The animal does not need to return. It is ever present. Animals, and here the plural is necessary in order that a founding diversity be acknowledged, continue to appear. Here in Goya's painting a dog appears (Figure 3.1).1 In appearing questions arise. Is the dog's head above the line? Is the dog slipping back? Its head is on the line. Is it submerging again, tasting death as the admixture of the fear and the quicksand that will eventually end the ebb and flow of life? Is it scrambling futilely up a bank that no longer holds? If the logic of these questions were to be followed then the dog's presence would be defined by its eventual death. There is, however, another possibility. While still allowing for the severity of the animal's predicament, its appearance may be precisely the ebb and flow, thus a continuity of life not structured by death but by having-to-exist.2 Within what specific set-up then does the dog appear? The question has force precisely because it has an exigency that cannot be escaped since neither answer nor direct resolution is at hand. The question endures. Once allowed to exert its hold then the question repositions the line. No longer mere appearance, the line is neither the sign of a simple division nor is it able to sustain a simple either/or. Death cannot be equated with the dark. Equally, the light cannot be reduced to the life that may be escaping (though it should not be forgotten that Goya's work belongs to the so-called Black Paintings).
To return to the painting, the dog's head interrupts the line. As a result what is opened is a site. Perhaps, to use a word that will play an important role in the analysis to come, what emerges is an écart that refuses to be set within simple and symmetrical oppositions. Before continuing it is essential to note that this interruption occurs as the result of animal presence, a presence that insists within the question of the animal's appearance. If the work of death is to be stilled – and the stilling would be a philosophical gesture that did not resist the propriety of the question of human being but which nonetheless obviated the need for an eventual equation of that question with death – then the animal's interruptive presence may need to be maintained. Maintaining it is, of course, to open the question of how a relation to the animal, a relation thought beyond the hold of the animal's death, is to be understood. Hence what matters is that the animal appears.
Figure 3.1 Goya, The Dog (1820–3). Prado, Madrid. Reproduced with permission.
As an interim step therefore, one leading to the appearance of the animal within Blanchot's formulation of language and community, it is vital to note that the place of the animal within much philosophical and literary writing is positioned by a death that is no mere death. The animal's death is incorporated from the start within a logic of sacrifice. Within that context securing the propriety of human being demands either the exclusion or the death of the animal. Forcing the animal to appear in this way circumscribes its presence in a way that is premised on what can be described as the animal's privation. This constructs the figure of the animal. This is, of course, another instance of the without relation to the animal. The animal is held within a logic in which the animal enables – an enabling stemming from privation – the being of being human to take over that which is proper to it while at the same time excluding the possibility of any foundational and thus identity-constructing relation to either the animal or animality. Once again this enabling is the result of the operative presence of the without relation. Within this structure, as will be argued below, the animal cannot be positioned as the other.
While death plays a central role in Blanchot's reflection on community, the death in question defines being human. Blanchot's path of argumentation from Hegel via Kojève continues to link this specific conception of the work of death to the necessity of the animal's death, a link that inscribes both the animal and human being within a pervasive logic of sacrifice. There is therefore a doubling of death – animal death and human death. The doubling, however, introduces a structuring difference, the enactment of the without relation. For the human, death, especially insofar as it is understood as ‘dying’, is linked to authenticity, while for the animal the link is to a form of sacrifice and thus to the provision of that authenticity, a provision which moves from the animal to the human. There is a necessary reciprocity, however. To the extent that the animal's death provides the ground of authenticity the animal is systematically excluded. The animal cannot have therefore an authentic death. It can only die within sacrifice. The interplay between these two different senses of death marks the operative within the logic of sacrifice. However, it may also be the case that, once scrutinised from a different position, one allowing for animal presence, the animal's sacrifice would undo the very structure of community given by the work of a founding ‘irreciprocity’ or refusal of symmetry that it was taken to found. In other words, it may be that animal presence undoes the concept of community that Blanchot is attempting to found thus opening up the question not just of another thinking of community but one that includes animals as others.
At this stage, however, the question that needs to be answered concerns the animal already inscribed within the logic of sacrifice as opposed to the animal held apart from the either/or demanded by such a logic. Prior to any attempt to move from one positioning of the animal to another, the role of the former – the sacrificial animal – within Blanchot's argumentative strategy needs to be noted. While Blanchot is addressing that which is proper to being human in the course of his writings it is an address that inscribes literature, or the advent of literary language, as present from the start. The sense of propriety comes, as will be indicated, from the way the interrelated philosophical projects of Hegel and Kojève are at work within Blanchot's text ‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’.3
In a central passage in ‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’, Blanchot engages with Hegel. And yet the engagement is far from direct. As a footnote in Blanchot's text makes clear, that engagement is situated in Kojève's 1933–4 lecture course, ‘L'idée de la mort dans la philosophie de Hegel’.4 Consistent with Kojève's project as a whole the two lectures that comprise this section of Kojève's text involve detailed commentary. Of specific interest in this instance is that one of the texts on which commentary is made includes the fragmentary remains of the First Philosophy of Spirit. A succinct summation of the project would be to argue that death is central to what Kojève terms ‘the self-creation of Man’ (‘auto-création de l'Homme’) which in turn is brought about by what he describes as ‘the negation of the given (natural and human)’.5 In other words, the emergence of human propriety is predicated upon the ‘negation’ of nature. That negation is death as sacrifice. Nature incorporates animality. Fundamental to the description is that the human becomes what it is – comes into its own with its propriety established – through action and therefore through forms of transformation that include transformations of place. For Hegel, according to Kojève, the conception of the human in Greek antiquity is to be equated with the natural. Thus he argues that this ‘pretend Man’ of the ancient tradition has a purely natural existence marked by the absence of both ‘liberty’ and ‘history’. Kojève continues:
As with the animal, its empirical existence is absolutely determined by the natural place (topos) that it has always occupied at the centre of an immutable universe.6
What interests Kojève is the way Hegel identifies the limit of the animal. He cites Hegel from the latter's 1803–4 lecture course: ‘with sickness the animal moves beyond [dépasse/überschreitet] the limit of its nature; but the illness of the animal is the becoming of Spirit’.7 The question of illness understood as staging the introduction of limits establishes the connection between the human and the animal. As is clear from the following passage the animal plays a decisive role in the self-construction of the human. However, it should be noted that the presentation of the animal is not couched in the language of neutrality. The contrary is the case. The animal is present in terms of harbouring a sickness.8 This sickness, moreover, cannot be separated from the necessity of the animal's death. Animality becomes a sickness unto death.
It is by sickness that the animal tries in some way to transcend its given nature. It is not successful because this transcendence is equivalent for it to its annihilation [anéantissement]. But the success of Man presupposes this attempt, that is the sickness, which leads to the death of the animal, is the becoming of Spirit or of Man.9
The issue that arises here does not concern the animal's death as though such an occurrence were an arbitrary interruption. What needs to be noted is that the emergence of the ‘human’ depends upon that death, a dependence that reiterates a sacrificial logic and announces the without relation. Death continues to figure. Its connection to the animal is such that death is integral to the operation of a sacrificial logic and thus the operative without relation. However, that logic does more than constitute the particularity of human being. At the same time it inscribes the centrality of death into the actual formulation of human being. Death, therefore, while pertaining to the animal, is equally located within and comes to define that which is proper to human being. This inscription gives rise to the distinction between existence and human existence. In relation to the latter Kojève writes that ‘human existence of Man is a conscious and voluntary death on the way of becoming’ (‘[L]'existence humaine de l'Homme est une mort consciente et volontaire en voie de devenir’).10 Not only is there a clear act of separation between this death and the death of the animal, they also both figure in the way Blanchot incorporates what will continue to figure as death's doubled presence: animal death and human death, (The latter, human death, will continue to return in terms of an authenticity from which the animal is structurally excluded.)
The passage from Hegel, in Kojève's translation, that is central to the argumentative strategy of ‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’ and which draws the animal's death through death and into the project of writing and which moreover can be described as opening the generative dimension of the without relation, is the following:
The first act by which Adam became master [maître/Herrschaft] of the animals was to impose on them a name, that is that which annihilated [anéantit/vernichtete] them in their existence (in terms of existing entities) [dans leur existence (en tant qu'existants)].11
The necessity of ‘annihilation’, literally a reduction to nothingness, needs to be understood as a recapitulation of the animal's death. It should be added that the relationship between Adamic naming and the ‘annihilation’ of animal existence is far from necessary. Walter Benjamin's invocation of the ‘same’ scenario – the site of an original naming – involves a distinction between things and the language of things. However, such a move does not necessitate a separation that is founded upon an originating violent act that identifies and incorporates the death of that which is other than language. The possibility of a conception of naming no longer held by either annihilation or death and thus one located from the start within a logic of sacrifice provides an opening to which it will be essential to return.
What Blanchot takes from Hegel in this context opens up beyond any equation of concerns with the animal. The animal's founding death is quickly overlooked. Literature proceeds without the animal. The relation of without relation is, as has been indicated, inextricably bound up with a founding sacrifice. Nonetheless, the contention is that the animal, more exactly its death as a form of sacrifice, is retained within this founding without relation. Blanchot writes in regard to the passage cited above that: ‘God created beings but man was obligated to annihilate them’ (‘Dieu avait créé les êtres mais l'homme dut les anéantir’).12 Naming retains therefore the named at the price of their death (again their reduction to nothingness). The most sustained link between death and the possibility of meaning is set out in the following passage. It should be noted in advance that the passage needs to be understood as connected to the excerpt from Hegel's own text that conditions it. For Blanchot death is that which exists
between us as the distance that separates us [entre nous comme le distance qui nous sépare] but this distance is also what prevents us from being separate, because it contains the condition for all understanding. Death alone allows me to grasp what I want to attain: it exists in words as the only way that they can have meaning [sens]. Without death everything would sink into absurdity and nothingness.13
The difficulty of this passage demands that care be taken. The first element that needs to be noted is the way a concern with meaning and thus an opening to literature overlaps with a specific understanding of place and therefore of ethos. (Together they need to be interpreted as the interplay of distance and separation.) What such an interpretation brings to the fore is not just the centrality of the ‘entre’ (‘between’) but the way in which this ‘between’ is itself the site in which these two tendencies – ‘distance’ and ‘separation’ – converge. Death also figures as the ‘between’ which joins and separates. Death therefore is as much the mark of the ‘between’ as it is the condition of ‘sens’ (‘meaning’). In regard to the latter the ‘meaning’ in question is not the reduction of words to semantics. A different form of directionality is involved. Meaning is the very possibility of words becoming operative. Meaning, in this context, is the happening of language as it becomes literature. Death plays out as the ‘between’ equally as the moment in which writing is able to occur. With naming there is death. When Blanchot writes ‘when I speak death speaks in me’,14 what is announced is not just the centrality of the incorporation of Hegel's founding gesture in which the animal's death, a death within and as sacrifice, the productive without relation, establishes at the same time a separation and thus a distancing that marks the self, community and writing. All these elements have therefore a founding interdependency.
While the question of death within ‘La littérature et la droit à la mort’ becomes more complex in that writing and thus literary language will allow for the overcoming of a move that would reduce human being to the self of either anthropocentrism or biology, the conjecture guiding this analysis of death and thus the emergence of literature in Blanchot is that accession to the literary retains its sacrificial origins. This point is central. Its implication is that the necessity of the animal's death leaves a mark that continues to endure. The without relation therefore, as it pertains to the animal, would retain, by definition, a form of presence.
Within the setting opened by Blanchot's mediated relation to Hegel the conception of a distance that both joins and separates, a distance that is the ‘between’, cannot be thought outside its founding relation to death. This ‘between’, precisely because it identifies a form of commonality, the common as the co-presence of ethos and place in addition to death, brings community to the fore. More importantly, it positions the question of community such that community eschews a relation given by sameness and allows for the introduction of a sense of alterity. Rather than merely being the other to the same, alterity in this context is defined in terms of founding ‘irreciprocity’. While for Levinas that relation is uniquely ethical and concerns the relationship between humans, for Blanchot it is, in the first instance, inextricably bound up with what he describes as ‘the experience of language’.15 That experience is, of course, conditioned by death. Literary language is as much defined by ‘anxiety’ (inquietude) as it is by negation and death. For Blanchot both are at work at the heart of language. And yet, questions remain: what death is this? who has died? The answer to such questions cannot be that it is death merely as the sign of human finitude. Equally, it cannot be the death that allows that which is proper to the being of being human to be presented as ‘being-towards-death’. (Heidegger's project does not figure here. More accurately, it can be argued that it is refused, or this is the attempt, each time Blanchot stages his concern with ‘death’.16) The death in question is at the same time more and different.
If death were central then in order to avoid the ‘collapse into absurdity and nothingness’ the other side would be a sense of sovereignty. Note that it would not be life as opposed to death. Death's opposition, the death that is productive, is ‘nothingness’. The conception of sovereignty that pits itself against this nothingness (and in so doing refuses a space in which life as productive could in fact be thought), would not be the form defined by a mastery, one remaining ignorant of death, but the sense that worked with its necessity. Again, that necessity is neither the conflation of death with mortality nor is it merely phenomenological (death as the experience of an ineliminable presence). On the contrary, it is a death that is as much constitutive and foundational as it is at work in terms of its being the condition of production itself. It is in this regard that Blanchot writing of Sade can argue that:
Sade completely understood that man's energetic sovereignty, to the extent that man acquires sovereignty by identifying with the spirit of negation, is a paradoxical state. The complete man, completely affirmed, is also completely destroyed. He is the man of all passions and he is completely unfeeling. He began by destroying himself, first insofar as he was man, then as God, and then as Nature, and thus he becomes the Unique.17
The description of the ‘Unique’ is the moment in which destruction and creation work together. That work is not simply structured by negation. The situation is far more intricate. At work is a conception of negation which, even though it is thought beyond the confines of Hegel's own logic, nonetheless retains the set up that has been positioned by the hold of death,18 a negation that continues and thus a conception of death that is becoming increasingly more complex. What needs to be retained, however, is the relationship that this positioning has both to the project of literature as well as to writing. In L’écriture du désastre the interplay of destruction and creation is worked through the project of writing in the following terms:
Write in order that the negative and the neutral, in their always concealed difference – in the most dangerous of proximities – might recall to each other their respective specificity, the one working, the other unworking [l'un travaillant, l'autre désœuvrant].19
Writing, bound up with the move to literary language, involves a conception of work that resists the automatic directionality inherent in the logic of negation and equally in the predication of an already determined sense of measure. And yet, measure and production are occurring. At work here – a work signalled by the co-presence of ‘working’ (travaillant) and ‘unworking’ (désœuvrant) – is a specific economy. The ‘Unique’ as the destruction of nature reinforces the need to understand such a determination as predicated on that economy and therefore as involving a form of production. Prior to addressing this economy, the question that has to be taken up concerns the relationship that the mode of human being identified in Blanchot's writings on Sade may have to the ‘between’ and with it to the ‘us’.
If the question arising from the interconnection of ‘between’ and the ‘us’ can be asked with stark simplicity, then it is the question of community. Moreover, it is a question that brings into play the possible presence of commonality. The latter, the continual refrain of commonality, defines community as it appears within the philosophical tradition. Appropriately, given the context created by this refrain, Hegel allows the work of negation to present the profound sense of commonality that defines as much the I = I of Absolute self-consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit as it will the possibility of ‘ethical life’ in the Philosophy of Right. While Blanchot has drawn on Hegelian elements in his formulation of the role of death, the separation from Hegel is taken to have occurred at this precise point.20 Rather than assuming the role of the other and thus inscribing commonality as derived from the interplay of recognition and negation, in L'entretien infini, as part of an engagement with Levinas, Blanchot reworks the question of the other – ‘Qui est autrui?’ (‘Who is the other?’) – such that it becomes the question of community. However, the latter is given a very specific orientation. Blanchot's concern is with a different question and thus with another way of proceeding.
The question of community is reposed in terms of a ‘relation’. It emerges as implicated in another form of questioning, within which the question of community would then involve what in Blanchot's terms is a
relation of strangeness between man and man [rapport d’étrangeté entre l'homme et l'homme] – a relation without common measure – an exorbitant relation that the experience of language leads one to sense.21
While the immediate concern is the description of community as ‘a relation without common measure’, two elements need to be noted. The first, which will be pursued directly, is the link between this claim and its continually present adumbration, thus gestured occurrence, as already taking place in the ‘experience of language’. It is as though that experience of language has already provided a clue, as though writing and speaking, understood as the co-presence of creation and destruction, were implicated ab initio in any thinking of community. (The extent to which the posited centrality of ‘man’ (l'homme) amounts to no more than a reiteration of the privileging of logos as that which separates the human from the animal, a position reiterated continually throughout the philosophical tradition, remains an open question.) The second element, which at this stage will be simply noted – a noting that will have to accompany the proceeding, at least initially, as a continual point of referral, though which will return within the chapter's conclusion – is that the relation is given a precise determination. Rather than a relation in general, it is ‘between man and man (‘entre l'homme et l'homme’). Even if this were the ‘man’ of universality, the man in question is the one given by the death of the animal. (Hence what is at work is more than mere logocentrism.) That death, or rather the necessity of sacrifice, is in fact the ‘common measure’. (This is the conjecture being pursued.)
Nonetheless, as the passage suggests, the ‘common measure’ is absent. Relations occur without it. There are, however, relations.22 In L’écriture du désastre the ‘without’ – presented here in terms of ‘exceeding’ or ‘moving beyond’ (dépasser) – is given a formulation that reintroduces the economic. Indeed what is at work is a process that has the form of a without relation. Within these terms community is described as that which
has always left exceeded [toujours dépassé] the mutual exchange from which it seems to come. It is the life of the nonreciprocal, of the inexchageable – of that which ruins exchange. Exchange always [toujours] goes by the law of stability.23
Here the working out of the without relation, while linked to an economy, introduces another aspect definitional of the way that such an economy operates. Note Blanchot writes that, in the first place, ‘community’ ‘always’ (toujours) exceeds or passes beyond a conception of mutual exchange, and, secondly, that such a conception of exchange, the one ruined by the advent of the ‘irreciprocal’ ‘always’ (toujours) has stability as the law governing it. In other words, the reiteration of the ‘always’ introduces a founding site of conflict, named in advance by Blanchot in terms of both the ‘irreciprocal’ and the ‘unexchangeable’. Community is only possible if the tension that marks its presence – the communality of community – is sustained. While this introduces an active rather than a passive sense of the communal and thus a sense in which what could be described as the nothing-in-common becomes the measure, what still has to be pursued is how the without relation is understood. (And it has to be remembered that any answer to this question has to acknowledge that which marks the process of the without relation, i.e. a founding sacrifice.)
The first element marking the without, the generalised process of without relation, was brought into consideration on the basis of its separation – a separation of referral – from a positioning given by the opposition with/without. Beginning with this without relation means starting with a point of origination that, as has already been noted, can be described as the ruining of the exchange that holds in place relations that otherwise would have been defined by both symmetry and reciprocity. As has already been indicated, Blanchot's engagement with Levinas does not occur with the simple introduction of alterity, but by holding to alterity as already given within an irreciprocal relation. Moreover, that ruin is a form of place. If there is a link between writing and community it happens because the ‘place’ in which writing occurs is defined by Blanchot thus:
There would be a separation of time. Like a separation of place [Il y aurait un écart de temps, comme un écart de lieu], belonging neither to time nor to place. In this separation we [nous] would come to the point of writing.24
This separation, gap or breach – the already noted founding ‘écart’ – is a different permutation of the absence of relation. What is at work is a sustained attempt to think the possibility of both community and the communal given the effective abeyance of any recourse to the essential. The essential would play itself out as much in the language of nations, races and peoples as it would in abstract conceptions of human being. However, community still pertains, not as a negative instance but as a mode in which distance comes to delimit both what it is that is ‘between’ us as well as ‘our’ position within it. (After all, Blanchot writes ‘we’ (nous) would come to the point of writing’ and thus there is the inescapable question of who ‘we’ are.) If community continues to be defined in terms of communication and thus as a form of exchange – recognising immediately that the exchange in question is determined from the start by the ‘without common measure’ where the ‘without’ signals an original condition – then it will be within staged encounters, and thus in Blanchot's presentation of dialogues occurring in the récits in addition to the essays, that further intimations of community's incipient possibility can be discerned.
In an exchange situated within Blanchot's text L'attente L'oubli, there is a form of communication. The questions to be brought to this exchange should not be determined by a concern with meaning. Meaning is always an after-effect. The questions should pertain to the staging of relation. As a consequence dialogue can be understood as relation rather than that which is measured in advance. The components of the crisscrossing of words therefore voice and enact the presence of a relation that is marked in advance by the irreciprocal. The presence of dialogue neither indicates an already present community of the Same nor does it intend one. Here the mere presence of dialogue – and by extension the dialogical – is not projective.
‘We are truly distanced from each other.’ –
‘Together’ – ‘But also one from the other’.
‘And also from ourselves’.
‘The distancing does not make a part.’–
‘The distancing distances whilst distancing.’
‘And thus it approaches us.’–‘But far
from us.’
(‘Nous nous sommes bien éloignés.’ –
‘Ensemble.’ – ‘mais aussi l'un de l'au-
tre.’ – ‘Et aussi de nous-mêmes.’-
‘L’éloignement ne fait pas part.’ –
‘L’éloignement éloigne en éloignant.’
‘Et ainsi nous rapproche.’ – ‘Mais loin
de nous.’)25
The term that allows for a way into the domain created by this exchange is distancing (‘éloignement’). Within the passage they amount to the varying modalities of distance. Rather than ‘distance’ being understood as a given and thus as an already established relation there is the process and thus the continuity of distancing. To insist on distancing is to insist on activity and thus on that which will never have been given once but which continues. A relation positioned within space therefore will have ceded its place to the complex, perhaps now a weave, created and recreated by the continuity of spacing. Spacing, as the passage makes clear, is inextricably bound up with time and thus with the continuity of its being enacted. Distancing is lived out. When Blanchot writes, ‘The distancing distances whilst distancing’ (L’éloignement éloigne en éloignant), there is a reiteration of forms of distancing. Equally, however, there is a connection to time. There is an implicit temporality which is there continually in the process marked by interruption and thus by the discontinuities which are themselves staged by the ‘whilst distancing’ (en éloignant). This latter formulation needs to be understood as presenting the time of an occurrence, an occurrence and thus finitude which holds distance's continuity in place, hence the presence of the ‘whilst distancing’ (en éloignant). At any centre therefore there is a necessary closing off of the possibility of a completing enclosure. Such a centre is there in this exchange – an exchange to which it will be essential to continue to return – as it is in another conception of community.
If there is a way into and through this set up as it emerges from the exchange in L'attente L'oubli then it involves defining the écart, the gap and thus distancing as already figuring a dynamic set of relations. These relations are dynamic in the precise sense that what is always at work is the interplay of continuity and discontinuity. And yet there is a problem with such a procedure. The problem or difficulty, even though it should be conceded from the start that finding the right term for this occurrence is far from straightforward, is the inbuilt necessity to link this exchange and with it the work of the ‘without’, the generalised process that precludes possible relationality, to the interplay of destruction and creation and their inevitable inscription of death. This is neither death tout court, nor dying but death as bearing the mark of the animal's sacrifice. If there were to be a reappropriation of the ‘without’ – the without relation that will have always been present twice – then it will have to have occurred despite the logic in which it was initially presented.
To recapitulate that initial presentation: the point of departure, the point at which literary language and thus writing takes place, is encapsulated in the moment, for Blanchot, when it becomes possible to say (though more accurately to write and thus never to say!), ‘when I speak death speaks in me’ (quand je parle la mort parle en moi). At that moment, one in which the ‘when’ as both a singular utterance and as announcing an action and thus as the moment that should have been absorbed into the ‘I’ who speaks while yielding that ‘I’, there cannot be pure particularity. This impossibility does not take place because of the presence of an original plurality but because the death in question of the one that ‘speaks in me’ (parle en moi) is already doubled. The ‘I’ in whom death speaks is there, and only there, as the result of a death that makes that ‘I’ possible. There is therefore what can be described as a ‘death of possibility’ (the death that makes possible), namely the unannounced sacrificial death within death's now doubled presence. Consequently, while that doubled death is not announced as such, it will have been at work in the without relation. In the texts just considered the without relation was itself presented in terms of the ‘without common measure’. The ‘between’ is the gap and the distance. However, in its original formulations, this is inextricably bound up with death. Here the central issue arises. Even if the doubling of death is postponed and thus the registration of death's content as well as its reception is put off, what still endures is the question of the subject of death. What death is this? There is, of course, the additional already noted question: who dies? Harboured within this latter question is both the possibility as well as the impossibility that the animal's death could be the death of an other. The animal's death becomes the condition on the basis of which the question of alterity can be reposed as that of community. The animal dies in order that there be alterity. In more general terms the force of the questions concerning the subject of death – who and what dies? – have as their ground their necessary relation to both literature and writing.
Beginning to answer questions pertaining to the subject of death has to start with the recognition that there is what could be described as an emphatic version of death in Blanchot. In La communauté inavouable, for example, death as a figure cedes its place to dying and thus to death's actualised presence. While the position becomes more nuanced as the argument of the text unfolds, in this context what founds community is the dying of the other. In Blanchot's terms: ‘my presence to the other as the one who is absenting themselves in dying’ (ma presence à autrui en tant que celui-ci qui s'absente en mourant).26 There can be no act of substitution: neither a same for same, nor a simple other than the same, nor a spurious equality given by an all-encompassing ‘Being towards Death’ (to deploy Heidegger's formulation). Dying is equally the force of distance and presence, hence that which is there in the distancing (the latter being the continuity of movement noted in the formulation ‘en éloignant’ (‘while distancing’). That the relationship constructed by death's emphatic presence, the presence in which the dying of the other is always accompanied, defines particularity and intimacy is clear. The demanding question is whether it locates the specificity of community, even a sense of community structured by an operative sense of the without relation. Having made the claim concerning this particular set up Blanchot goes on to add:
This is what founds community. [Voilà ce qui fonde la communauté.] There could not be community if it were not for the first and last common event which in each of us ceases the power of being (life and death).27
While this reworking of the Levinasian stricture not to let the other die alone cannot be faulted in terms of an ethical imperative, what is actually occurring is that the écart and thus the interplay of the ‘without’ (sans) and the ‘between’ (entre) are defined in these terms. In other words, the complex forms of relationality that were identified in the passage from L'attente L'oubli take the notion of irreplacability inherent in the relation to the dying as the structure for a reconfiguration of community. What this leaves open is the possibility that relationality may hold itself apart from the need to deploy the already determined connection between death and a logic of sacrifice – death's doubled presence – as that which founds community.
The relation to the dying knits together three elements. In the first place it is the literal dying of the other, an actual dying that prompts Blanchot to write: ‘This is what founds community.’ In the second there is dying as the potentiality that is there for all human beings. The third element is dying's other modality, i.e. dying as that which is introduced as the interplay of destruction and creation, a set up whose continual recall is the death of nature and thus the death of the animal. The weave created by the relation between these elements is one of interdependence and thus co-implication. Part of the reason for this positioning has to do with the role of the writer and thus writing in Blanchot's overall project. Bataille's acute summary of this position is the following:
The situation of the writer is, according to him, of being placed like a truth between the living and the dead. Sometimes the writer opens life to the fascination of death.28
However, the actual argument in which the three elements identified above are interconnected cannot be reduced to the proposition that the only community is a community of writers. Once there is a move to a more generalised sense of community then the community in question, la communauté inavouable, the community given by the nothing-in-common, begins to take on a sense of identity. This occurs despite an intention to the contrary. The identity in question, however, is implicit. Refusing any possible form of overt essentialism within the refusal of the common there remains not just a type of commonality but one that has a productive form. Beyond the hold of the essential that would be positioned as internal to human being there is the sustained necessity and thus commonality of the animal's death. What is involved need not be a literal death. (The effective presence of the logic of sacrifice does not necessitate actual sacrifice.) Nonetheless, the death in question is far from arbitrary. There are at least two interrelated reasons why the impossibility of the arbitrary is the case. In the first instance, it involves the relationship between death and writing. While commenting on Blanchot for a different project, this relation is succinctly captured by Levinas, when he notes:
To Blanchot, death is not the pathos of the ultimate human possibility, the possibility of impossibility, but the ceaseless repetition of what cannot be grasped, before which the ‘I’ loses its ipseity. The impossibility of possibility. The literary work brings us closer to death, because death is the endless rustle of being that the work causes to murmur.29
The question that has to be taken back to the acuity of this observation would concern how the literary work comes about (a question that is not of direct concern to Levinas). Answering such a question necessitates that attention be paid to an understanding of the ‘death’ to which the literary work brings ‘us’ (nous) closer. The intimations of community within this ‘us’ underscores the connection between literature as the place – thus the placing of death – and the common. In Levinas’ reformulation of Blanchot the implicit anthropocentrism that marks Blanchot's formulation of alterity as occurring in a relation ‘between man and man’ is itself reinforced by the use of the term ‘us’ (‘us’ as the ‘we’ that exists in a relation of without relation to animals).
The second sense in which death is not arbitrary, a possibility that moves beyond a simple reiteration of the anthropocentrism evident in Levinas’ summation of Blanchot, can be understood initially in terms of death's non-generalisable presence. The death in question is of course already doubled, a doubling that is reiterated within the operative presence of the without relation. In the first instance it is the dying of the other. The other in question is necessarily the human other. The animal's death is not the death of an other. There is no structural relation to that death. The animal, as was suggested, does not figure as an other since, were that to occur, then not only would there be the possibility of relation and commonality with the animal and thus with differing forms of a recalcitrant animality, the animal would no longer be able to figure within a sacrificial logic. The exclusion of the animal from the domain of alterity is structural and not ethical. (As such the response cannot be ethical.) However, in the second instance as it pertains to Blanchot, death is implicated in Blanchot's inscription of Hegel's own concern with naming and language, an inscription which, for Blanchot, accounts for the possibility and thus generation of literature. However, naming and language in Hegel, at least insofar as this figures in the use Kojève makes of Hegel, while opening up literature, a literature in which the force of both death and dying are already present, are positioned, from the start, within a logic of sacrifice.
What emerges with the exclusion of the animal from the domain of alterity and the reiteration of the logic of sacrifice is, as has been intimated, another form of anthropocentrism. This is neither the anthropocentrism defined in terms of the essential, nor the anthropocentrism that emerges from the allocation of a fundamental quality to the being of being human – a quality that may demand its own form of naming. The anthropocentrism in question is rather the one that is given by the death of the animal, an anthropocentrism therefore that results from the inscription of the animal within a sacrificial logic. Moreover, the form of anthropocentrism constructs an important affinity between Levinas and Blanchot in relation to this exact point.30
The stark position that has to be brought into consideration – a consideration that will allow for the reintroduced presence of the dog – involves the affirmation of relationality as evident from the L'attente L'oubli. And yet the definition of relationality is bound up with the death of the animal. Therefore the location of relationality occurs within a structure sustained by the sacrificial logic that has always accompanied the animal's presence. If there is a way to sum up the argument then it would be that, despite the attempt by Blanchot to keep a distance from the idea of the common by positioning what has been already been described as a without relation (and its various entailments) as central, precisely because the without relation involves a form of doubling that was also at work with death (human death and animal death), the end result is that community occurs with the sacrifice of the animal. As has already been suggested, what the without relation has as its defining sense of the common is the necessity of the animal's death and thus the reiteration of the logic of sacrifice that continues to position the animal's inclusion as predicated upon the necessary and productive nature of its death. Hence the animal is present as figure. The reiteration of the logic of sacrifice gives a fundamental continuity to the without relation. As a consequence what is refused is a place for the animal other than as a figure within the dynamic relations that define human being. That refusal does not just open up the question of the animal's inclusion. More significantly, what continues to return is the problem of how and in what terms is the animal to be understood were that presence to be no longer structured by the logic of sacrifice.
And the dog? The question, in this context, precisely because it recalls Hegel's point of departure as well as its incorporation by Blanchot, opens up the place of Adamic naming in relation to the animal, or, more exactly, a conception of naming that affirms relation, an affirmation distancing the without relation and therefore, rather than necessitating forms of annihilation, would instead demand rethinking the latter as a type of nihilism.31 For Kojève and Blanchot the position and role of the animal cannot be separated from a productive destruction, the operative within sacrifice. Within it the animal is constrained to exist without relation to human being. As has already been noted, another possibility for naming – an attempt to deploy the Adamic moment of thought outside a logic of sacrifice – can be located in the work of Walter Benjamin. For Benjamin naming is linked to God's acts of creation:
God did not create man from the word, and he did not name him. He did not wish to subject him to language, but in man God set language, which had served Him as a medium of creation, free. God rested when he had left his creative powers to itself in man. This creativity, relieved of its divine actuality, became knowledge.32
Moreover, Benjamin does not distinguish between the human and the animal in terms of a simple opposition between the presence and absence of language. The key term is ‘communication’ (Mitteilung). The human communicates through the act of naming. Naming and knowledge are inextricably bound up with human activity. Moreover, they begin to define that activity. There is no necessity, however, that the named are vanquished. Language preserves. Benjamin describes the situation that draws on a distinction between literal empirical presence on the one hand and an other form of presence within language in terms of the claim that ‘[T]he linguistic being of all things is their language’ (Das sprachliche Wesen der Dinge ist ihre Sprache’),33 Understanding that what is at stake here necessitates working with the recognition, as will be suggested, that the totality of ‘things’ allows for the animal.
The animal appears a number of times in Benjamin's text. The most significant for these concerns pertains to comments made by Benjamin on a line from a poem by Friedrich Müller.34 Benjamin interprets the moment within the poem of Adam's encounter with animals as implying ‘the communicating muteness of things (animals) towards the word language of man’. Two forms of communication are at work. Benjamin goes on to note that later in the poem:
The poet expresses the realization that only the word from which things are created permits man to name them, by communicating itself in the manifold languages of animals [in den mannigfachen Sprachen der Tieren], even if mutely, in the image: God gives each beast in turn a sign, whereupon they step before man to be named. In an almost sublime way, the linguistic community of mute creation with God is thus conveyed in the image of a sign.35
At work in this extraordinary passage is the proposition that what allows human naming is that some ‘thing’ is communicated to the human, the human designated as the one who names. God gives the animals a sign. As a result they communicate themselves independently of naming. In a sense they call on naming. Indeed, the totality of all things with God appears and thus the contents of that totality exist as signs prior to naming. Naming, however, because it is a human activity, becomes the undoing of that totality of signs. Equally, however, it announces a separation of the human and God, a separation that for the religious will become the locus of prayer and liturgy while more generally it is the moment in which knowledge and naming – for Benjamin there is an inherent relation between them – takes over. That separation discloses the space of human action. Equally, naming preserves the animal. It does so within a space that will always be contested, one in which relations are tenuous, precisely because it is a space defined by the possibility of action and thus of actions the determinations of which are not given in advance. The space in question therefore is defined by potentiality and allowing.
It is vital to note the structure in which the animal's allowing occurs. The animal is present within nature. The animal and nature are brought together in terms of the ‘nameless’. At the end of the text on language Benjamin writes the following in relation to human action:
To nature he gives names according to the communication that he receives from her, for the whole of nature too, is imbued with a nameless, unspoken language [einer namenlosen stummen Sprache], the residue of the creative word of God, which is preserved in man as the cognising name and above man as the judgment suspended over him.36
There is a fundamental exchange occurring here. Nature communicates itself and the human response is to name. There will be an ineliminable and inevitable incompleteness to this exchange. The elements are preserved in their difference within a relation that is inherently dissymmetrical and endless. The endlessness in question, one in which knowledge and judgment continue to operate, involves the interruption, as finitude, that naming demands, a demand, it should be added, that only occurs if the communication of ‘nature’ – nature communicates itself as a sign enjoining naming – is itself maintained. The point that needs to be made in this context is that what occasions naming, the Adamic naming of animals, is the continual giving of that which demands to be named. Naming thus understood is incorporated into the process in which knowledge and language operate. The endlessness of the naming has as its correlate the inevitable endlessness of the ‘nameless unspoken language’. Arguing for the presence of such a correlate is not to make writing subservient to nature. That would be to strip nature of its communicability. Rather, the correlate attests to differing modalities of finitude. One mode of communication works in relation to another. Both the endless naming and the nameless, unspoken language operate within domains and relations in which one neither exhausts nor masters the other. Both continue within their difference. The animal will have been maintained.37 Writing will continue. There is another relation to the other.
If this other formulation can be generalised then it is possible to see the centrality of a relation which is no longer between ‘man and man’ as opening up another way of understanding and thus conceptualising community. (It may be that this word ‘community’ is itself a residue of the pervasive anthropocentrism that predominates within the term's reiteration. As such there may need to be another formulation of what is entailed by being-in-common.) As opposed to the privileging of death and sacrifice, a privileging in which both the animal and a recalcitrant animality are inevitably implicated, life, though not as a singular term with an essential content, would have centrality. The line therefore that the dog continues to interrupt, a line between light and dark, a line that continues to resist a founding death, has to become the line of relation. The being of being human would as a consequence be articulated within a network of relations – thus demanding an explication in terms of a relational ontology – in which the animal continues to figure as the site of a continual negotiation demanded by the already present set of connections that hold the complex variations of life in play.
1. Goya, The Dog (1820–3), 134 × 80 cm, oil on plaster remounted on canvas (Madrid: Museo de Prado).
2. For a more elaborate sketch of this term see my ‘Having to Exist’, Angelaki, vol. 5, no. 2 (2001), pp. 51–7.
3. References to Blanchot's text ‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’ are to its publication in Maurice Blanchot's De Kafka à Kafka (Paris: Gallimard, 1981). The English translation as ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ is found in Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). All references to texts by Blanchot are to the French editions and the published English translations where available. Translations have on occasion been modified. Even though the path taken in this instance has a different point of orientation for two central discussions of Blanchot's text see: Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 112–14, and Christopher Fynsk, Language and Relation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 227–45.
4. Alexandre Kojève, L'introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). Translations are my own. In addition, Kojève's capitalisation of certain terms has been retained. It should be added that the accuracy of Kojève's interpretation of Hegel is not a concern here. What matters is the adoption and adaptation of Kojève by Blanchot.
5. Kojève, p. 532.
6. Kojève, p. 535.
7. Kojève, p. 554. For the actual Hegel text see G. W. F. Hegel, Jenaer Systementwürfe 1. Das System der spekulativen Philosophie (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1986), p. 179. The text in question reads as follows: ‘Mit der Krankheit überschreitet das Tier die Grenze seiner Natur; aber die Krankheit des Tiers ist das Werden des Geistes.’
8. I have analysed the relationship between disease, animality and alterity in Chapter 5.
9. Kojève, p. 554.
10. Kojève, p. 570.
11. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, p. 323 (‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’, p. 36). For the actual Hegel text see G. W. F. Hegel, Jenaer Systementwürfe 1. Das System der spekulativen Philosophie (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1986), p. 201. I have included both Hegel's terminology as well as Kojève's (thus Blanchot's) translation.
12. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, p. 323 (‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’, p. 36).
13. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, p. 324 (‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’, p. 37).
14. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, p. 324 (‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’, p. 37).
15. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 73 (L'entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 103).
16. The relationship between Blanchot and Heidegger cannot be encapsulated in a single statement. Blanchot's engagement with Heidegger is systematic, even if the name Heidegger cannot be located in every text. While it would need to be developed in greater detail one radical point of divergence between them can be found in Heidegger's use of the term ‘anticipation’ (Verlaufen) in Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978). With Heidegger's use of this term death emerges therefore in terms of a ‘possibility’. However, rather than a possibility to be realised or even closed in on, ‘anticipation’ has a different quality. For Heidegger
it turns out to be the possibility of understanding one's own most and uttermost potentiality-for-Being – that is to say, the possibility for authentic existence. (307)
The real distinction between this position and Blanchot's does not involve the rejection by the latter of a form of authenticity. Rather for Heidegger authenticity pertains to a mode of existence; the authentic is linked to a potentiality within human being. In the case of Blanchot there is an importantly different sense insofar as death cannot be separated from a form of language – i.e. from literature – and as such is inextricably bound up with a reworked conception of writing. Literature's relation to death, even at the moment in which death becomes dying, maintains a set up that precludes its incorporation into the generalising phenomenology of ‘being-towards-death’.
17. Maurice Blanchot, Lautrément and Sade, trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 36 (Lautrément et Sade (Paris: Les editions de minuit, 1963), p. 44).
18. In sum this distinction captures the inherent equivocation that structures Blanchot's relation to Hegel. On the one hand there is the sustained attempt to develop a conception of negation and of negativity that works beyond the hold of the logic of negation found in Hegel while on the other the move to literature and with it the structuring force of death retains – or at least this is the argument presented here – specific Hegelian origins.
19. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 37 (L’écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), p. 65).
20. I have taken up in greater detail the complex relationship between Hegel, Blanchot and Bataille in my ‘Figuring Self-Identity: Blanchot's Bataille’, in J. Steyn (ed.), Other than Identity: The Subject, Politics and Aesthetics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 9–32.
21. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 46 (L'entretien infini, p. 10).
22. The question of measure and of that which exists ‘without measure’ is a central element of Blanchot's thought. In The Writing of the Disaster (L’écriture du désastre), for example, he writes that ‘Passivity is without measure’ (p. 17) (‘La passivité est sans measure’, p. 34). What a formulation of this type involves is a positioning that is no longer possible in terms of either of strict oppositions or of a logic of negation. At work is the limit that allows. To the extent that this allowing occurs, the limit reaches its own limit. For an exemplary discussion of the limit and its relation to fiction and thus to writing in Blanchot, see Leslie Hill, Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 220–6.
23. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 87 (L’écriture du désastre, p. 138).
24. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 87 (L’écriture du désastre, p. 138).
25. Maurice Blanchot, L'attente L'oubli (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), p. 137. The actual structure of Blanchot's page had been maintained in the citation.
26. Maurice Blanchot, La communauté inavouable (Paris: Les editions de minuit, 1983), p. 20.
27. Maurice Blanchot, La communauté inavouable, p. 22.
28. George Bataille, ‘Maurice Blanchot’, Gramma, nos. 3–4 (1976), p. 219.
29. E. Levinas, ‘The Poet's Vision’, in Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 132 (Sur Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975), p. 16).
30. Levinas’ engagement with the question of the animal and the positioning of the animal in anthropocentric terms occurs in his paper ‘The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights’. This text, in English translation, along with extracts from an interview with Levinas that touches on the question of the animal, can be found in Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Philosophy, eds Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 45–51.
31. In more general terms what this opens up is the question of whether it is possible to think of production in a way that distances itself from the logic of sacrifice, specifically the death of the animal as the precondition for writing. For a lead in this direction see Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘L'insacrifiable’, in Une Pensée finie (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1990), pp. 65–106. Nancy's paper has in its own right attracted an important secondary literature. The issues raised within it are of fundamental importance to the project advanced here concerning the animal. See, among others, Patrick ffrench, ‘Donner à Voir: Sacrifice and Poetry in the Work of Georges Bataille’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, vol. 42, no. 2 (2006), pp. 126–38, and Marie-Eve Morin, ‘A Mêlée without Sacrifice: Nancy's Ontology of Offering against Derrida's Politics of Sacrifice’, Philosophy Today, vol. 50, SPEP supplement (2006), pp. 139–43.
32. Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 1 (SW) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 62–74 (Gesammelte Schriften (GS) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), pp. 140–57).
33. SW 1.63; GSII 1.143.
34. The poem of Müller's to which Benjamin refers is ‘Adams erste Erwachen und erste selige Nächte’.
35. SW 1.70; GSII 1.152. It should be noted that throughout this section of the text Benjamin is connecting ‘Stummheit’ as ‘muteness’ with ‘das stumme Wort’ (‘the unspoken word’). The mute animal still communicates. The shift away from the centrality of language understood as a tool and thus as the mark and thus as a form of utility to its incorporation within ‘communication’ is a fundamental move in the reconfiguration of the relations between human and non-human animals.
36. SW 1.74; GSII 1.157.
37. It is precisely the retention of the animal that allows for the development of the mitzvot within the Torah that accompany that existence. While sacrifice occurs it is not placed within a productive logic in which the propriety of being human necessitates the without relation and therefore a sacrificial logic. It would be thus that sacrifice (actual animal sacrifice) could be viewed as no longer essential within the Torah. However, other rules concerning the relation to animals could be given greater priority. The act of interpretation may provide them with genuine actuality (see, for example, Deuteronomy XXII: 6–7). In both instances what occurs does so because of the withdrawal of the animal from the logic of sacrifice.
