1. L’Arrét de mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), trans. Lydia Davis under the title Death Sentence (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1978).
2. This definition recalls Heidegger’s alèthéia, in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” for example. In The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot ponders the word alèthéia, its possible etymologies and meaning.
3. Michel Foucault, in “La Pensée du dehors,” Critique, no. 229 (June 1966), was the first to emphasize the interiorlessness of Blanchot’s writing, and the implications of his term le dehors.
4. L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), trans. Ann Smock as The Space of Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). Readers approaching Blanchot for the first time might wish to look at the general introduction to his work provided as a preface to the 1982 translation.
5. L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).
1. “Not so much what we undergo, as that which goes under” is my translation for le subissement, the word Blanchot supplies lest we misunderstand the word “suffering” (souffrance), and which he forms from subir (“to undergo, to suffer”). Blanchot writes: “‘Est-ce que tu as souffert pour la connaissance?’ Cela nous est demandé par Nietzsche, à condition que nous ne nous méprenions pas sur le mot souffrance: le subissement, le ‘pas’ du tout à fait passif en retrait par rapport à toute vue, tout connaître.” —TR.
2. Simone Weil.—TR.
3. The French word I have translated as “title” is surnom, which Blanchot hyphenates, sur-nom, thus emphasizing the prefix, which recurs in survie, “survival.” —TR.
4. “The uneventfulness of the neutral wherein the lines not traced retreat” is my elaboration upon Blanchot’s expression “le désoeuvrement du neutre.” Le désoeuvrment is a word Blanchot has long used in close association with l’oeuvre (the work of art, of literature). It means the work as the work’s lack—the work as unmindful of being or not being, as neither present nor absent: neutral. It also means idleness, inertia. My word “uneventfulness” tries to express this idea of inaction, of nothing’s happening, and my additional phrase “the lines not traced retreat,” recalling an earlier expression in this book, “the retreat of what never has been treated,” seeks to retain the relation which this fragment is evoking and which is, so to speak, spelled out in the word désoeuvrement: the relation between the work and its denial. Between writing and passivity, between being and not being a writer, being and not being the subject of the verb “to write.” —TR.
5. Blanchot writes: “Dans le rapport de moi (le même)à Autrui….” Thus he makes explicit that the relation of self to others (of subject to the Other) is also the relation of identity to otherness, or of sameness to difference. He is able to suggest this implicitly in many other passages because the expression for “myself” is moi-même in French. When he speaks, as in the fragment following this one, of my being the same by virtue of my relation to the other (“It is through the other that I am the same”), the fact that being myself in French is being moi-meme makes the expression “I am the same” less strained than it is in English. Blanchot’s sentences consistently recall that to be yourself is to be identical: self-same, one might say in English. But his point is always that there is no such sameness, no such identity except through the (disastrous) relation to otherness: no identity, in other words, save by virtue of its ruination. —TR.
6. In French, “guilty” is coupable, and le coup is a blow. So innocent guilt (i.e., responsibility) is the endurance of a blow whose -able has been blown up: its ability to be inflicted, its ability to be borne. —TR.
7. Blanchot’s brackets. —TR.
8. A note added subsequently, lest the ambiguity here exceed what is called for: I say “eternal philosophy” in the sense that there is in Levinas no spectacular break with the language called “Greek,” wherein the principle of universality is preserved. But what is pronounced, or rather announced, with Levinas is a surplus: something beyond the universal, a singularity which can be called Jewish and which waits to keep on being thought. Prophetic in this respect. Judaism, as that which exceeds all that has ever been thought because it has ever been thought already, and which nevertheless bears the responsibility for thought yet to come: this is what gives us the other philosophy of Levinas, a burden and a hope, the burden of hope.
9. Blanchot actually wrote: “[La] responsabilité … me donne à répondre … de l’impossibilité d’être responsable, à laquelle cette responsabilité sans mesure m’a toujours déjà voué en me dévouant et me dévouant” (my emphasis). —TR.
10. Blanchot writes “l’un travaillant, l’autre désoeuvrant.” TR.
11. This fragment displays several effects in French (besides the echo passing back and forth among “turn,” “overturn,” “return,” “detour,” and from this group to “catastrophic” and back) that are lost in my translation: the trancelike motionlessness of the fall is called “l’immobilité d’une mouvance”; where I say “deficiency,” Blanchot writes déception, rhyming with exception: “La déception ne laisse pass l’exception se reposer dans la hauteur … l’exception échappe, la déception dérobe.”—TR.
12. “In answer to the entreaty which strips and flays me and destroys my ability to answer” is my translation of “dans la supplique d’un supplice infini.” La supplique is “supplication,” le supplice is “torture.”—TR.
13. Here, what Blanchot actually wrote is, “Le silence est peut-être un mot, un mot paradoxal, le mutisme du mot (conformément au jeu de l’étymologie).” I believe that the etymology referred to is that of the expression Motus! (“Silence! Not a word!”), a latinization of the word mot (“word”). Motus, meaning “not a word,” is said to have developed from the expression ne dire mot (“to say nothing”), an expression similar to others such as n’y voir goutte (“to see nothing”). —TR.
14. “It has the suddenness of the interminable torment which is always over already” is my expansion upon “á la fois subit (subi) et patient. …” Subit is ‘sudden”; subi is “suffered,” suffered as the suffering Blanchot calls subissement. This suffering goes under suddenly, and is undergone patiently.—TR.
15. Makes the coup coup-able. See note 6, page 22. —TR.
16. René Char. —TR.
17. “Trip”: achopper, “elude”: échapper. “La philosophie qui met tout en question, achoppe à la poésie qui est la question qui lui échappe.” —TR.
18. Georges Bataille. —TR.
19. As is well known, and as I have noted in L’Entrien infini, rhythm, according to Benveniste, probably does not derive from rheô, but, through rhutmos, from rhusmos, which Benveniste defines as “changing, fluid configuration.”
20. The reference is to Roland Barthes and his Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Paris: Seuil, 1977), trans. Richard Howard as A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). —TR.
21. In Blanchot’s phrase, which I have translated rather freely, the word for “fold,” pli, not only resounds in the word déplié (“deployed” in my version) and repliement (my “retreat”), but is echoed in the word I have rendered as “mortify”: supplicier. Blanchot writes: “… l’ensemble que nous ne connaissons que comme déplié et dont le repliement dérobe l’infinie richesse de ‘l’une seule fois’ qui s’y suplicie.” —TR.
22. Blanchot’s brackets. —TR.