This title is not a provocation, no more than it is a cover for an insidious kidnapping attempt. It is not a question of trying to smuggle Blanchot over to the side of the new political correctness (and thus indecency) that takes the form of a “return to religion,” as unsound and insipid as are all “returns.”
It is merely a question of this. Blanchot’s thought is demanding, vigilant, uneasy, and alert enough not to have thought itself obliged to adhere to the atheistic correctness or requisite expression of antireligious feeling that was de rigueur in his day. Not that his thought was in any way caught up in a countervailing declaration of faith. It is true that Blanchot affirms a form of atheism, but he does so only to dismiss atheists and theists alike.
(That takes place in a major text in The Infinite Conversation, “Atheism and Writing: Humanism and the Cry,” in which atheism is associated with writing.1 I shall return to this point, without, however, quoting or analyzing this text, no more than I will any other. In the context of and space allotted for this note, no analysis can be carried out. I will limit myself to allusions to a few Blanchotian topoi in order to suggest a direction for subsequent work.)
To reject in the same gesture both atheism and theism means to consider first and foremost the point that the atheism of the West (or the double atheism of monotheism: the one it causes and the one it secretly bears within itself) has thus far never pitted against or set in the place of God anything other than a different figure, instance, or Idea of the Supreme punctuation of a sense: an end, a good, a parousia—that is, an accomplished presence, especially that of man. It is for that very reason that what is at stake in the association of atheism with writing—a provisional one, preliminary to the joint deposition of the claims of theism and atheism—is the displacement of atheism in the direction of an absenting of sense, of which, it is true, so far no notable atheistic figure has been capable (unless it may be in the figure, so close to Blanchot, of the atheology of Bataille—of which I will say no more here).
The “absent sense,” that expression Blanchot sometimes risks, does not designate a sense whose essence or truth is to be found in its absence. That would be transformed ipso facto into a modality of presence no less substantial than the presence most assured, most being. But an “absent sense” makes sense in and by its very absenting, in such a way that, in sum, it never stops not “making sense.” Thus it is that “writing” designates for Blanchot—as well as in the community of thinking that connects him with Bataille and Adorno, Barthes and Derrida—the movement of exposure to the flight of sense that withdraws signification from “sense” in order to give it the very sense of that flight—an élan, an opening, an indefatigable exposure that consequently does not even “flee,” that flees flight as well as presence. Neither nihilism nor the idolatry of a signified (and/or a signifier). This is what is at stake in an “atheism” that owes it to itself to deny itself the position of the negation it proffers, and the assurance of every sort of presence that could substitute for that of God—that is, the presence of the signifier of absolute signification or signifiability.
Now it so happens that Blanchot’s text is devoid of any interest in religion (beyond the fact that a Christian—a specifically Catholic—culture shows through here and there in a remarkable way, which will have to be examined elsewhere), yet the name God is not simply absent from it. Precisely, one might affirm that it occupies, with the text, the very particular place of a name that flees and yet returns, finding itself alternately (not very frequently, but often enough to be noticeable) firmly distanced, then evoked in its very distance as the site or as the index of a form of intrigue of the absenting of sense.
(Again, although it is totally out of the question to go into the texts here, I simply suggest a rapid re-reading of Thomas the Obscure [first and second versions], The Infinite Conversation, and The Writing of Disaster or The Last to Speak,2 to verify at least from a formal point of view the presence of the word God—even if at times only latently—and the manifestly diverse, complex, or even enigmatic modalities of its role or tenor.)
If the name God comes in the place of an absenting of sense, or in the line of flight, so to speak, and in the perspective at once infinite and without depth of field of that same line of flight, that is primarily because this name does not involve an existence but precisely the nomination (and this is neither designation nor signification) of that absenting. There is, then, in this respect, no “question of God” that is to be asked as the ritualistic question of the existence or nonexistence of a supreme being. Such a question cancels itself out automatically (as we have known since Kant, and in fact from much earlier), since a supreme being would have to be indebted for its being or for being altogether to some authority or some power (terms obviously very inappropriate) impossible to classify within the order of beings.
This is why the most precious gift of philosophy is, for Blanchot, not even in the operation of the negation of the existence of God, but in a simple shrinking away, a dissipation of that existence. Thought does not think unless it be from this point of departure.
Blanchot, therefore, neither asks nor authorizes any “question of God,” but he additionally posits and says that that question “is not to be asked.” This means that it is not a question, that it does not correspond to the schema of the demand for the assignment of a place within being (“What is … ?” or “Is there …?”). God is not within the jurisdiction of a question. That does not mean that he falls within an affirmation that would answer the question in advance. Nor does he fall within a negation. It is not that there is or is not a God. It is, quite differently, that there is the name God, or rather that the name God is spoken. This name corresponds to a statement of the question, whether it is a question of the being (the “What?”), of the origin (the “Through what?”), or of sense (the “For what?”). If all questions intend a “what,” a something, the name God corresponds to the order, the register, or the modality of what is not, or has not, any thing.
Moreover, this name sometimes appears in Blanchot alongside words such as being (as taken from Heidegger), or neutral. For them as well, the question is not to be asked, for it is already deposited within them. But they are words (concepts), whereas God is a name (without concept). The name God must, then, represent something other than a concept here, more precisely, it must bear and bring to a head a trait common to names as such: to be at the extremity and the extenuation of sense.
The same may be said, no doubt, of this name and of the name Thomas, who might be called the eponymous hero of Blanchot’s writing. In the story titled Thomas the Obscure, a narration in the course of which God appears and intervenes on several occasions, the name Thomas is sometimes referred to as “the word Thomas.” The word thauma, in Greek, means marvel, prodigy, miracle. As a concept, “Thomas” presents the miracle or mystery of the name qua name.
The name God is said by Blanchot, on occasion, to be “too imposing.” That qualification, mixed with fear or reverence, is open to two interpretations. Either this name is too imposing because it claims to impose, and impose itself, as the keystone of an entire system of sense, or else it is majestic and awesome to the degree that it reveals the nonsignification of names. In the second case, this name names a sovereign power of the name that beckons—which is very different from signifying—toward that absenting of sense such that no absence can come to supply a supposedly lost or rejected presence. “God,” then, would name neither the God subject to sense nor the negation of this in favor of another subject of sense or non-sense. God would be the name of that which—or of he or of she who—in the name escapes nomination to the degree that nomination can always border on sense. In this hypothesis, this name would de-name names in general, while persisting in naming, that is, in calling. That which is called, and that toward which it is called, is in no regard of another order than what Blanchot designates, on occasion, “the emptiness of the sky.” But the appeal to this emptiness, and in it, inserts in this name a sort of ultimate punctuation—though without a last word … to the abandonment of sense that also forms the truth of an abandonment to sense insofar as the latter exceeds itself. The name God would indicate or proffer that call.
To the coupling of atheism with writing, Blanchot adds, in the same text and under the same title, the association of humanism and the cry. The humanism of the cry would be a humanism that abandons all idolatry of man and all anthropo-theology. If it is not exactly in the register of writing, it is not in that of discourse either—but it cries out. Precisely, it “cries out in the desert,” Blanchot writes. It is no accident that he takes up a watchword phrase of biblical prophecy. The prophet is the one who speaks for God and of God, who announces to others the call of and recall to God. There is no motif here of any return to religion, rather, an attempt to extract for himself, out of the monotheistic heritage, its essential, and essentially nonreligious, trait—the trait of an atheism or of what one might call an absentheism, beyond all positing of an object of belief or disbelief. Almost in spite of himself, and as if at the extreme limit of his text, Blanchot did not yield on the name God—on the unacceptable name God—because he knew that it was still necessary to name the call unnamable, the interminable call to in-nomination.
Translated by Michael B. Smith