Chapter Five: In Lieu of a Last Word: Maurice Blanchot and the Future of Memory (Today)

Wild animals run from the dangers they actually see, and once they have escaped them worry no more. We however are tormented alike by what is past and what is to come.

—Seneca

. . . la responsabilité la plus folle (celle de la mémoire) . . .

—Christophe Bident

Impatience is the failing of one who wants to withdraw from the absence of time; patience is the ruse which seeks to master this absence by making of it another time, measured otherwise.

—Maurice Blanchot

To end with a discussion of the work of Maurice Blanchot is rife with difficulties, two of which I will mention by way of beginning. The first involves the sheer difficulty of reading his work. While to be sure, this seems to be something of a “side issue,” it is one with important consequences: An encounter with Blanchot’s texts—whether those of his fiction, his criticism or the aphoristic, fragmentary texts of the later years—induces a deep feeling of exposure and vertigo, the negativity or indeterminacy of which is hardly conceivable as a mediating moment toward a higher reconciliation, be it one of judgment, of an experience of sympathy or of understanding.¹ Even the genre of the “encyclopedia entry,” that avatar of sober academic assessment, seems to lose its footing when it draws attention to this experience, in one case asserting that Blanchot’s oeuvre “has struck many serious commentators as being uncannily, disempoweringly infectious” and that, while his significance is undoubtedly formidable, its impact has proven extremely difficult to assess.² Given the difficulty of such an experience, the fascination of reading Blanchot is bound to be accompanied by an undeniable feeling of resistance, by a refusal to be led to a confrontation with something opaque on which one’s consciousness can find no hold.

How, then, to answer to the groundlessness of this reading? How to respond in such a way that does not simply recover from or shut down the unsettling experience (or unexperience) to which this writing exposes us, where it seems to be the very ground of experience itself that is called into question? Though, as we shall see, this calling-into-question itself implies that we are already near to a singularly Blanchotian motif, nothing about its proximity should provide us with an overly hasty feeling of comfort or security, let alone with the ease of feeling as if a certain “solidarity” has been achieved.

Related to the sense, only barely touched upon here, in which Blanchot’s texts leave us alone and in no position (“to approve or disapprove, believe in or doubt” says one of his readers and translators³) is an even more intractable objection to giving a reading of Blanchot’s texts (in) the place of an ending: Over the course of roughly fifty years, he consistently submitted the notion of the “end” to rigorous critique, exposing its ground to be the ethos of a “successful” work of mourning that seeks to limit and contain the possibility of an other exposure. In keeping with Blanchot’s most trenchant demand, then, it will have to be a question of another mourning, or of a mourning after.

Nonetheless, impatience is my failing. The impatient reader in me still wants to get to the end, wants to put “a term to the interminable,”⁴ still wants to ask: “What is mourning though, if its ethos of putting a term on the past is not somehow intimately linked to morning, to the very possibility of a new moment, a new beginning, to the dawn of something new?” What is it, indeed, that links mourning to morning? The question may not be quite as simple—or not quite as complex—as the homonymic play between the two words suggests. Before we can approach what is at stake in Blanchot’s problematization of mourning, then, this question of what aligns mourning so closely to morning or with the dawn of new beginnings must itself be raised.

From Hegel to Nietzsche and Freud, each makes a claim that stakes the vitality of the present on its ability to assimilate what is lost. Assuming the familiar simplifications, whether the claim is conceived along the cultural lines of an organic assimilation put to the service of the subject’s own self-constitution, of an obsession with the ego’s successful Trauerarbeit following a loss or of scolding one’s own century for its pathological sense of history, in all cases, the chief exigency is that the potentially crushing weight of the dead must be transformed into something more liberating.⁵ “There is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of historical sensibility,” writes Nietzsche, “that injures and ultimately destroys all living things, whether a human being, a people, or a culture.” For a vital and life-affirming balance to be stuck, the past must “not become the grave digger of the present”; that is, a people, an individual, or a culture must succumb to the power to “assimilate what is past and alien, to heal wounds, to replace what has been lost.”⁶ Likewise, for Freud: “The fact is . . . that when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again [Tatsächlich wird aber das Ich nach der Vollendung der Trauerarbeit wieder frei und ungehemmt].”⁷

Despite the more complicated reading I hope to have generated in Chapter 4 regarding the future of a dialectically recuperated past, nonetheless it is Hegel who will have set the stage for this Trauerspiel. Indeed, the preoccupations with grief and mourning that we have discerned in Hegel’s treatment of how objects pass from sensuality to intelligibility—marking their passage into knowledge as philosophical history—confirm the sense that mourning is the mechanism that will ensure spirit the return to itself of all its moments.

For mourning to be “successful,” all three accounts suggest that what has been lost must not only be relinquished but must also be made to reappear. If mourning emerges as the work that successfully disarticulates the past and the present, it still remains difficult to know how to situate this disarticulation in relation to the paradoxical necessity that the loss be made to appear. On the one hand, this disarticulation between past and present is clearly on the order of a rupture or break; on the other hand though, it can only be the outcome of an articulation, determination or assessment of what is lost. To bring the loss to an end, one must claim to know it and to know its reach; one must mourn as if one knew what it was and could represent it as a figure for, or an object of, knowledge.

The disarticulation of the past from the present thus implicitly presupposes a figure or presentation of what it is that has passed. Whether it be in the form of a concept, a monument, a narrative account or a “lesson learned,” the demand for a safe or nonpathological return of the past through its figure is everywhere present where, by assimilating the past, attempts are made to get out from under it and to neutralize its potentially deadening blow to the singular vitality of the present. Conversely, the inability to figure the loss (or, indeed, the refusal to do so) obstructs the possibility of mourning and is associated, for Freud, with a breakdown of the very principle of subjectivity (“an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale [eine großartige Ichverarmung]” [MM 254/431]), writes Freud); with a passive stance that masks a deeper attitude of open hostility toward overcoming the loss and, finally, with an almost total loss of interest in the quotidian world (of politics, of community).

In the thought-provoking protest against melancholia that takes place on the pages of Mourning Becomes the Law,⁸ Gillian Rose echoes these thinkers by summing up what she sees as the none-too-inspiring political consequences at the heart of a “process of endless mourning” or “everlasting melancholia” (ML 11): a “refusal to let go” (ML 11) that results in a self-imposed “impotence and failure” (ML 10); a flight from and renunciation of the difficult political risks involved in self-positing and learning from one’s own limitations; “impotence and suffering” (ML 51); an evasion of responsibility, as well as a self-absorbed indifference to questions of justice.

In the book’s penultimate chapter⁹—which is also a moving account of private grief—explicit aim on all these fronts is taken at the oeuvre of Maurice Blanchot who, in Rose’s estimation, represents a particularly extreme example of this melancholic paralysis (ML 14). Rose objects in particular to his notion of désoeuvrement (worklessness or unworking) and draws attention to how it stalls the work of mourning, interrupting its movement of restitution and jamming the gears of a dialectical relation to the past: “For Blanchot, the letting go of mourning is not for morning or dawning, for commencing, but for the endless reality of ending, which our workful beginnings can only, and must always, violate” (ML 104). In Rose’s account, Blanchot’s refusal to “let go” of mourning is tantamount to a refusal of responsibility and to a blanket rejection of the premise that we can learn anything from the past.

It is explicitly in light of these characterizations of Blanchot as a melancholic par excellence that Rose performs a vigorous critique of Blanchot’s reading of Hegel in his 1949 essay “Literature and the Right to Death.”¹⁰ According to Rose, the essay evinces a melancholic stance at practically every level, but she places special emphasis on the way in which it throws the Hegelian dialectic into violent reversal: Whereas the sequence of the Hegelian presentation proceeds from naming and moves on to action and then to ethical substance, Blanchot, she writes “moves from action and the thing itself (la chose même) to the name (la chose) and its ungraspable remnant, and thence to the absolute meaning of meaning” (ML 117). The claim that mourning in Blanchot is tied to what remains ungraspable within language is what provides Rose with the grounds for the contention that his unworked mourning involves turning one’s back on the future, in order precisely to turn back toward the unredeemable loss in a gesture of “poiesis or ‘making,’” one that “does not involve working through, nor acceptance of, the inevitable negation by which meaning is secured” (ML 104).

Ultimately, the task here will not be to square Rose’s complaint—as urgently expressed as it is polemically so—with Blanchot’s writing but to assess what might be at stake in Blanchot’s tarrying over the issue of language for an understanding of how it can be situated in relation to mourning. In what follows, I will examine “Literature and the Right to Death” for its philosophy of language and will concur with Rose’s assessment that the language of Blanchotian mourning cannot be read as the expression of a work of recovery, self-empowerment or cultural accrual.¹¹ Unlike Rose’s however, my reading of that language will suggest that the divisions and ruptures of language that Blanchot draws out—excruciatingly, exquisitely—have temporal implications that, while certainly at odds with that of a teleological history, open up the possibility of a nonredemptive account of memory. Turning to a late text, Après coup (1983), I will then attempt to gauge the “practical” implications of this temporality for a sense of how it might be conceived in relation to history.

Posing a Question

Every time we speak, we make words into monsters with two faces, one being reality, physical presence, and the other meaning, ideal absence. But ordinary language limits equivocation. It solidly encloses the absence in a presence, it puts a term to understanding [elle met un terme à l’entente].

—Maurice Blanchot

It will certainly come as no surprise to readers of a certain Hegel: By asking after the essence of literature—that is, in posing the question “What is Literature?”¹²—philosophy will have already begun chanting its funeral dirge. For when posed in reflexive and cognitive form, the question itself will have already presupposed the overcoming of the “what” under consideration; it will already have the answer at its fingertips, will have already consigned literature to the status of a determinate object, the essence of which having already departed from literature per se so as to emerge in the registers of philosophy or conceptual analysis.

Refusing to allow philosophy to get at its booty with such seeming ease, Blanchot’s “Literature and the Right to Death” contends from the outset that literature has some questions of its own. To be more precise, its questionability is not the exclusive domain of philosophy but has an irreducibly literary dimension. The question of literature, Blanchot asserts, is coextensive with literature itself and as such, is neither incidental to literature nor is it a threat that comes to it from the outside. In other words, self-questioning is present at literature’s very commencement: Supposing, he writes, that literature does “begin at the moment when literature becomes a question,” the question is addressed “to language . . . , by language which has become literature” (LRD 300–301).

It is thus from very early on in Blanchot’s essay that philosophy gains a rival in literature; there is something in “the literary Thing” (LRD 301) that refuses to be given as knowledge and refuses too to give itself up to the conceptual rigor of philosophy. In what might this refusal consist? To get at what is at stake here, Blanchot’s excursus on the “word” will prove crucial insofar as it acts for him as a focal point from which to draw out the striking differences between what we might call a philosophical bearing of death and a literary one.

In the second half of the essay,¹³ Blanchot recalls the claim made by a youthful Hegel (not without placing him near Hölderlin, his “friend and kindred spirit”) that the act of naming is always and irreducibly an act of annihilation: “In a text dating from before The Phenomenology, Hegel . . . writes: ‘Adam’s first act, which made him master of the animals, was to give them names, that is, he annihilated them in their existence (as existing creatures)’” (cited in LRD 322–23). The act of naming can be understood here as a form of mastery; indeed, as one of the opening sentences of the essay’s second half explicitly suggests (one prior to the citation of Hegel), naming can be linked to control and domination. Alluding to the phrase “Je dis: ‘une fleur’” from Mallarmé’s Crise de Vers, Blanchot writes: “When we speak, we gain control over things with satisfying ease. I say, ‘This woman,’ and she is immediately available to me, I push her away, I bring her close, she is everything I want her to be” (LRD 322).

If such is the kind of language most of us would be content to live with—it is, as Blanchot says, “life’s ease and security”—it will immediately give way to the hint of an even greater power, greater in that it is both “disquieting and marvelous.” Again echoing Mallarmé’s celebrated phrase, Blanchot writes:

I say, “This woman.” . . . A word may give me what it means, but first it suppresses it [mais d’abord il le supprime]. For me to be able to say “This woman,” I must somehow take her flesh-and-blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of that being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost being [Le mot me donne l’être, mais il me le donne privé d’être. Il est l’absence de cet être, son néant, ce qui demeure de lui lorsqu’il a perdu l’être]—the very fact that it does not exist. Considered in this light, speaking is a curious right. (LRD 322/312, emphasis added)

Several aspects of this dense formulation need to be drawn out. First of all, as in its first usage, the act of substituting une femme for une fleur is clearly not fortuitous: Une femme lends to the elaboration of the relation between language and annihilation an intensity or disquiet that could never be matched by reference to a flower.

Related to the passage’s sense of increased intensity is the intricate relation it establishes among speaking, being, and nothingness. With regard to the phrase that begins with “the word gives me the being but it gives it to me deprived of being,” the first and most obvious interpretation to present itself suggests that the name or word only signifies by virtue of its having robbed the entity to be named of being pure-and-simple, its “flesh-and-blood reality.” Or to put it in a slightly different way, the name drains or divests what is named of its vital being.

The next sentence, however, qualifies this interpretation. If the three phrases of the second formulation—“absence of that being,” “nothingness” and “what is left of it” (l’absence de l’être; son néant; ce qui demeure de lui)—are apposite and are to be understood as specifications of “the word,” what Blanchot seems to be suggesting is that nothingness itself has survived in the word. Furthermore, if “to survive” indicates a prior existence, the implication is that nothingness was already there in the entity prior to naming. According to this reading, language does something other (and less) than divest an entity of the plenitude of its own being. Rather, it seems to complete an already-existing division of the entity from itself.¹⁴ The following contention, made some paragraphs later, confirms this reading at the same time as it redoubles, once again, the intensity of the claim:

Of course, my language does not kill anyone. And yet, when I say, “This woman,” real death has been announced and is already present in my language, my language means that this person, who is here right now, can be detached from herself, removed from her existence and her presence, and suddenly plunged into a nothingness in which there is no existence or presence; my language essentially signifies the possibility of this destruction; it is a constant, bold allusion to such an event. My language does not kill anyone. But if this woman were not really capable of dying, if she were not threatened by death at every moment of her life, bound and joined to death by an essential bond, I would not be able to carry out that ideal negation, that deferred assassination which is what my language is. (LRD 323)

As the development of this passage suggests, Blanchot defers the moment of “ideal negation” in order to underscore the ground on which it takes place: Mortality is the sole condition upon which language can proceed to that idealizing destruction of a singular, flesh-and-blood reality. While in one sense, this formulation can be read as an expression of the structuralist argument regarding the conditions for signification in general (that signification depends upon the potential absence of the speaker and referent), Christopher Fynsk has argued that a far more unsettling death is at stake here, in that “a ‘real death’ has occurred. This woman negated when I say ‘this woman’ must have been ‘really capable of dying,’ bound essentially to death. Language is thus constantly referring back to its origin in the essential bond between the existent being and the possibility of the death that offers this being to language.”¹⁵ What is most forceful in Blanchot’s contention, Fynsk asserts, is that what exists prior to language is not life pure and simple, but life already bound to death.¹⁶ In turn, the claim that “my language essentially signifies the possibility of that destruction” implies that the destruction itself is prior to language and that the very possibility of language consists in the offering of existent beings of themselves to language through and as their own dying.¹⁷

Since language begins in negation and its meaning “derives not from existence but from a retreat before existence” (LRD 324), different understandings of it become possible. Everyday language asserts that the living thing is contained in the word. This assertion is certainly not wrong, Blanchot claims, since even if it be admitted that the word “excludes the existence of what it designates,” common language is still able to refer “to it through the thing’s nonexistence, which has become an essence” (LRD 325). In fact, here common language finds itself on even more solid ground. For, by emphasizing its expression of the nonexistence of things, Blanchot explicitly, if ironically, suggests that it has also secured for them something resembling everlasting life: “Things can change if they have to, sometimes they stop being what they are—they remain hostile, unavailable, inaccessible; but the being of these things, their idea, does not change: The idea is definitive, it is sure, we even call it eternal” (LRD 325).

Literary language, however, remains torn. It is “made of uneasiness”; its position is “not very stable or secure.” On the one hand, language involves it in a deceit and a contradiction: While desiring to attain the absence of the thing absolutely, it nonetheless perceives that the “non-existence of the cat” is a “non-existence made word”; that is, it perceives its language as a completely material and objective reality. Here the word is an annoying embarrassment, a stupid block or hindrance that maliciously attests to the failure of language to attain the infinite movement it seeks and that can only be mitigated by “an endless sliding of ‘turns of phrase’ which do not lead anywhere. Thus is born the image that does not directly designate the thing but, rather, what the thing is not; it speaks of a dog instead of a cat” (LRD 326).

On the other hand, literary language cannot help asking after what was lost. Tormented, it cannot recover from that “murder Hegel speaks of”:

It recalls the first name which would be the murder Hegel speaks of. The “existant” was called out of its existence by the word, and it became being. This Lazare, veni foras [Lazarus, come forth] summoned the dark, cadaverous reality from its primordial depths and in exchange gave it only the life of the mind. Language knows that its kingdom is day and not the intimacy of the unrevealed; it knows that in order for the day to begin . . . something must be left out. Negation cannot be created out of anything but the reality of what it is negating; language derives its value and its pride from the fact that it is the achievement of this negation; but in the beginning, what was lost? The torment of language is what it lacks because of the necessity that it be the lack of precisely this. It cannot even name it. (LRD 326–27)

How can one seize hold of what is prior to the word, how is one to get at that primordial truth of things before language, when all that language has at its disposal is precisely the idealizing negation that causes that truth to retreat or that pushes that truth away? “How can I recover it, how can I turn around and look at what exists before, if all my power consists of making it into what exists after? The language of literature is a search for this moment which precedes literature [Comment le trouver, comment me retourner vers ce qui est avant, si tout mon pouvoir consiste á en faire ce qui est après? Le langage de la littérature est la recherche de ce moment qui la précède]” (LRD 327/316).

One might be tempted to read these formulations as an attempt to retrieve the timelessness of a prelapsarian purity. Indeed, Blanchot’s various references to “this woman,” “the flower,” “the cat as it exists,” “what man rejects by saying it,” etc. do little to dispel such a reading, invoking as they do an Edenic paradise of utopian fulfillment.¹⁸ Is Blanchot’s characterization of language here not, in fact, that of an impossible and tormented commitment to the before which the afterwardsness¹⁹ of words—the after-words?—can only ever honor by violating? Before attempting to answer this question, let us continue to follow the movements of the text. For contrary to what one might expect, it is not to the before of a living Lazarus on the nether-side of language that Blanchot will draw attention but to what remains unassimilated by any model of designation or representation. Almost immediately following the long passage cited above, Blanchot writes that the loss that torments literature, all the more intense for being insurmountable, is the all-too-literal “cadaverous ‘reality’” of the corpse: “Lazarus in the tomb and not Lazarus brought back into the daylight, the one who already smells bad, who is Evil, Lazarus lost and not Lazarus saved and brought back to life” (LRD 327). Next to its difficult sensibility, what is, I think, most exceptional about this passage is how the corpse is put “to work” as an emblem or figure of the before. By most standards, this choice would seem unconventional in the extreme. For if a corpse can be said to “work” as a figure at all, would it not be most likely to do so as a figure of the after, of the unworked and unworkable remainder of mortal existence? Or is there a sense in which the before already bears within it its own after-life? We will come back to this.

Whereas language had earlier acted as a hindrance and a barrier to ideal negation, at this stage of the argument it becomes the writer’s only hope. “What hope do I have of attaining the thing I push away? My hope lies in the materiality of language, in the fact that words are things too.” Referring back to the understanding of language as “ideal negation,” one for which the dead letter posed an irritating hindrance, Blanchot continues, “just now the reality of words was an obstacle. Now it is my only chance” (LRD 327). The chance for language to grasp what it has left behind turns out, in fact, to be very much within reach; it lies in the very materiality or thing-ness of language itself. As such, the flight of literature into the physicality of language will foreground the latter’s “rhythm, weight, mass, shape,” even the smear of the ink and the sheets of paper on which one writes. Its desire? To “become senseless” (LRD 327).

As Blanchot well knows however, this very attempt will turn out to be “a tragic endeavor”: Ultimately, literature cannot not reveal. The insanity of the effort to do so turns on an elaborate paradox, that of attempting to become “the revelation of what revelation destroys” (LRD 328) or to become antisense, which cannot help surreptitiously importing a meaning into this meaningless matter.²⁰ “If it were to become as mute as a stone, as passive as the corpse enclosed behind that stone,” Blanchot writes, “its decision to lose the capacity for speech would still be legible on the stone [la décision de perdre la parole continuerait à se lire sur la pierre] and would be enough to awaken that false corpse” (LRD 329/318). Even in the purest poetic spirit of refusal—of ideality, signification, and negation—literature, it seems, cannot help inscribing an epitaph on the tomb; it cannot avoid spiriting the corpse.²¹ After having established that every attempt to ground language either in its idealizing and eternalizing negation (pure sense) or in its brute materiality (pure senselessness) is doomed to find itself caught in a contradiction, Blanchot then turns to the question of their intermingling.

In an attempt to catch more precisely the irreducibly double-aspect of language, Blanchot returns to it in his summary of the two “sides” (deux versants) of language. The first side, that of “meaningful prose,” aims at expressing “things in a language that designates things according to what they mean” (LRD 332). This is the prosaic and healthful language of ideal negation, whose distrust of words, paradoxically enough, makes it perfectly adequate as everyday communication and speech. The second side is characterized by a “concern for the reality of things,” by “the being which protests against revelation” (LRD 330/319). On this side, “words are transformed . . . in them, physical weight is present as the stifling density of an accumulation of syllables that has lost all meaning” (LRD 331).

For our purposes, the particular constitution of each side is of less importance than is the question of their interrelatedness: Each is “contaminated” by the other—the language of ideal negation cannot escape its own irreducible materiality while the language of pure materiality cannot avoid signifying its own decision, even if it is one of a refusal or abandonment of meaning. But for Blanchot this does not imply that one side of language simply collapses into the other, or that their differences are ultimately reconcilable at a higher order of consciousness. Their enduring relation as partage—that is, an experience of both sharing and division—is crucial. Blanchot writes: “Literature is divided [est partagée] between these two sides. The problem is that even though they are apparently incompatible, they do not lead toward distinctly different works or goals, and that an art which purports to follow one side is already on the other” (LRD 331). What might be the implications of this partage between the two sides of language—an indivisible division, signifying both an incompatibility and an inseparability, an intimate proximity and an infinite distance, etc.—for our understanding of language or for an understanding of how consciousness might encounter it, say through practices of writing or reading?

Such a question raised at this particular juncture is far removed from the question of writing or readership that was posed in the first half of the essay. There, it was a question of a reading public or an audience whom a writer might attempt to keep in mind as she composes her works, but whose presence in the end would effectively prevent both the writer from writing and the reader from reading (LRD 306–7). What is at stake here involves the ordeal consciousness might possibly undergo when exposed to language’s two sides and the issue as to whether or not it can maintain any hold on its own experience.

In the first place, the most obvious aspect of language is that in order for it to be legible, words must “mean.” That is, they must point beyond themselves to that which in them enables representation, illumination, and comprehension. However, prior to any comprehension, understanding or illumination, it is the nonrepresentational and senseless materiality of language that first constitutes the ground or substratum of such a reading.

In the second place, a more complex and difficult issue involves the sense in which that same materiality, while making the act of reading possible, is also what possesses the potential to undermine or destabilize the security of the insights it may afford. For is it not the case that language’s materiality is precisely that aspect of linguistic power that resists accommodation to consciousness and as such, might threaten its sure footing? Whatever else one might hazard to say about it, the attempt to ground oneself with any kind of certainty in language is bound to produce an experience that is, at the very least, confusing: “Everyone understands that literature cannot be divided up, and that if you choose exactly where your place in it is, if you convince yourself that you really are where you wanted to be, you risk becoming very confused [c’est s’exposer à la plus grande confusion], because literature has already insidiously caused you to pass from one side to the other and changed you into something you were not before. This is its treachery; this is also its cunning version of the truth” (LRD 333, emphasis added). If it is indeed true that neither the writer nor the reader can possibly hope to find themselves on stable ground in language—if they do, Blanchot claims, they will immediately find themselves changed into something else—then tarrying with language means endlessly confronting an illegibility that an act of reading or writing can neither obliterate nor incorporate as an aspect of its own sense.²² The most we can say about such an experience, in fact, is that it bears the risk of being exposed to “something else,” to what Blanchot calls a “force that is capricious and impersonal, and says nothing, reveals nothing . . .” (330); an “impersonal power” with which “no one can do anything” (LRD 331); “an impersonal spontaneity” (333). The matter of language remains, then, as an uncanny trace of illegibility or a disquieting non-revelation within every “enlightened” experience of reading.

At this stage, it might be helpful to go back over some of the terrain we have covered thus far. First, we noted how literature is tormented (in a way that philosophy and ordinary language claim not to be²³) by the status of its own language in relation to what comes before—which, as we saw, is neither immediate sense-certainty nor “the life of the mind” but mortal life—that is, life that is already capable of dying. In light of that contention, we then noted how Blanchot submits the conventional relation between the terms of before and after to a complex and subtle transformation. For if their relation is normally conceived along the lines of a rupture or break, Blanchot’s contention is that the before is somehow continuous with the after, the corpse being that dead aspect of mortal existence from which language, thanks to its own materiality, ultimately manages not to break; rather, the abject corpse passes into the afterlife of language in and as the latter’s very thingliness.

What at the level of the prepositions of before and after we might be tempted to read as a temporal division reemerges, then, within language as its own division, the division of its very essence. That is to say, the division of existent being is itself not overcome by language but is carried into it. In precisely that sense, the relation between the before and the after cannot be said to be structured around a radical break or rupture—between, say, words and things—which might act to immunize language against what preceded it; in fact, the dead letter of language has retained something of what refuses to give itself as signification or, more accurately, what gives itself only in refusal.

Strictly speaking, then, between the before and the after there is both continuity and discontinuity. On the one hand, there is a survival of what has been left behind but on the other hand, that survival can only be conceived in terms of an enduring discontinuity within language itself. For if the task Blanchot has set for language is to recuperate the corpse-like before, the unheimlich and abject stature of which would be enough to stop anyone dead in their tracks, into the after (what we called, only half in jest, “after-words”), the “accomplishment” of that task only seems possible by virtue of the division inherent to language itself—namely, in its two sides that are simultaneously irreducible to and inseparable from one another. When consciousness attempts to find sure footing on these sides, it does so only at the risk of losing its train of thought, of getting confused and losing its place, its own mastery waylaid by a “something else” that, when pursued, “vanishes into thin air” (LRD 335).

The movement here clearly cannot be described in terms of a propelling-forward, a progression, or a safe recuperation of what is past. It would probably be more apt to describe it in Blanchot’s terms as the vacillation of a “strange slipping back and forth” (LRD 338) or, stranger still, as the nagging distraction of a Kafkaesque “insect-like buzzing” that never attains the status of an idea to be understood, comprehended or explained, “because the inexplicable emerges in it” (LRD 340). Indeed, Blanchot’s complex presentation of language makes any implications it might have for an understanding of its temporality deeply elusive. In fact, if we foreground the sense in Blanchot that the effort of language is precisely to leave nothing behind—not even the corpse—does this not violate the very condition upon which a future seems possible, which is, as Blanchot himself acknowledges, that “for the day to begin . . . something must be left out [pour que le jour commence . . . quelque chose doit être exclu]” (LRD 326/316)? Be that as it may, it nonetheless remains the case that the analysis of the after-words in relation to their before gestures toward a structure of retrospection, one whose transformations might very well be pointing to some other sense of futurity. Is it not the case, after all, that at a very minimum, retrospection can be said to be the attempt to give the past an other future?

The belated act of retrospection is often conceived in terms of how it belatedly confers on the past a sense of futurity. Lacan, for example, succinctly sums up the task of Freudian psychoanalysis as the opening-up of a space for retrospection so that the subject can restructure the event at a later date (Lacan’s—Freudian—word for this belatedness is nachträglich) and can “reorder past contingencies by conferring on them the sense of necessities to come.”²⁴ While Lacan underscores how this method is the means by which retrospection enables “an assumption of his history by the subject,” it seems crucial to highlight how that act of assumption is inseparable from giving past events a sense of the future, one that Lacan describes in terms of “necessities to come.” Now, if the potentiality of this future seems, in Lacan, to be circumscribed or captured by the sense of an after-the-fact anticipation or expectation of the present, the question remains as to how to situate Blanchot’s structure of retrospection in relation to Lacan’s.

Blanchot’s formulation, in fact, seems to complicate the sense in which the futurity of the before is restricted to the one conferred on it by the belated anticipation of a retrospective act. In fact, the disquiet of his formulation arises from the sense in which, for Blanchot, the before is of a radically different order than a retrospectively ascribed “necessity to come.” In particular, its force seems to be virtually indiscernible from the unworkable sense—the extreme blockage of which is maximized by its corpse-like illegibility—in which something of that “pastness” exceeds the grasp of a consciousness seeking to capture it without remainder and which consequently is not so much transformed by the after into something more accommodating or manageable—Lacan’s necessity “to come”—as it is carried into the after as an enduring material remnant. In short, what may very well be at stake in this unreadable remnant of the before is its sustained potential to destabilize or disrupt a retrospective assumption of it. In this respect, perhaps we could propose that when Blanchot refers to the anonymity (or the “impersonal”) of language, it is to a sense of this quasi-permanent and uncertain futurity that he is gesturing. Furthermore, at the risk of conflating two distinct registers of discourse, one might also suggest that what is given voice here informs what will be articulated, much later, on the opening page of The Writing of the Disaster as the time of the disaster:

We are on the edge of disaster without being able to situate it in the future: it is rather always already past, and yet we are on the edge or under the threat, all formulations which would imply the future—that which is yet to come—if the disaster were not that which does not come, that which has put a stop to every arrival. To think the disaster (if this is possible, and it is not possible inasmuch as we suspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in which to think it.²⁵

In “Dreadful Reading: Blanchot on Hegel,” Andrzej Warminski repeatedly asserts that in “Literature and the Right to Death,” Blanchot rereads the Hegelian motifs of death and work “in an other place, to the side,” that is, in terms of writing.²⁶ To which, I think, we could add that in doing so he also rereads and transforms the mourning-work of history. If Blanchot does turn the tables on history by rereading its dialectical mechanism in terms of reading and writing, is it conceivable that the tables be turned once again? That is, is it conceivable that Blanchot himself be asked to turn the tables and reread, in still an other place, his own writing in terms of history?

§

Every work is an occasional work: this simply means that each work has a beginning, that it begins at a certain moment in time and that that moment in time is part of the work, since without it the work would have been an insurmountable problem, nothing more than the impossibility of writing it.

—Maurice Blanchot

The text Après coup (1983) is among the few in Blanchot’s oeuvre that scholars devoted to his work have seemed reluctant to engage in any sustained way. While the text is sometimes mentioned in the course of other analyses to support arguments that are not its proper focus, seldom is it taken to be a work with a force of its own.²⁷ The reasons for this lack of engagement are doubtless manifold—its brevity, its status as excursus or addendum (it is an after-word for the reedition of two little known interwar récits)—but one could speculate that what has proven to be more than a little off-putting for those readers of Blanchot who seek to trace the enigmatic textual force at work in Blanchot’s writing from inside of that writing might be its curious lack of an inside.

Many aspects of Après coup indeed suggest that it belongs to the most conventional of genres, so much so that one of its readers has characterized it in the most neutral terms as “a brief retrospective essay” and another has argued that it goes “against the grain of critical approaches” to Blanchot’s work and promotes “a consistent authorial identity above and beyond change in time.”²⁸ To this we could add consideration of its writing style, which is uncharacteristically programmatic; its perspective, which has been suggested to foreclose theoretical readings in favor of a more direct or constative approach (exceptional as it is, Gary Mole suggests, Blanchot is here commenting “directly on his own work” [33]); and finally its tone, which oscillates between fatigue and a pedantry or parabasis. In short, if one can say as much, it is difficult to read Après coup as a text.

In this regard, the intention here will neither be to “rescue” Après coup from a supposedly undeserved theoretical oblivion nor to make an inflated claim for its importance within Blanchot’s oeuvre. Rather, I simply hope to highlight the ways in which the text indeed adopts the conventional signs of a retrospective essay—the signature, the heightened awareness of time’s passage and importantly, the retrospective aim par excellence of giving the past an other future—but that it does so in a way that transforms these conventions to a degree significant enough to warrant consideration. First, then, it will be necessary to say a word or two about the provenance of the texts collected in the volume and to highlight some of the latter’s structural aspects. As I will suggest, its very make-up attests to the difficulties involved in establishing the time of Blanchot’s writings. Uniting in one book writings of a radically discontinuous provenance, the collection itself speaks volumes about the forces of continuity and discontinuity that are put into play there.

Après coup was first published in 1983, having been written to accompany the reedition of two interwar récits, entitled “The Idyll” and “The Last Word.”²⁹ These two stories were first published independently of one another in 1947, but they had been written over a decade prior to this: The 1947 version of “The Idyll” bears on its closing page the date “juillet 1936.” As Michael Holland has suggested, this story must have already seemed like an anachronistic curiosity even on the occasion of its first publication in 1947. Not only was it over a decade old but it evinced a style, what Holland describes as “a relation between story and form of the most conventionally self-contained sort,”³⁰ that Blanchot was already in the process of surpassing.

What Holland leaves out of his account of the publication of these stories so long after their having been written is that, from the vantage point of Après coup, the interval between 1936 and 1947 had to have made the stories seem like a forlorn relic in an altogether different historical sense: I am, of course, referring to the devastation of the war. I mention this not to cast a stain on Holland’s excellent account (it is of little relevance at this point of his analysis), but to place the dating of the stories squarely in the context of our focus on Après coup. It seems to me that the belated first publication of the stories generates the sense that, beyond any particular decision on Blanchot’s part, “datedness” has to be seen as an essential aspect of their history, almost as if they were revenants coming from another world.

In any case, we have not yet reached the “last word” as regards the publishing history of these stories. Before their publication together with Après coup, the stories were then republished (with minor changes) together for the first time in 1951 under the title Le Ressassement éternel,³¹ a volume that was again reprinted in facsimile in 1970. Finally thirteen years later, in 1983, “Après coup” précédé par “Le Ressassement éternel” appeared. As Holland contends, these two conventional stories, “however inert and self-contained in appearance,” remain the single most reworked and continuously “re-written” pieces of writing in Blanchot’s entire oeuvre.³² If the act of republication can indeed be conceived less straightforwardly than is usually the case; that is, if we can conceive it as a reflective act of rewriting or renarration, the issue immediately arises as to what status to accord the “postface” (as it is called in its English translation). Is it to be read as a “commentary on” that stands at a remove from the rewriting, or is it part of the putting-back-into-play of these texts?

A brief digression into the text’s 1983 title suggests that Blanchot was doing something more complicated here too. While at one level the title “Après coup” précédé par “Le Ressassement éternel” confirms the compositional order of the text (that is, the postface comes after the 1951 Le Ressassement éternel), the sequence of the title actually reverses it, privileging the after over the before.³³ That is to say that the ordering of texts presents them in chronological order (1951; 1984) but that the title disrupts or destabilizes this ordering, turning Le Ressassement éternel into a sort of foreword for the “post-face” that follows. Furthermore, the title’s emphasis on the 1983 Après coup is such that the après coup reflection takes priority over the two stories or at least renders the récits themselves secondary in importance to their uptake and replay in and as the preface to Après coup. This repositioning opens up the possibility that Après coup is not to be read simply as a detached and straightforwardly retrospective commentary on a couple of fifty-year-old stories but as a central, if not primary, aspect of their rewriting.³⁴ Though, that would be not so much to say that Après coup is, like the narratives that “precede” it, simply a fiction, as it is to say that the ressassement éternel of these stories from within the space of Après coup provides Blanchot with the opportunity to articulate a relation to history that is neither direct nor, strictly speaking, chronological.³⁵ At the expense of a reflection on the narratives themselves, then, it is to this aspect of Après coup that the following pages will be devoted.

Time Lapse or, Back to the Future

At the very core of Après coup is a concern with the relation between writing and history. Rereading his early narratives, Blanchot considers them in relation to historical events—more precisely, to the event of the Holocaust—that at least one of the narratives, “The Idyll,” in its evocation of a penitentiary workhouse with its “vast rows of showers” and arduous yet pointless work-routines may be seen to parallel in eerie ways, if not to predict outright. Though, the very first lines of Après coup complicate its appointed task of retrospection.

In a gesture that will be familiar to readers of his other works (not least, the first half of “Literature and the Right to Death”), Blanchot first calls into question the project of reading retrospectively by problematizing the status of the writer as one who possesses authority over his or her own work: “Prior to the work,” he writes, “there is no artist—since it is the production that produces the producer. . . . But if the written work produces and substantiates the writer, once created it bears witness only to his dissolution, his disappearance, his defection and, to express it more brutally, his death. . . . Thus, before the work, the writer does not exist; after the work, he is no longer there” (AC 59–60). The author’s time is quite literally impossible to measure, suspended as it is between the “not yet” and the “no longer” of writing. Under these conditions, Blanchot is asking what authority the writer can ultimately be granted to reflect on what he has written, when it is precisely his fate to be exiled from it. Both created and destroyed by writing, the writer, it seems, is never there at the right time to reflect on what he has written, much less to reappropriate it or to explain it to others: “From the ‘not yet’ to the ‘no longer’—this is the path of what we call the writer, not only his time, which is always suspended, but what brings him into existence through an interrupted becoming [non seulement son temps toujours suspendu, mais ce qui le fait être par un devenir d’interruption]” (AC 60/86).

No sooner has Blanchot situated the impossibility of retrospection in relation to the time, toujours suspendu, of writing than he recasts the crisis of self-recognition implied by it into terms that are more readily discernable. As if in response to a channeled request, he writes, “I have been asked—someone inside me has asked—to communicate with myself, as a way of introducing these two old stories, so old (nearly fifty years old) that . . . it is not possible for me to know who wrote them, how they were written, and to what unknown urgency they were responding” (AC 64). Indeed, retrospection is always made more difficult when called to a remote past. It was, simply, too long ago and the aging Blanchot (in his late seventies) complains of a failing memory. Though even as he reflects on how flawed his memory has become over the years, the greatest threat to understanding these old stories, he suggests, has little to do with the expanse of time separating him from their composition. Rather, throughout Après coup the act of retrospection will be persistently complicated, even impaired or blocked, by the future. “Nothing,” writes Blanchot, “could have prepared me to write these innocent stories that resound with murderous signs of the future [les présages meurtriers des temps futurs]” (64/92).

The reflections in Après coup present the future in multiple ways but it certainly cannot be said that they ever culminate in a stable perspective. At once a prophetic tone internal to the stories in question and the force of a history des temps futurs, Blanchot reflects on the future as a dimension of time somehow in excess of itself. In his brief discussion of one of the stories, for instance, Blanchot suggests that perhaps it claims “to be a prophetic work, announcing to the past a future that is already there [annonçant au passé un avenir déjà là]” (AC 65/94). Against the totalizing gesture of the story, evinced by its temporal implosion of past and future, is set still another, far more deeply unretractable future: “Prophetic also,” he writes, “but for me (today) in a way that is even more inexplicable, since I can only interpret it through events that took place and were not known until much later, in such a way that this later knowledge does not illuminate but withdraws understanding from the narrative [de sorte que cette connaissance ultérieure n’éclaire pas, mais retire la compréhension au récit]” (AC 65/94, emphasis added). That the historical future fails to offer a perspective from which Blanchot’s early narratives can be comprehended is arguably as much a statement about the act of historical retrospection itself as it is about literature’s relation to history. At one level, it is fairly obvious that any attempt to interpret the récit as “the reading of an already menacing future” (AC 67/96) is bound to end in an impasse. In this sense, Blanchot is resistant to its seeming convergence with history: “History,” he writes, “does not control meaning [L’histoire ne détient pas le sens], any more than meaning, which is always ambiguous—plural—may be reduced to its historical realization, were this the most tragic and weightiest imaginable” (AC 67/96, translation modified).³⁶

On the one hand, this statement is pointing more or less straightforwardly to the literary narratives’ excess of meaning, one that cannot be reduced to whatever happens, before or after the fact, in history. On the other hand, however, given that the apparent task Blanchot has set himself is to consider these narratives in relation to history, could he not also be suggesting that there might be an excess of meaning right at the heart of history? As an instance of this excess, Blanchot’s gesture of pointing to the violence done to meaning—“always ambiguous”—when it is reduced to its “historical realization” is itself an ambiguous statement: Is he referring solely to the meaning of the narratives in question or to meaning as such in relation to historical events? To rephrase the latter half of the question slightly: Might history not mean more than it realizes?

For try as he might, Blanchot seems nonetheless incapable of not thinking about it. “And yet,” he writes in faltering prose, “difficult, after the fact, not to think about it [Et pourtant, difficile, après coup, de n’y pas songer]” (AC 66/95, translation modified). For Blanchot, it is both impossible to read the récit in terms of a history “to come” (it is ultimately “a story . . . which that death [in Auschwitz] cannot darken”) and, it seems, impossible not to. In raising the issue of the problematic conflation of the two registers (that of literature with that of history), it seems unlikely that Blanchot is attempting to create a purely literary space cut off from history and immune to its effects (we will have more to say about this shortly). Rather, the impasse created by an attempt to resolve the thoroughgoing uneasiness of their relation becomes the occasion for a broader consideration of the difficulties involved in the task of taking up history retrospectively.

In the lengthy passage cited above, the future imminent to the past, described as “inexplicable,” is of central importance to this questioning. Indeed, the passage abounds with time lapses as it multiplies the moments at which the task of retrospection has failed to produce understanding. From the perspective of 1983—that of “(today)”—what does become clear is how preposterous it would be to grant the young writer the powers of a clairvoyant. The literary narrative does not constitute a prediction; it did not see the future coming. More startling, though, is the contention made at a slight remove both from the narratives themselves as well as from the aims of a straightforwardly retrospective understanding, that the future was not even seen when it arrived; only later, “much later” Blanchot says, would there be knowledge of these events. But even then—perhaps especially then—the advantage of belatedness would still fail to generate a sense of the past’s necessary future.

Thus, all of these staggered moments of time-lapse—the “before” of writing the narratives, the after of “what took place” whose knowledge would itself have to wait, and so on—prove insufficient to locate the past’s futurity, even that of “today.” No amount of time, it seems, will do. In the process of submitting his own literary production to historical understanding, Blanchot remodels the “après coup” in such a way that it bears little resemblance to the advantages of hindsight that have come to be expected from such retrospective encounters. The specificity of the future that Blanchot invokes—the singular event that he refers to, simply, as “Auschwitz”—resides in its continual refusal to give itself to understanding.

Given the radical singularity of the text’s articulation, one might wonder what kinds of general insights it might afford. For the historical specificity of Blanchot’s retrospective dilemma proves difficult to generalize beyond his own example: Indeed, it hardly seems to have any exemplary value at all. And yet it is precisely to its exemplarity that Blanchot turns when, at the essay’s conclusion and partially in reference to his own narrative, he writes: “A narrative [récit] from before Auschwitz. At whatever date it is written, every narrative [tout récit] henceforth will be from before Auschwitz [A quelque date qu’il puisse être écrit, tout récit désormais sera d’avant Auschwitz]” (AC 69, translation modified).

This last claim is strange and disconcerting, not least due to how its first phrase (“At whatever date”) contends that time is of virtually no significance to it and then immediately supplements that contention with a seemingly clear temporal index, “from before Auschwitz.” To this formulation (complex enough) is added désormais, a difficult word that means “in future,” “henceforth” or “from now on” and that thus situates the claim as departing from today and stretching out into an indeterminate future, possibly into what Derrida has called a “permanent future.”³⁷ With so many conflicting temporal and nontemporal registers intersecting in this statement, one feels as if the resources for sorting it out were lacking.

In a brief reading of these lines, Vivian Liska has argued that their aim is to shield or protect narrative from disaster. She writes: “In using the indefinite and shifting désormais, ‘from now on,’ he avoids actually inscribing the fissure caused by the event into literature, transporting it [that is, literature] instead ‘backwards,’ to the safe haven of the potentially ‘idyllic’ time ‘before.’” In much the same vein, Geoffrey Hartman claims that in contrast to Adorno’s statement about poetry after Auschwitz with which he seeks to “shield the Holocaust from profanation. . . ; Blanchot is concerned rather with defending art.”³⁸ The suggestion shared by Hartman and Liska is that the before of Auschwitz constitutes an epoch or era untainted by disaster, a possibly innocent time into which the displacement of narrative will ensure its safeguarding. Equally clear is the extent to which, although Liska does note how Blanchot “disposes of chronological order,” both of these readings reintroduce or presuppose for their analyses a conception of linear and objective chronological time, one wherein the before remains untainted and even untouched by the after.³⁹ However, is it not precisely this linear temporality that the passage is calling into question? Are the multiple temporal vectors of the passage not precisely that which is in need of explanation, constituting as they do its central enigma?

In the context of Après coup, “d’avant Auschwitz” signals something considerably other than, or considerably more than, the safe era of a historical “before.” In addition to its straightforward understanding as a retrospective historical ascription, d’avant Auschwitz is also, at practically every level of Blanchot’s text, bound to a sense of inexplicability, disquiet, and, indeed, danger: Although Blanchot can certainly be understood here as encouraging—to some extent—the notion that the Holocaust was “incomprehensible” it must, I think, also be read as the index of the nonexperience of unforeseeable imminence. Would this not make the “idyllic past” even more uncanny and disturbing, not despite the fact that it is situated “before” but precisely because of it? For, the before is not so much configured as a past that is categorically and temporally distinct from that which will have come to pass as it is figured in dangerous proximity to it. In other words, Blanchot does not seem to be suggesting that the récits are not touched by Auschwitz: They are, rather, not yet touched by it. From this perspective, might Blanchot’s own tenacious theorizing the time of the après coup not itself be the enactment of a response to trauma?⁴⁰ For if, as Blanchot claims, all narratives will henceforth be “from before Auschwitz,” what seems disconcertingly straightforward is that the “before Auschwitz”—the past, namely, that did not see the future coming—may lie in the future, in the unsettling and permanent possibility of its traumatic repetition.

§

Yet for all that, it is difficult to leave it there. Blanchot is explicitly involving himself here in a strangely damning assessment of the récit, strange not least because of how its impact is registered in a matter-of-fact tone solely as a function of time. An account, however provisional, is no doubt necessary. For, by making the récit a possible accomplice—without agent or act—to a certain kind of traumatic repetition, has he not resolved altogether too many of the tensions governing the relation between literature and history, playing rather too much the role of prophet?

In the essay “LIVING ON: Border Lines,” Derrida has described the deeply ambivalent relation that Blanchot’s oeuvre has to the genre of the récit, arguing that it is “a word that Blanchot has repeatedly insisted upon and contested, reclaimed and rejected, set down and (then) erased.”⁴¹ Lacoue-Labarthe has recently agreed with Derrida on this point, though he claims that Blanchot’s relation to the genre is even more straightforward and categorical: “We know moreover,” he writes, “that Blanchot explicitly, even solemnly denied or dismissed narrative as such.”⁴² Nonetheless, it remains difficult to know how to read the tenor of the claim in Après coup: Is it to be read as the final dismissal of the récit or its final blow (coup)? Is it a condemnation, a death sentence, a challenge, or an injunction?

There are doubtless other possibilities than the ones I have listed here. Though it is undoubtedly problematic that Blanchot himself declines to be more specific regarding any relevant differentiations at stake in his use of the term (récit designates virtually any kind of narrative), nonetheless an answer can be prepared by returning to the question of literature and in particular to its beginning, which for Blanchot consists in its own self-questioning. The forms of the récit to which he explicitly refers in Après coup—the récit-fiction for which Sophie’s Choice is the referent (AC 98)⁴³; the récit as l’histoire that, as we have seen, “does not control meaning”—all point toward a sense of the récit that is characterized by a marked resistance to self-questioning. They are, rather, récits that quite possibly embody the pretense of having, or indeed of being, the answer.

In this respect, could one not argue that Après coup, that is to say this text itself, puts back into play aspects of this questioning in order to bring it to bear on an impossible retrospective account of history? If it is possible to conceive Blanchot actively presenting the past as traumatic, it would thus be to expose a dimension of the future imminent in traumatic occurrence, one for which a narrative structure of recuperation, recovery or closure could never provide an account: its irrecuperable dimension of shock, surprise, or of a radical break in expectation. For Blanchot, there is no narrative or temporal logic—no logic at all—that can sustain the passage from the “before” of Auschwitz to its occurrence, much less to its relative position on an historical continuum.⁴⁴

While Blanchot certainly shared in the political injunction of “Do not forget,” he squarely rejected the notion that any mode of knowledge or representation could deliver a future severed from it. In the passages we have been reading, the sense is rather that narratives presenting themselves as a curative response to the ruptures and wounds of historical trauma are to some degree complicit with traumatic repetition if only because the latter’s imminent futurity—its shock, discontinuity, rupture, and interruption—must, of necessity, disappear from those responses. That trauma may always interrupt claims made by narrative to have finally put it to rest, in the form of its own shocking reemergence: This, for Blanchot, constitutes the indiscernible condition of all political futures as well as it constitutes all modes of responsibility vis-à-vis the past, from now on.

In the extremity of these formulations, Blanchot contends not only that narrative does not do justice to the traumatic past but more specifically, that it fails at that task because narrative flattens out its time and ultimately effaces the dimension of futurity implicit to trauma that cannot possibly be squared with the punctuality of a narration. Geoffrey Hartman has recently described Blanchotian time in terms that emphasize its lack of punctuation: “Time loses its potentially redemptive aspect; it is not a present extended between meaningful beginning and meaningful end, or a history of disasters in whose aftermath we live, and which gives us importance by that fact. We glimpse a state without such forcible punctuation, and so without the possibility of a récit.”⁴⁵ The indictment of narrative that we witness in Après coup is, I think, inseparable from the sense in which it tends to spare its readers from being exposed to the futurity of the threat permanently posed by trauma. For its retrospective structure must, of necessity, presuppose that the threat itself is passé, that it has been overcome.

For Blanchot this is no small matter, since it neutralizes the political dimension of the past. What Leslie Hill has pointed out, that for Blanchot “it is the future—a future without present or presence—that is the only properly political dimension,”⁴⁶ holds equally true for the past as it does for the present. Leveling down the time of traumatic occurrence to a historical moment, narrative would also substitute for the void or interval, which Blanchot is intent on keeping open, a teleological fiction that would subject to an occlusion the very opening of history to itself as an experience of the future. Or, to put it slightly differently, it would efface the dimension of shock, surprise, and blow (coup) by turning all accidents into chronological necessities, après coup. Even those narratives that, for the most well-intentioned reasons, seek to put an end to traumatic histories by relegating them to the past can only do so by effacing the very dimension of futurity that is most unique to traumatic historicity, and indeed, to the very possibility of historicity itself. If the récit-fiction bears the brunt of Blanchot’s criticism here, it is because what is in question is a future that no narrative of its kind could ever represent, let alone see coming, but for which narratives “at whatever date they were written” will nonetheless bear some responsibility, après coup.

Admittedly the perspective, if we can even call it that, offered by Après coup—Blanchot calls it “this perspective (this non-perspective)” (69)—is a dim one, generated as it is on the grounds of a retro-perspective whose only continuity between past and present is inseparable from the gap or interval separating them. Nonetheless, Blanchot’s deep reservations about an ethos of narrative representation that seeks to efface this gap do not amount to a withdrawal from political exigencies nor do they mean an abandonment of the obligation to bear historical witness. In fact, Blanchot’s aporetic ethics of memory are inseparable from his refusal of the impulse to seek closure. For what in Après coup is articulated as disjunction implies, at other points, an injunction, an injunction to mourning as a mode of vigilance that, because it neither produces knowledge nor relies upon it, is incessant: “In the work of mourning, it is not grief that works: grief keeps watch.”⁴⁷

On this point, Blanchot himself would become increasingly insistent. In “Do Not Forget,” a letter written in 1988 to Salomon Malka, Blanchot makes a claim as if in response to a voice incanted from the outside: “Must it be repeated (yes, it must) that Auschwitz, an event which endlessly interpellates us, imposes, through testimony, the imprescriptable duty not to forget: remember, beware of forgetfulness and yet, in that faithful memory, never will you know.”⁴⁸ This injunction had appeared some years earlier in the following form: “And how, in fact, can one accept not to know? We read books on Auschwitz. The wish of all, in the camps the last wish: know what has happened, do not forget, and at the same time never will you know.”⁴⁹ In underscoring that we “read books on Auschwitz,” Blanchot suggests that documentation and historical reference are needed. But at the same time, he also suggests that there is a limit to historical knowledge. Attending to the limits of historical understanding does not, however, mean putting a term to memory. Rather, for Blanchot, those limits of what we can know constitute memory as an obligation without limit: “Keep watch over absent meaning.” In thus reciting the oft-repeated formula of post-Holocaust ethics, “Do not forget,” he also translates it into an infinitely more difficult task.⁵⁰

Après coup supplements the injunction to “know without knowing”: With the suggestion that the futurity of the disaster’s occurrence irreducibly belongs to this nonknowledge, Blanchot also contends that this futurity is one that will never answer to expectations, much less conform to them, even after the fact. In this regard, the disquieting vacillation that takes place on the pages of Après coup can itself be understood as a ressassement éternel, within which it is not just the meaning of the words that is transmitted but a two-fold performance: that of a caesura within the retrospective subject and simultaneously, that of an enjoinder to displace the claims of historical narrative to have safely recuperated the past, to bear witness—impossibly—to that which escapes historical presentation precisely because it lies in the interstices of history presented as linear narrative.

The ways in which Blanchot’s postwar and post-récit writings attest to his vigilance over the “absent meaning” of disaster has been thoroughly attested, contested, and, at times, detested.⁵¹ No doubt it will continue to be. All that needs to be stressed here is that Blanchot’s notion of futurity does not involve a deferred present on the order of a “horizon of expectation,” the contingency of which will always turn into a necessity as it passes into a meaningful past. Rather, Blanchot’s understanding of the future is inseparable from its contingency in the past—namely, from the inability to have seen it coming. In this sense, his project in Après coup is aimed at interrupting the time of the assured orders of retrospective presentation, narrative, and history so that this aspect of the past’s future remain, if not meaningful, then at least jarring to signification. To his readers who might see this project as pessimistic, despairing and groundless, there is perhaps no ultimate rejoinder except by pointing out that, for Blanchot, in no way was it to constitute an alibi for entrusting ourselves to failure (which would, in any case, involve a rigid set of expectations) or for abdicating on the need to make decisions. On the one hand, decision-making is itself dependent upon the ordeal of undecidability that is its condition of possibility. On the other hand, a nonredemptive account of memory open to—indeed grounded in—what it cannot possibly capture might be sufficient to open up the present or rather, to pose it as a question.

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That the fact of the concentration camps, the extermination of the Jews and the death camps where death continued its work, are for history an absolute that interrupted history, this one must say, without, however, being able to say anything else.

—Maurice Blanchot

In quite a different sense, it is also worth pointing out that from somewhere beyond the end of Après coup (the text proper abruptly comes to a close with the word Auschwitz), without being able to say anything else, Blanchot nonetheless adds a further remark. Another step is taken, that is, a step (not) beyond.⁵² The supplementary remark extends the text beyond the point of its having something to say. Just one more thing, Blanchot seems to be saying. Is this remark to be considered as a prolongation of the end or its interruption? Whatever the textual status of the remark that follows, in it Blanchot makes a complex invocation of hope, complicated not least because it is a hope that he nonetheless feels himself unjustified to possess: “I cannot hope for ‘The Idyll’ or ‘The Last Word’ to be read from this perspective (this non-perspective). And yet death without words [la mort sans phrases] remains something to be thought about—perhaps endlessly, to the very end. ‘A voice comes from the other shore. A voice interrupts the saying of what has already been said’ (Emmanuel Levinas)” (AC 100). If reading from this (non)perspective is ultimately a task that Blanchot cannot hope to ask of his readers, there is nonetheless an invocation made by a voice at the very periphery of this postscript, an other voice that is interruption itself. From within that very interruption of the text’s end, then, interrupting Blanchot, interrupting the end’s punctuality, a voice coming from “the other shore” is still audible, still within reach. A voice, in other words, interrupts “what has already been said” about la mort sans phrases of “Auschwitz” with an invitation to listen.