometimes gathered, community. Blanchot imposes on his public existence as a subject this same step beyond the law as a repeated decentering.
The “step (not) beyond’ therefore refers both to a movement of rewriting and of publication, a way of leaving behind a situation in which one can be trapped by the struggle for the possible, even when it is carried out in the name of the impossible. This is a new disengagement seeking a new way of engaging. From 1969 on, Blanchot would again dedicate himself to literature, even as he set himself the task of setting it free by intensely playing with and displacing genre: publishing books and denouncing the book, returning to the work in order to reaffirm its worklessness. There are few entirely new texts, although such fragments confirm that his thought is advancing, albeit only every few months (on average, in the years up to 1973, Blanchot published only two new texts per year).5 And yet almost a hundred articles had been published in the space of two years, from fall 1969 for The Infinite Conversation to fall 1971 with Friendship. However much they were criticized for their encyclopedic effect and their show of authority, these books add to Blanchot’s work, giving it a new form, sometimes referred to as revolutionary: that of completion. From 1970 on, Blanchot’s novels and récits were gradually reprinted, but he continued firmly to oppose Robert Gallimard’s suggestion that they be grouped together in a single volume. Thus a few months before the publication of Friendship, in spring 1971, Thomas the Obscure, The Last Man, and Death Sentence were simultaneously reprinted. But this movement recognizing the work was met by its author, who abdicated a certain form of sovereignty. In the reprint of Death Sentence, Blanchot removes the reference below the title to its status as récit; he also removes the final page of the text that, separated from the main body of text, superimposes the voice of someone who is implicitly the author, challenging the reader to escape the trap that has been laid in the récit. Not providing the book with any future, interrupting any assurance that might have been found in solitude, Blanchot delivers the author’s voice, in a sentiment of nakedness and weakness, unto the presence of a reader that he can no longer define as his “prey,” but as his invisible and fictitious partner, he who, as he said twenty-three years earlier, “in the darkness, would see me.”6 Last, in February 1973 another récit, largely unknown because it had been published in 1949 in a journal, was published by Bruno Roy on the suggestion of Roger Laporte, with a frontispiece by Bram Van Velde: The Madness of the Day. No modifications were made, except that it now had a title. The last line of the récit announces, belatedly and not unparadoxically, that it is the final one: “No. No stories, never again.”7 (This publication also announces, at the very moment when Blanchot is again withdrawing, a movement of autobiographical secretion within the work: something is secreted while still being kept secret.)
Thus gathered together, acknowledged, denounced, republished, modified, retitled, the text attempts to free itself of any rootedness in the sedentary nature of books (“only the nomadic affirmation remains”).8 It appears against a backdrop of silence, it is torn away from—or a fragment of—forbidding absence. It is its author’s public manifestation, and the dispersed form it takes upon publication refers back to the demand of return. The disseminated variety of languages would never be as marked or as panicked in their rhythm as in a book such as The Step Not Beyond; the few sections of it published beforehand allow us to follow its genesis and to emphasize how exceptional it is. Blanchot wrote its first passages in a text published in homage to Jean Paulhan in May 1969, formulating what would become the title, but was still—being between dashes—a way of referring to overcoming the possibilities prescribed by the law: That is to say, the title is a way of referring to transgression.9 In one of Friendship’s few texts not to have been previously published, and in scare quotes as if to announce that the author is particularly concerned with the term and the work it carries out in the margins, the “step (not) beyond” still refers to transgression, but insofar as it “is always incomplete and always allows itself to be thwarted further still because incompletion is its only mode of affirmation.”10 Meanwhile, two extracts from the future book had appeared in journals; “The Exigency of Return” and “Fragmentary Pieces” (Fragmentaires) bore witness to how the research they flowed from was advancing, if only by way of their titles, the way they are set out, their form. The next extracts, very short ones, would only appear in December 1972. None of these pieces sets out its statements in the complex manner of The Step Not Beyond, which constantly splices together narrative speech and the discourse that—beyond the obvious division of the fragments into those in italics and those in roman type—initially seems to associate some with the récit and others with commentary, only to offer different declensions of language and different attributions of the voices. The different modes of speech are made to flow into one another (commentary into entretien, fictitious récit into discourse), suspending any preeminence of one language over another and preventing the work from presenting itself as a spectacular literary event within narrative, just as it neutralizes any pretention of the critical work toward spoken monologue. The lines become blurred instead of the dialogues progressively illuminating meaning, these being dialogues in which no particular standpoints can be identified, and in which opinions and values are constantly switched. The neutral layout of the fragment takes to its extreme the fragmentary demand that refuses to align with the dogmatism of aphorisms or the moralism of the nicely turned phrase. It constantly sets aside any self-recognition by language, makes the surfaces of its narratives uneven, with fragments that always seem to be simply present, without justification. The authority of all speech is diffracted, withdrawn from the historical grasp of the negative, and the disquiet, irritation, and misfortune of the everyday is transposed into a different type of journal, one open to welcoming, to listening, and to using any speech it can in the name of seeking what is wholly other.11 This “step beyond” serenity does not submit thought to misfortune (which would be to return to the historicity of “unhappy consciousness”); instead misfortune is given over to the possibility of thought, the unfulfillable demand for the impossible as the condition absolutely necessary for thought’s exercise.12
Thus following the rhythm of the days over four years, torn away from the life and the becoming of the work, and demonstrating the latter’s radical independence, the fragments of The Step Not Beyond appear like notes taken for a journal fictitiously written in the neuter. Blanchot sets out something like a governing agreement in the first pages: “If I write he, in denunciation rather than in reference and far from giving him a rank, role or presence which would elevate him above whatever might signal toward him, it is I who thereby enter into the relation where I agrees to adopt a static fictional or functional identity” (4).
“He” (il) is the neuter, which does not refer but allows itself to be referred to, does not occupy any position of oversight but instead welcomes the mobile workings of the subject. As a “partner” in “play,” in Blanchot’s words, this “he” become a noun as the grammatical partner of writing provides—in the name of anonymity—the history of a subject in terms of its relation to transgression and the law. It is also referred to as an “inhospitable host” (37), the clandestine partner of what is most personal for us. “He” prevents the passion of the relation engendered by desire or fear being amalgamated into the self. Feeling that there is no hope of unifying one’s existence, or even of explaining what makes it so varied, something in this book nonetheless recognizes the biographical. First of all, the “he” serves to withdraw the subject from any statement that would confirm a straightforward chain of events, instead offering the only grammatical trace accounting for the strangeness of the fictional subject, that subject that is withdrawn from life, from others and from itself in the violent intimacy of the “primal scene,” that is alone facing the “opening of the sky,” and then in the blinding light of the “primal scene” of writing, in which not only is the writer’s work inaugurated but—after years of wandering—the underlying possibility of that work as well (“Thomas sat down and looked at the sea”).13 These two secret moments, which are not present in the opening text of The Step Not Beyond on its first appearance in L’Arc, interrupt it like a parenthesis in the book version: “Whence comes this power to uproot, to destroy or change, in the first words written facing the sky, in the solitude of the sky, words by themselves without prospect or pretense: ‘he—the sea’?” (1). In a sequence of fragments that exemplifies the constantly varying utterances throughout the collection, second-person narration holds sway over the autobiographical turn to the birth of the writer, to his expulsion from the family milieu and paternal order:
Writing as the question of writing, a question that bears writing that bears the question, no longer allows you this relation to being—understood first as tradition, order, certainty, truth, all forms of root-edness—which one day you received from worlds past, a domain that you were called to administer the better to strengthen your “Ego” [Moi], even though it had as it were cracked open, the day the sky opened onto its emptiness. (2)
Here the mysterious strength of the movement of writing is what is most at issue, over and above the question of the origin, and without any description of the scene of the opening of the sky that The Writing of the Disaster would address a few years later. Blanchot makes the concession of one of the few strictly autobiographical passages in his work, albeit one rigorously without references, to this “step (not) beyond” whose authority he underscores: “I will try in vain in represent to myself he whom I was not and who, without wanting to, began to write, writing (and knowing it then) in such a way that the pure product of doing nothing was introduced into the world and into his world” (2).
Here and there in the book we encounter the room in Èze, the pane of glass from The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me, the study of The Infinite Conversation.14 The Step Not Beyond imposes on them a recognition of the biographical that is sometimes allusive, sometimes literary, but always draws on friendship and on reservedness. This is because however confidential they are, events, objects, and places only ever refer back to language. The discretion that Blanchot imposes even on those closest to him means that he allows them no recognition except in the realm of the imaginary. Fragmentary writing demands that everyone accept the vacuity of images. “Let us enter into this relation,” the first fragment proposes, the only one that is not preceded by the lozenge-shaped sign. The existence of this relation is signaled by this mark’s absence on this occasion, in this preamble destined to disappear, and signaling within all affirmations of life the slipperiness of death, the neutral version of the image, the exposition of the cadaver. From the unwritten autobiography—which had already forced writing to the demand of more than one return—the “journal” of the 1970s retains what, given the precariousness of Blanchot’s health, thought is forced to call a “last thought” (1).
Between 1970 and 1973, Blanchot experienced various further health scares, including a serious hospitalization that would ultimately force him to leave the Rue Madame in order to follow his brother René and his sister-in-law Anna, who were now living in a house in a small town in the suburbs outside Paris.15 While he still sometimes went to Quain or Èze, when his health was bad, he returned more frequently to the suburbs. From 1970 on, he had to give up seeing most of his friends regularly, and, mortified, he wrote to them to say how much he regretted this; Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Roger Laporte would never see him again. At his brother’s request he spent several weeks with him in Marrakech in January 1971, but rarely left the Mamounia Hotel, the comfortable residence where they were staying, which made him fear that he was slipping into laziness and therefore—he added with humor—might end up like Raymond Roussel. A year later, in January 1972, those close to him received letters that he had written consecutively, and that took the tone of a last will and testament, taking as their witness the grace that had allowed him to meet them and that had therefore made his existence a happy one (to the point of the “last thought,” as the opening of The Step Not Beyond would say, 1). By the spring, however, he thought he would be able to return to Paris. He had to move out of the apartment in the Rue Madame, which was on a high floor and had no elevator. He quickly found a new place to live in the Rue Jean-Bart, which was close to his previous address; the old apartment had been neglected for several years and after being renovated, served as a pied-à-terre for René and Anna. He moved into his new dwellings in the summer, rather secretively, only giving his address and telephone number to his closest friends, although he was happy to do so in such cases. He even considered seeking a second job with Gallimard to help him with the rather high costs of the new apartment. It would mainly serve him as a pied-à-terre in Paris: from the end of this year, or at the latest from early 1973, Blanchot went to his brother’s house in the suburbs more and more often. There he spent long weekends, which would eventually become long years.16
“The more he shuts himself away, the more he says that he belongs to the Outside” (102). The movement of withdrawal, which is both inexorable and contested, is therefore also behind the repetitive nature of fragmentary speech, it is the expression given to the pace [pas] marking dying’s incomplete and arrhythmical work, “like a beating heart whose every beat would be illicit, unnumbered” (96). It is not a new demand in Blanchot’s work for writing to have to escape death’s ubiquity; but here it has to escape Dying itself, the substantivization of the dying that had for a long time been set in opposition to the pure transcendence of death.
Dying, in the discretion that is attributed to this word while it is distinguished from the obviousness and the visibility of death, in its turn becomes extremely visible, like an entity (Dying) hiding its capitalized form that illness and ageing help us—as if thanks to a reagent or to being heated up: as if thanks to the fever of life—to reveal. Dying of an illness or old age, we do not just die ill or old, but deprived of or frustrated by what seems to be secret in dying itself: we are thus reduced to not dying. (98)
The everyday anguish of the early 1970s surfaces in the writing (in 1973, Blanchot was sixty-six years old); in so doing it, also staves off any dissolution, any shying-away from anxiety, any acceptance of “dying,” a concept that too often became synonymous with the simple, visible decline of the body. “Dying” has to be denied if the rigor of the movement of separation is to continue, that movement that—even in an empty anguish sometimes touching absolute absence (an invisible but tenacious form of paralysis)—preserves death from any possibility of being thought. For several years already Blanchot had been calling this emptiness fatigue or weakness. “Weak thoughts, weak desire: he felt their force” (3). Writing attempts to inhabit this force—it attempts to inhabit it, in an everyday way, as its subject, for “on the far side of weakness” the bottomless nature of exhaustion has an ultimate resource, an ethically charged one: through an infinite emptying-out movement it infinitely heightens its attentiveness to the slightest gesture of the other.17 One voice says to the other:
“You are not yet at the limit, nor impaired enough, still having and being, nor vulnerable enough, not reaching the point of passivity in which the other would tack toward you without you being an attack on the other, nor plaintive enough for your cry to carry the plea of all to all.”
The other responds: “I know, I still exist too much, via a too-little that is too much” (131).
This demand for humility is held in a secret, immanent cache for speech, desire, and encounters (9–10). None of these three precedes the others, and each escapes the others. For Blanchot, the passive ground of attentiveness opens onto ways of imagining the broadest virtual qualities of the space of community: that which proposes and fixes, although without any axis or center, fragmentary writing. (Indeed, there could be no fear of fixing it in one place, when such a fixing would allow it to be glimpsed but nothing more, when through the dance of the text’s italics or through the emptiness of its interstices, it shows the reader its slightest movement, its slightest vibration.) The writing at hand sets out to create a space of waves, of returns and inversions, a space less visible than musical.18 In this sense, the constant irritation provoked by paradoxically inverted phrases only inscribes an openness to what is hidden about the other, something to which the infinite attention enabled by weakness is attentive. The journal of dying is inscribed between these two poles: the possibility of the relation to the other maintained by analysis’s constant to-and-fro, and the impossibility of any trace of this being written without vanishing.19 If “writing is only written at the limit of writing” (57), it is because writing is destined to repeat itself, to erase the marks it has made, to remain the only erasable mark. “Everything must be effaced, everything will be effaced. It is in accordance with the infinite demand of effacement that writing takes place and takes its place” (53).
Such an “accordance” is not without fear. It is even in this fear, conceived of as a dead organ that is part of a broader flesh (language), that one can find the extreme difficulty of the demand of writing; a difficulty linked to its atheist foundations. “Fear is a piece of language, something that it would have lost and that would make it entirely dependent on this dead section” (59). Occupying the invisible place of absent divinity, an absence of divinity only present in fragmented language and depriving that language of any salvation, piercing it even when given over to it, fear is inevitably found “on the far side of weakness,” as the condition on which thinking can be carried out. This is an absolute fear that disarms all hope, eradicates all beliefs (however nihilistic they might be). This fear is not the fear of the philosopher, that which gives up on confronting fear. It opens the domain of the impossible to an endlessly repeated necessity for effacement (in the sense that the latter cannot not take place, even if it has to erase singularity). It constrains the possible to the following reading: “That the fact of the concentration camps, the extermination of the Jews and the death camps where death carries out its work are for history an absolute which has interrupted history: this one must say without however being able to say anything else”20 (114). This means that fear makes it all the more necessary not to abandon attentiveness and concern.
“The most serious of idolatries: to take into account that which does not take into account” (134). And the most serious not-taking-into-account is that of fear, that of the fear deep down in those who show no fear. Such is the inflexible limit that Blanchot would henceforth place on all thinking of misfortune. Consideration of the “dark, ruined sovereignty” of the other afflicted by the misfortune of the camps (125) finds here, after the article on Robert Antelme’s Human Race and after the more recent text written in response to a Polish magazine’s investigation into war and literature, its first major expression.21 Various passages in The Step Not Beyond explicitly refer to “the roll-call in the camps” (38), to “the horror of the death camps, of those dying by the thousands” who were tragically condemned to feel guilty for their deaths, “to die of the very abjection of death” (96–97), to feel the ruin of all presence, even the presence of friendship (114).
Concern for this limit would now constantly preoccupy Blanchot because “the gravest of idolatries” had appeared where he could never have imagined it: at the heart of the political group he belonged to. The anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian positions adopted by intellectuals of the far left, which inevitably became more radical in September 1970 (“Black September”) when royal troops expelled Yasser Arafat’s organization from Jordan, led to an immediate rupture. For while he did not overtly defend Zionism, Blanchot was unable to tolerate what he saw as a de facto alliance between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, an alliance built on ignorance, lack of awareness, or disowning. On several occasions Emmanuel Levinas would bear witness to this rupture, notably by publishing a letter that he would only later reveal had been sent to him by Blanchot.22 The letter asks: “Isn’t this a strange reversal, which proves that the absence of anti-Semitism is not enough?” This is said to be a reversal, or a rather a perversion, of the words of May: “We are all German Jews.” For these “young people who are acting violently, but also with generosity” were the same, spontaneously identifying with the fate of a community that was a victim of genocide, but without having “any idea of what anti-Semitism was and is.” Blanchot’s reasoning is paradoxical; he tries to demonstrate that such arguments do not stand up, refuses to see anti-Zionism as “the anti-Semitism of today” and yet also denounces “a perhaps innocent ignorance, but one that is henceforth gravely responsible and deprived of innocence.” His reasoning is persistent, refusing to follow “those who are completely ignorant of what it is to be Jewish” and using the same objection to them that Sartre and others had used in the 1960s. Last, his is a reasoning that initiates a “last thought” (1), a concern to be vigilant over anti-Semitism that would preoccupy him for long years to come, with the name of Auschwitz as an “absolute” of history, as its erasure, as its interruption, instead of what he had been calling, since the International Review—its suspension.23
The Step Not Beyond therefore touches on the absolute of all political, community, historical reflection, becoming its fragmentary echo. It inscribes the “line drawn through” the Committee as the final limit of what is tolerable, instead and on the reverse of which affirmation and refusal can take place.24 It continues the reflections of May 1968 on the relative quality of all forms of possible transgression. It unmasks all the ways in which an authority or a power can profit from the activities of a group.
We are not taken in by the present that would make us believe we had any authority or exercised any influence, and still less are we taken in by the past, and still less again presumptuous of any future. We see right through the impersonal responsibility claimed by groups affirming, secretly or directly, the right of some to lead in aggrandizing their name with that of a group. (36)
The book’s allusions remain anonymous but for Blanchot also represent a way of drawing a line, a line to follow in one’s approach giving over “the acts of the day” to the fragmentary, which is constantly being thought in relation to the “absolute” of history. They therefore leave a trace of the disagreements that marked these years, from the break with the Committee and the refusal of anti-Zionism to his irritation over the ways in which the names of Artaud, Bataille, and Breton were being reappropriated, in quarrels over intellectual inheritance that were in full flow, by the groups led by Philippe Sollers and by Jean-Pierre Faye.25 Blanchot seems to regret having left, for health reasons, the committee charged with publishing the Complete Works of Georges Bataille.26 However, he would not follow Dionys Mascolo in his project for a declaration denouncing such abuse of names and works that should have been placed far out of the reach of such political or literary instrumentalizations; this was because he refused to see himself as representing any authority over these works or these names.27 Letting the name of the other play itself out, letting the works of the other take their course; such are the risks of the way writing evolves, and they do not allow for writing to be reduced to a manifesto ultimately coextensive with strategic positioning only meaningful in the political arena of the possible. The writing of The Step Not Beyond would be faithful to the demand for the impossible, contrasting on the one hand the breakup of political discourse and of literary strategy, and on the other its own fragmentary demand. In its narrative—even poetic—passages, its shards represent Blanchot’s political itinerary, the itinerary of that subject doomed to traverse “the city,” to frequent the silent members of a dispersed community, to traverse in the words of a detached fragment that functions almost as free verse: “the eternal, straight streets, under an erased sky” (80). This writing bids farewell to the memory of the possible (“I crossed [the City] as one passes distractedly over the graves in a cemetery,” 83), also chiming with its most personal or secret manifestation, like in the dream that Blanchot spoke of in a letter to Dionys Mascolo and to which he now returns: “At night, dreams of death in which one does not know who is dying: all, all those who are threatened by death—and oneself, into the bargain” (115). This “oneself” is now caught in a fracturing of the political that Blanchot is tempted to carry—to the limit.
The space of the récit is invaded by the thought of misfortune. The fictitious room able to include the entire city now also includes the space of the camps, “the crumbled city”: “All around, there were men who seemed to be sleeping, lying on the ground, blankets thrown over them like earth is thrown into a pile, and these innumerable little knolls, thoughts of the crumbled city, were leveled out until they became the bare floorboards of the room” (112). Such poetic attention to a community space traversed by war was already at hand in the “récit” published in 1949, which had been reprinted a few months before The Step Not Beyond as The Madness of the Day. The aphasic impossibility of avowal, the then-affirmed and now-fragmented absence of any possibility of narrative, the blinding (through glass crushed into the narrator’s eyes) that prophetically withdraws the present and authorizes a completely different type of gaze, one of speech where speaking goes beyond seeing: through all of these the wind of the most despairing madness, the dominion of the most unbearable impersonal hell takes priority over any serene acceptance of tragedy. There are some memories of this “mad writing” (22), ratcheting up its own patience, in The Step Not Beyond. This atmosphere of madness again surrounds Blanchot during these years when dying is less than fully present and yet not entirely absent, and repeatedly justifies the move toward the limits (of interruption, of fragmentation) over the writing of attentiveness and of misfortune. This madness is the parenthesis of the “new reason,” the externality of return, the empty reiteration of the absolute of history. Madness is the poetry of those who are the “last to speak.”
It is not wholly unrelated that Blanchot’s most silent and maddest text of these years addressed Paul Celan. On April 20, 1970, Celan had joined the “unknown girl” whose portrait always hung in Èze: in the Seine. Shortly following the thirtieth anniversary of the death of his parents during the deportations, Celan’s suicide shocked Blanchot. The Step Not Beyond resonates with the echo of May 1970, when the body was searched for at length and then finally identified. The fragments further inflect the reflections in The Space of Literature on suicide, especially its characteristics of indiscretion and impossibility, which give it a double meaning on which, in the words of The Step Not Beyond, “nobody has the power to pass judgment” (123; see also 97–98). Thus indiscretion with regard to those who have exhausted possibility becomes a Blanchotian figure of friendship touching the poet-suicide precisely where he had refused the patience of dying. Through discreet anonymity, the figure of Paul Celan must be seen as one of the possible interlocutors of the entretiens of friendship that run throughout the book, of these dialogues between two who are “the last to speak” (92–93). The last to speak: Blanchot takes this formulation from Celan’s poem, demonstrating how much they share in terms of the exhaustion of speech, and uses it as the title for a 1972 homage to him in the Revue de Belles-lettres in the form of a commentary that he would turn into a book twelve years later. This commentary stands out in Blanchot’s critical work, abolishing as if definitively the analytical format and instead presenting itself as an entretien within friendship, in the now-convergent, now-divergent friendship of two voices.28 Like a collection of epigraphs or epitaphs, Celan’s verses are cited sometimes in detached form, sometimes intermingled with the words hearing and translating them in an infinite attentiveness to their resonances, to their “shrill sound beyond what can become song,” at the limit that they constantly cross in the other’s language, that of the attackers, that of fear.29 Friendship alone attests to the lack of witnesses for death (or for madness) and in this lack, which it does not accompany, it dictates the law of separation. If self and language are indeed being destroyed, as Celan’s critics have often tried to argue, then this never takes place without preserving otherness: such is the ethics of witnessing that Blanchot reads in this poetry.
“The responsibility of and for friendship” henceforth irreducibly inflects Blanchot’s critical writing, his writing in the name of the other. Such a situation, which flows from a politics of writing, is decisive for the years of accompaniment and rupture that followed the moment that Blanchot would continue to name simply as the month of May. And thus even the decision to publish was submitted to friendship. This was the case in terms of who the texts were addressed to: of the few articles between 1969 and 1973, three were given to Louis-René des Forêts for L’Ephémère and one to Maurice Nadeau for La Quinzaine Littéraire.30 It was also the case concerning the gift that publication could offer: “The Exigency of Return” was dedicated to Pierre Klossowski, “The Last to Speak” to Henri Michaux.31 And it was also the case in terms of the subjects chosen: all the texts concern friends, either as part of a collective homage (Celan, Jabès, Merleau-Ponty, Parain, Paulhan) or as a commentary on their latest book (Duras). None of the articles published goes without one or another of these relations to friendship. Beyond their persons—far from the exile into which he must have been considering withdrawing at this time—it is to the friendship in his friends that Blanchot addresses each of his texts, like faraway speech. Friendship is also part of this movement of confronting the absolute: “Friendship: friendship for the unknown without friends” (133). It is made more important by each death, each withdrawal of a friend, thus moving ever closer, beyond all separation, to wholeness. Blanchot used a passage from his letters of January 1972 here, in another parenthesis: “(In the night that is coming, let those who have been united and who are effaced not feel this effacement as an injury that they would inflict on one another)” (137).
These penultimate lines of The Step Not Beyond have the ring of an epitaph. For almost a year and a half, Blanchot would dwell in silence.