Cosmogenetic narratives revolve around the notion of formless darkness informing the beginning of all things. The world takes shape only in contrast
to and in separation
from the deep darkness from which it has emerged, engendering an incessant interplay of day and night, light and shadow, becoming and passing away. In creation stories, the terrestrial difference between night’s dark and day’s light that fundamentally structures the order of the everyday world recalls the nonexistence preceding it by positing a primordial night as the precondition from which all ordinary nights are distinguished. In this chapter, I will first explore how classical antiquity imagined the creation of the world from darkness, limiting my discussion to the figure of Nyx as she appears in Hesiod’s
Theogony and the religious poetry attributed to Orpheus and his followers. I will then look at the way the mythologist Karl Philipp Moritz reinterprets her epistemological function at the same historical moment Schikaneder created his star-flaming queen, thereby illustrating how, at the height of the Enlightenment, primordial night was given a feminine shape. I will close by looking at two modern philosophical engagements with the offspring of this primordial nocturnal force—Horkheimer and Adorno’s idiosyncratic reading of how Odysseus came to outwit the Sirens and Maurice Blanchot’s equally idiosyncratic rethinking of Orpheus’s descent into nocturnal Hades. In all the narratives discussed, Nyx and her daughters are positioned on the threshold between a formless darkness that can never fully be grasped and its reconfiguration as a dark feminine shape: mysterious, omniscient, awe-inspiring, and sometimes fatal, embodying a point of contact to this unknown.
In Hesiod’s Theogony, no deity stands at the beginning of the world; rather, it is dark Chaos that presides, from which three entities are born: Gaia (the broad-chested earth), Tartarus (the dismal abyss), and Eros (the most beautiful of the immortal gods). Yet Chaos is also the progenitor of a second family branch, bringing forth Nyx (the dark night) and Erebus (the lightless darkness of the deep underworld). As these two siblings unite in love, they in turn bring forth Aither (heavenly air) and Hemera (the day). In Hesiod’s description of the creation of the world, light thus comes into being only after Earth and its periphery, the underworld, have been created out of the gaping void of Chaos. The day is clearly marked as a child of the night. Even if Nyx is not the actual origin of the cosmos and comes into being only as a rival to her sister Gaia, the night represents a creative power, obtaining her singular importance from the fact that she autonomously gives birth to all her other children. Having initially coupled with her sibling, Erebus, she will require no further partnering with another masculine deity. Instead, her other offspring—including odious fate, black doom, death, sleep, and the family of dreams—are all self-engendered. Antiquity’s nocturnal deity thus emerges as the mother of a lineage that not only creates the day, but also everything that makes the ordinary dreadful. Equally significant is the fact that the two beings she creates with her brother, Erebus, are conducive to earthly existence. By contrast, her self-generated children are not only the toxic inversion of day and air, but also pertain primarily to the psychic life of humans—their desires and their transgressions, as well as the laws regulating their dreams. Hesiod names Nyx’s descendants as Momos (blame), Oixyn (complaint), Moros (destiny), the three Moirai (fate), the avenging Keres and Furies, retaliatory Nemesis, Apathe (deception), Gera (age), and Eris (discord).
Ever since, night has come to trigger in human beings transgressive desires as well as a fear of being haunted by fate’s punishment. Other psychic conditions ascribed to the family of Nyx include violence, lawlessness, and delusion, as well as quarrels, lies, oaths, and perjury. Hesiod attributes everything that is terrible about terrestrial existence to the realm of the night, but also everything that renders visible the laws of day by virtue of their transgression. Only the experience of perjury allows us to recognize the importance of oaths; only the experience of delusion makes us recognize the value of true insight. The fact that Nyx is the mother of both Hemera and all the Fates serves, furthermore, to illustrate that moral darkness is a sibling of the bright day. Hesiod not only speaks about this nocturnal deity as one of two mothers, who, together with her sister Gaia, creates something out of the depths of darkness; as mother to the fates and furies, his Nyx also emerges as the prerequisite of moral knowledge. Even though her seductive (if punitive) children reside in the underworld, they incessantly return to earth to hound human beings with the consequences of their deeds, imposing on them as much a sense of guilt as a desire for retribution. Their punitive law leads humans in the other direction as well. Nyx and her progeny give shape to the line of demarcation between earthly existence and its periphery, Tartarus, not least because one is banished to the underworld for committing crimes.
In Hesiod’s narrative, Nyx is thus the first to introduce into the gaping emptiness of formless chaos both the ordered alternation of night and day as well as a plethora of divine laws that regulate everyday suffering, the punishment of transgressive desires, and the duration of earthly existence. As a result, her own status is constantly in flux. On the one hand, because she resembles the deep formless darkness of chaos that brought her forth, she is part of the primordial night that precedes the creation of the cosmos. On the other hand, in her function as an earthly manifestation of nature and the counterpoint to the day, she is also part of the ordered cosmos, which Nyx herself helped produce and her offspring so poignantly influence. Given her dual positioning, belonging both to the world and to a condition preceding the world, Nyx can be seen as having helped shape the groundless foundation at the beginning of the world in two ways. Although her daughter, daylight, allows the world to emerge from this darkness, her own mysterious darkness offers intimations of the chaos that preceded all manifestations of being. As a creative principle and the precondition for the emergence of a recognizable world and because she precedes the world, its concepts, and its language, Nyx represents an entity that is itself ungraspable. This nocturnal deity could be conceptualized in retrospect by virtue of her earthly manifestation, as the ordinary change of night and day. Thus conceived by cosmogenetic narratives as the line of demarcation between chaos and order, Nyx embodies the point of transition from an unordered potentiality of all possible manifestations of being to the actual shaping of all distinct aspects of the world, separate from this dark point of origin. Hesiod’s casting of the night as the point of contact between a knowable world and its unknowable precondition is particularly seminal for my discussion of subsequent cosmogenetic narratives that implicitly refigure his creation of the world. In her cultural survival Nyx continues to function as a personified portal between the inaccessible primordial ground of all existence and the incessant transformation of earthly phenomena, as the force of transition subtending the interplay of ordinary daylight and dark night, and of life’s emergence and destruction.
ON THE THRESHOLD BETWEEN THE KNOWN AND THE UNKNOWN
Whereas Hesiod’s nocturnal deity is primarily a figure of awe and terror, Orphic poetry predating his
Theogony emphasizes not only a more benevolent side of the night, but also a cosmogony that elevates her above all other deities. The third of the hymns attributed to Orpheus places the night at the beginning of the creation of the world and celebrates her as the mother of all gods and men. In this version she is celebrated not as the dreaded dark mother of the day and the fates, but rather as a “blessed goddess” whose “bluish sparkling, star-blazing” appearance promises restorative rest. Remaining vigilant in the darkness of a world after sunset, she offers both reflection and solace after the day’s toil and brings on the sleep that relieves humans of their diurnal worry. She is primarily conceived as the mother of consolation and replenishment, as the friend of all earthly creatures. The hymn also draws attention to her scintillating appearance. Riding across the sky in her carriage, she belongs to the earth even while she is perceived as a “being of heaven—circling playfully through the mists in a whirling dance.” In her earthly manifestation, the Orphic Nyx also ensures an illumination of the world after dark, even while this is itself contingent on her connection to the underworld: “You send light into the dark and yourself flee down to Hades.” Although in this poem the cyclic all-nightly emergence and disappearance of an illuminated night also recalls the “dreaded necessity” of death, the poet addresses his “beseeching words” to Nyx, the sacred and most blessed mother of sleep and death, in hope of consolation. As a merciful figure sought by all, she is seen as being endowed with apotropaic magic. The poet calls upon her to “come and frighten away the images of fear gleaming here in the darkness.”
In contrast to Hesiod, the Orphic hymns thus cast the terrestrial illuminated night as a protection from precisely those more primordial anxieties that are also attributed to Nyx, wrapped in her dark cloak. Where Hesiod imagined a neutral chaos at the beginning of the world, the Orphic cosmogony elevates the night to the status of a primordial mother. In this version, Chaos and Nyx reign together, accompanied by Erebus and Tartarus. In the shape of a bird with black wings, the primordial night lays a silver egg in the enormous lap of Darkness, so that her brother Erebus in fact functions as the ground in which she can plant her seed; he provides the material support for her creative power. Fertilized by the wind, Eros, decked with golden wings, emerges from this egg. His glowing, shining appearance gains its affective force only against the backdrop of nocturnal blackness. In this he recalls the way the light of Hesiod’s Hemera also becomes visible only in distinction from the all-encompassing darkness of Nyx and Erebus, her two parents. In the Orphic version, the first-born child of the night, also known as Phanes (because his rays bring everything to light that up to this point had been lying concealed in Nyx’s silver egg), takes on the role of animating all the elements of the world order that were dark before his birth. Seminal for the difference between these two versions of classic cosmogony in turn is that, in contrast to the Nyx of Hesiod’s Theogony, the egg laid by the Nyx of the Orphic hymns already contains the entire world. Its hollow interior corresponds to the wide open void of Chaos, from which it is separated only by its outer shell. Night is thus cast as the decisive creative principle. Although the Orphic Nyx does not exist before Chaos, Erebus, and Tartarus, it is only the animating light of her first-born son that brings with it a visible connection between these other primordial elements, even while this illumination in turn brings forth the sky, the ocean, the earth, and the race of gods.
Common to both versions, however, is that they cast Nyx as a chatoyant deity, a black mother, on the one hand either pregnant with day or giving birth to radiant Eros, on the other, as the progenitor of human fate in all its tragic facets. Furthermore, even if Hesiod conceives her merely as the counterpart to the great vitality of Gaia, in her cultural afterlife she is repeatedly represented as a nurturing mother with one light and one dark child in her arms. The former, Hypnos, reinvigorates humans with the sleep he brings; the latter, Thanatos, puts an end to all earthly happiness and sorrow. Equally seminal is the twofold role she plays in the cosmogenetic narratives revolving around her. She exists as a personified deity dwelling on the periphery of the world, from where she reappears when day declines. Yet she is also conceived as a purely abstract principle, the entity that helped bring forth world out of chaos in the first place, even while determining the fortune and misfortune of all those who inhabit the world of mortals. Equally seminal to her cultural afterlife (as will be shown in more detail in the following chapters on both Hegel and Freud’s recourse to mythopoetic thinking), is that Nyx embodies an all-encompassing primordial deity. This is made particularly clear in the Orphic cosmogony, given that the egg from which radiant Eros springs forth is conceived as harboring the pure potentiality of the world that will emerge from it. In contrast to the vastness of Chaos, Nyx does not stand for a void, but rather a plenitude of manifestations still to be realized. As a figure who brings forth the light that allows shapes to become perceptible, even while bearing within herself all possibilities that have not yet been realized, she comes to stand for the force of contingency. The figures she engenders, directly or indirectly, can be beneficial or harmful. In all cases, however, both her daughter Hemera and her other more fateful offspring guarantee that the history of the world will unfold as a constant variation of figurations, in which generations of mythical figures and earthly phenomena come into being and again pass away in an incessant cycle. Put another way, as the begetter of both light and fate, the Nyx of antiquity embodies an irrevocable law. Once light has entered the cosmos, day and night alternate as inevitably as life and death.
The fact that Nyx also has a concrete place of residence in the world while functioning as a point of contact to the dark primordial unknown at the origin of all terrestrial existence needs further elucidation. According to Hesiod, even the Olympian gods are afraid of her place of abode, located at the outermost edge of the world. Enveloped by blue-black fog, her cave hovers on the enormous molding abyss of the bottomless depth of Tartarus, where “the origins and boundaries of everything” are juxtaposed. On the big ebony threshold to the place in which Nyx resides with her daughter, night and day meet and converse peacefully with each other. Never, however, does their joint residence contain both at the same time. When one of the two crosses over the threshold to descend into its inner chambers, the other one passes out into the world. With day and night sharing the world in equal parts, the one outside the mansion flies around the earth, while the one inside awaits the hour of her ascent. The difference in their terrestrial effect lies in the light they cast. Hemera, with her sun, brings with her “an all-seeing light for all those living on earth,” whereas Nyx, carrier of both ruin and solace, rides across the nocturnal heaven in a carriage drawn by black horses, surrounded by an entourage of dreams and stars.
There is, however, more to the terrestrial abode of this night goddess. A terra incognita, in which sky, sea, earth, and the underworld come together, the residence Nyx shares with her two children Hemera and Eros is also close to chaos, and thus in close proximity to all the unrealized potentiality the latter contains. For this reason, this nocturnal deity is also seen as a conveyor of divine pronouncements. Her daughter, day, is not the only one she has friendly conversations with on the threshold to her home; in mythic representations, she can also be seen standing in front of her dark abode with Dike, the goddess of justice, offering prophecies and dictating laws. In an Orphic fragment, Zeus himself makes his way to her cave to ask what he is destined to accomplish. She counsels him to devour Phanes and the world so as to bring about a new world order. Thus, even the most powerful of the Olympian gods visits the house of the primordial mother to acquire the wisdom he needs for his sovereign rule to hold. In chapter 14 of the Iliad, Zeus even refers to her as the conqueror of gods and men, while admitting that he is afraid of doing “anything to offend Night, the swift one.”
To summarize: In cosmogenetic narratives of classical antiquity, Nyx plays a decisive role both in creating light and the sky as well as introducing fate, punishment, and justice into the world. At the same time, she also influences the constitution of the race of gods, even while restricting their power. Although for the Orphics she is a benevolent primordial mother and gentle friend, conferring rest and pitting her nocturnal light against what would otherwise be perceived as an impenetrable darkness, in the writings of Hesiod and Homer she is primarily associated with ruination and doom. What Nyx initiates above all for Western culture is an association between the night and the feminine that is at once dangerous and rewarding, mysterious and illuminating. Decisive for her duplicitous survival in our image repertoire is the fact that in her personification of the powerful night, she represents an embodiment of the threshold between being and nonbeing. She functions as the fulcrum between a primordial night, conceived on the one hand as an originary darkness that conceals everything yet already contains all phenomena that will emerge from it, and, on the other, as the terrestrial night, the phenomenological chronotopos between dusk and dawn. Although closely related to the darkness of chaos, she is the mother both of actual daylight and of all illumination during the night. The duplicitous position she occupies, so crucial to her cultural survival, can be formulated as follows. Personifying the time period between the setting of the sun at dusk and its rising again at dawn, she also recalls the emergence of the first day from primordial darkness. As such she allows us to conceive in hindsight, from the position of an already created world, the originary chaos that existed before the distinction between darkness and light; she recalls the primordial fusion of all forms. Her separation from this originary chaos is not only conceived by cosmogenetic texts as the prerequisite that there is world and no longer nothing; the personified night, Nyx, also makes it possible to think, in retrospect and from the position of the world that emerged from it, about the precosmic nothing. The knowledge inspired by this figure, veiled in mysterious and fascinating darkness, serves to intimate traces of this formless origin.
THE RE-EMERGENCE OF NYX AT THE HEIGHT OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT
The fact that Nyx comes to experience a re-embodiment, albeit obliquely, in Schikaneder’s star-flaming Queen illustrates the direction that the idea of a primordial feminine power located at the edge of the world took at the height of the Enlightenment. A renewed interest in mythic narratives surrounding this nocturnal deity can also be found in Karl Philipp Moritz’s
Teachings of the Gods (1791). The title he chooses for his discussion, “The Night and Fate that rules over gods and man,” indicates that his interest lies in foregrounding her superior power. Beginning his revisitation of Nyx in an allusion to Homer, Moritz explains that in ancient thought there is something “that the gods themselves dread. It is night’s mysterious darkness, within which something lies hidden that reigns over both the gods and humanity, something that exceeds the concepts of mortal beings.” It is not only that this nocturnal deity rules over everything that is decisive for Moritz, but also that her power cannot be fathomed by the human mind. The concealment embodied by night’s darkness thus refers to what becomes mysterious precisely because it cannot be seen directly. It also gestures toward the limits of what can be known and represented. Given that Moritz celebrates both of these aspects of Nyx and her envelopment by darkness, one gets the sense that he seeks to combine the blessed maternal figure of the Orphics with Hesiod’s terrifying one: “Night conceals and veils; that is why she is the mother of everything beautiful and everything horrific.” Equally decisive about Moritz’s reconception of Nyx around 1800 is the fact that her gesture of veiling something is what determines her children. She is a maternal figure
because she conceals. Furthermore, his rewriting of the ancient mythic narrative poignantly names the beautiful emerging from her before it names the horrific.
Moritz’s rethinking of the classical Nyx thus illustrates how, at the height of the Enlightenment, night’s darkness was conceived not only as a source of fear, but also as a source of the aesthetic. Indeed, in contrast to Hesiod, he pointedly highlights the creative aspect of her first child: “From her lap is born the brilliance of the Day, wherein all earthly shapes unfold.” He privileges the act of formation. The creation of the world, all emotional and moral education, and the imagination as well as representations of any kind, are all derived from the birth of day out of the night. Only in a second step does Moritz name night’s less radiant lineage. These less wholesome children, in turn, he endows with distinct features so as to show that his is a more differentiated view of terrestrial fate. To render visible the proximity between those shapes that unfold in the splendid light of day and those that develop in nocturnal darkness, Moritz begins his list of the children of Nyx by noting, “And she is also the mother: of destiny, cloaked in darkness.” If, with this image, he underlines just how impenetrable fate is to human perception, he makes a similar claim for her sister, Nemesis, of whom he notes that she “punishes hidden transgressions.” These attributes in fact render her a sister of the day, given that Nemesis too brings something to light. In her case, however, this uncovering pertains to guilt, seeking to hide in darkness.
As he names all the other terrifying children born of night, Moritz mitigates their power by drawing attention to their benevolent effects. Concluding with a description of what all of Nyx’s children have in common, he anticipates what Horkheimer and Adorno will call a dialectic of Enlightenment. “All these figures to whom the night gave birth,” he explains, “give shape either to what recedes from the ordinary vision of mortal humans, or what fantasy itself likes to envelop in nocturnal darkness.” As in the cosmogenetic texts of antiquity, his Nyx also functions as a gatekeeper. At the height of the Enlightenment, however, she indicates what human perception cannot grasp, what exceeds human knowledge, and in so doing renders visible the limit to any rational education. Yet Moritz adds a decisive detail, absent in the earlier cosmogenetic narratives. In his revision, Nyx also embodies what our fantasy prefers to locate in the realm of mystery; what we enjoy imagining as ungraspable by the eye and incomprehensible to the mind. Moritz thus pits against enlightened knowledge, developing its cognitive shapes in the brilliant light of diurnal reason, a more obscure, implicit knowledge, whose concealment constitutes the realm of the aesthetic and its affective force—its far more intangible effects.
TWO MODERN REFIGURATIONS OF NYX
For all their differences, both classical cosmogonies and their reconceptualization under the pressure of the Enlightenment project envision knowledge in relation to a night whose darkness places it implicitly in proximity with a primordial nonbeing. Night is a radical outside that, as the precondition for the emergence of world, is also inaccessible to human knowledge. Even if the path to truth entails a gain in light, the knowledge acquired is irrevocably bound up with the dark depths from which any comprehension based on perception emerges. All the cosmogenetic narratives discussed so far imagine night as a maternal deity, responsible for bringing forth both the phenomenological world as well as the irrefutable laws that govern all terrestrial moral behavior. My reading of Schikaneder’s Queen of the Night in the introduction to this book was meant to illustrate
one trajectory of the cultural survival of Nyx at the height of the Enlightenment. The relation between knowledge and night that the libretto unfolds is one in which intuitive, implicit knowledge struggles against a regime of rationality in an epistemological battle, from which the truth ascribed to the realm of the sun priest can emerge triumphant only by denying to its nocturnal counterpoint any claim to truth. The fact that Tamino, who, in the first act, had initially lent his ear and heart to the Queen of the Night, will ultimately make himself blind and deaf to the other truth he might glean from her, illustrates how radically a knowledge based exclusively on rationality must extricate itself from its dark underside. Yet the relapse into mythic thinking on the part of the Enlightenment project, which Horkheimer and Adorno locate precisely in this refusal to acknowledge a nocturnal aspect to knowledge, also renders visible the possibility of a different, more inquisitive attitude toward the inextricable enmeshment between the night and any acquisition of knowledge. Although my readings of literary and cinematic texts in
Parts II to
V focus on a plethora of strategies for learning from a night conceived as stage and state of mind, I want to conclude this chapter by looking at two modern philosophical texts that, although they don’t offer a refiguration of Nyx herself, think through the knowledge to be gained from a feminine embodiment of the nocturnal.
The first involves the way Horkheimer and Adorno make use of Odysseus’s encounter with the Sirens in
The Dialectic of Enlightenment. In their discussion of Homer’s traveling war hero, Odysseus emerges as an enlightened subject able to listen to the alluring voices of night’s daughters without succumbing to their danger. He has been warned by Circe that he would not be able to escape the allure of their song. Yet, stubbornly resolved not to be taken in by their fatal charm, he pits against their power a cunning trick that will allow him to take control over his own destiny and bypass the destruction lying in store for him. His ambivalence is such that he intends to survive his encounter with the Sirens even while wishing to give himself up to the ecstasy that their song evinces in those who listen to it. He seeks to experience a suspension of his earthly existence comparable to journeys to nocturnal sites on the map of our mythopoetic imaginary, even while avoiding the fatal consequences that usually accompany the knowledge acquired by such means. For this reason, he commands his sailors to clog their ears with wax, ordering them to row with full force past the Sirens. He, in turn, has himself tied to a mast so as to enjoy their dangerous temptation with impunity. Odysseus’s ruse is significant in that, in contrast to Schikaneder’s Sarastro, he does not seek to abnegate or disavow these nocturnal voices. He decides to protect himself against them precisely because he knows how fascinating they are, thus acknowledging the power they could have over him. Given that he self-consciously wants to expose himself to their danger, his ruse involves a lesser impoverishment of fantasy. Instead, Odysseus assumes an enlightened attitude toward the fateful enjoyment of self-expenditure that our fantasy likes to attribute to the night. One must, of course, bear in mind that Sarastro is building a society under the auspices of his dark sun of reason and duty, whereas Odysseus is a notoriously bad leader. The individual may listen to the voices of the night, whereas the group must resist them if its political order is to have a viable future.
At issue for Horkheimer and Adorno in this far more ambivalent attitude toward learning from dangerous but enticing nocturnal voices, is that the Sirens do not lose their power over Odysseus because—as is the case in Sarastro’s battle against the Queen of the Night—he denies their legitimacy. Instead, his mind concedes to them an irresistible allure even while he insists that it resides in his power to decide whether their fatal charm will triumph or not. Fully acknowledging that one cannot defy the Sirens (true for all other figures of fate born of the night), Odysseus is willing to confront their law and face their alluring song. He neither seeks to travel by another route, one that would not take him past their island so as to avoid all contact with these daughters of Nyx, nor does he trust in the superiority of his rational mind by presumptuously believing he could resist fate. He abides instead by the mythopoetic pact about which Circe had warned him. Yet, as Horkheimer and Adorno cannily note, he has found a loophole. By complying with the terms of this contract he is able to circumvent its fatal outcome. Nowhere is it written that the traveler listening to the song of the Sirens may not be shackled. The chains Odysseus applies to himself are the symptom of an enlightened impulse that asserts itself not by denying but rather by partaking of fatal nocturnal voices, even conceding their all-encompassing power. Precisely because of this self-imposed restraint, Odysseus is able to observe the terms of his contract with the Sirens and the mythological thinking they embody, even while refiguring the experience of the beyond, of the outside this encounter elicits in terms of personal survival, with a day after in sight.
My second example for a modern valorization of the knowledge gleaned from the night involves the figure of Orpheus, although in this case not his hymnic celebration of Nyx. Even more emphatically engaged with attributing aesthetic inspiration to the realm of the night than Horkheimer and Adorno, Maurice Blanchot also focuses on a breach in a contract between his mythic hero and a nocturnal deity. Yet, whereas the Odysseus of critical theory falls back on a clever ruse so as to enjoy the dangerous voices of the night with impunity, Orpheus gazes directly at the figure of death now embodied by his deceased beloved, Eurydice. Although he chose to descend into the dark world of Tartarus, leaving terrestrial light behind in search for spiritual illumination, his artistic skill as a singer moves the night to such a degree that she is willing to open the gate and receive him. Initially he perceives the nocturnal darkness in which his lost beloved dwells as though it were comparable to the familiar intimacy of their shared terrestrial night. And yet the world into which one enters by way of night’s gate in fact represents the vanishing point of what his art of song can attain. In her embodiment of the eternal night of death, or rather of a life outside and beyond earthly existence, Blanchot’s Eurydice stands for the point of contact where earthly night approaches that other night, understood as unity of day and night beyond all quotidian oppositions. The pact Orpheus has agreed to in hope of reuniting with his lost beloved states that although he is allowed to fetch Eurydice and bring her back into a shared everyday, he must, while traversing the underworld, keep his back turned to her at all times. At issue is that he may approach her—and as such he may enter the liminality of that other night, located outside all categories of human knowledge—by not directly gazing at her. Eurydice, who has already moved beyond earthly existence into the beyond, will reveal herself to him only enveloped by her nocturnal surroundings, as a figure intuitively intimated rather than tangibly or visually grasped.
Ultimately, Orpheus will break his pact with the goddess of fate who has allowed his descent. Despite the prohibition, he will turn to face his beloved and in so doing destroy all he had initially achieved with his song. Rather than joining him in a shared everyday, Eurydice is forced to return alone to the indistinguishable darkness from which she emerged. Yet in Orpheus’s fateful refusal to stick to the terms of his contract with fate, Blanchot recognizes the artist’s insistence not to betray his inquisitive gaze, but rather to pursue it at all costs. The woman he turns around to face when driven by an uncurtailable desire to see her, is not, after all, Eurydice resurrected in her ordinary mortal shape. Having arrived at the deepest point of the underworld, Orpheus seeks an impossible gaze: the deceased beloved, enveloped and veiled by precisely the nocturnal darkness with which the event of her death has endowed her. At the end of his passage through death’s world, he is not interested in having Eurydice made visible and tangible to him again in the shape of the familiar beloved he once knew. Rather, his artist’s will to knowledge seeks to comprehend her with his gaze as a figure invisible amid the darkness of this eternal night, as a stranger outside and beyond any ordinary intimacy. According to Blanchot, the fascination leading Orpheus into the darkness of Tartarus arises from the desire to glimpse what the night veils and envelops. He seeks to partake of a concealment that has been rendered visible in what can only be thought of as an impossible gaze, the insight of a purely aesthetic experience. The inspiration that befalls Orpheus when, upon breaking his pledge, he gazes at Eurydice regardless of whether or not his art will succeed, consists in a negative recognition. Rather than giving back to the deceased a shape that will render her visible and recognizable once she has re-emerged in the light of day, his inspired gaze dissolves the shape of Eurydice completely (much as Odysseus’s ability to pass by the Sirens unharmed causes them to evaporate). One can speak of an anticosmogenetic impulse. Turning around and looking back, Orpheus loses his beloved a second time
and fails as a singer.
Sacrifice in or of life is, of course, usually a means for artistic triumph. One is thus prompted to ask whether, by insisting on confronting the powers of the night directly with his gaze, Orpheus gains something that is neither the art of his song nor the life of his beloved Eurydice. Is this perhaps a look, a specular knowledge of the night in conjunction with death that is too profound to be represented and transmitted? Does the inspiration Orpheus suffers, predicated as it is on a twofold loss, render palpable how the night contains a form of knowledge that is figured as an unpossessable and unseeable feminine body? Indeed, how Orpheus’s loss is actually a gain is decisive for Blanchot. An inspiration that emerges from the dark depth of night even while remaining bound to it demands that the singer sacrifice his song to the forbidden gaze. This nocturnal inspiration seizes the artist with a force that equates comprehension with a withdrawal of that which has been grasped.
The image that inspiration brings forth in the domain of the night is always caught in the act of vanishing. Even as it appears, it has already disappeared. In the cosmogenetic narratives this chapter has traced, each addressing how the world and all its manifestations emerge from the night, what is ultimately at issue is precisely this transience. Its resilient counterpoint is the will for living in the day, a desire to move beyond a nocturnal state into the everyday, experiencing the fatal fascination of the night and nevertheless being able to survive. On the mythopoetic map of classical antiquity, the house of Nyx is located at the periphery of a knowable world, where the beginning and the boundary to all that exists, all that makes up the world, coincide. In her cultural survival, Nyx, the veiled maternal deity who resides on this threshold, continues to be endowed with sovereign power over what, having become visible, can come to be discerned and grasped. Conceived from night’s position, which is to say, from the outmost edge of the cosmos, the appearance and disappearance of earthly phenomena make up a unity out of which—and against which—worlds emerge. Before moving on to the way that both Hegel and Freud have recourse to the rich and strange visualization of primordial night and her embodied deity, we must first turn to the other grand cosmogenetic narrative of Western culture, the Judeo-Christian mapping of the beginning of the world.
