Christopher Fynsk
Literature begins, Blanchot says, when it becomes a question, when the language of a work becomes literature in a question about language itself.1 This question concerns the source of literature’s ambiguity: its ‘origin’ in an irreducible ‘double meaning’ that is not a movement between irreconcilable meanings, but between meaning and a ‘meaning of meaning’ that is itself irreducibly ambiguous, material and ideal, neither material nor ideal: a ‘point of instability’, a’power of metamorphosis’, an ‘imminence of change’ (pp. 61–2/330–1) that gives itself in language beyond either the meaning language takes on, or its ‘reality’.
The question, as Blanchot stages it in ‘Literature and the right to death’, opens in both a temptation and an obsession, a ‘torment’. Only the latter will provide my focus here, since my aim is to bring forth the way the ambiguity of literature constitutes an offering of the il y a, and to read the relation (the pas of relation) marked by this offering as the site of what Blanchot will later thematize as the encounter with autrui. But to approach this second dimension of the essay and the infinite movement on to which it opens, I shall start with a few notes on the first, and what Blanchot describes as the temptation of the negative.
‘Any writer who is not led by the very fact of writing to think: “I am the revolution, freedom alone makes me write”, in reality is not writing’ (p.40/311). Blanchot makes this statement categorically in the first moment of his movement through what we might call ‘the two versions of the imaginary’. The declaration introduces Sade, whom Blanchot identifies as ‘the writer par excellence’, and this by virtue of his identification with the French Revolution and the Terror—his engagement with the passion of death as a negativity that gives itself up to the jouissance of an ‘absolute sovereignty’ (p.41/311). Blanchot will lean to Mallarmé (and others: Flaubert, for example, or the surrealists) in subsequent references to literature’s drive to realize the negation inherent in language. Along this first slope of literature’s double movement (p.51/318), we find the prosaic search for a transparent meaning, and beyond this the tropological movements by which literature seeks the flower that is ‘absent from all bouquets’, or the ground of essence itself in the movement of thought (though when this movement reaches ‘Igitur’ we are clearly on the ‘second slope’, where we have in fact also already been with Flaubert). But in seeking to illustrate the irreducibly imaginary dimension of this negation (the ‘imaginary’ ground of its very opening), and its ‘irrational’, even ‘aberrant’ character as the passion of that ‘life that bears death and maintains itself in it’,2 Blanchot turns to Sade.
The reference is undoubtedly dictated in part by the subversion of the Hegelian dialectic to which Blanchot dedicates himself in the first half of the essay; to release a kind of excess in the negative, Blanchot writes Sade into a very particular moment offered by Hegel himself (one that communicates with moments signalled by Bataille in ‘Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice’3). The Terror, he suggests, represents for literature that specular, speculative moment where literature ‘contemplates itself’, ‘recognizes itself’, and ‘justifies itself’ (p.41/311) in the realization of absolute freedom. In the Terror, literature passes into the world. It becomes ‘real’, we might say, it embraces existence, but only inasmuch as existence has become fabulous in giving itself over to the absolute character of the word wherein all finite determinations dissolve.4 What is terrible about the Terror is its abstraction, the fact that its incarnation of absolute freedom, its synthesis of the universal and the singular, the ideal and the real, remains ‘ideal (literary)’ (p.40/310). The ‘life that bears death and maintains itself in it’ represents the sacrifice of ‘life’, if life names existence as it is given in the always singular experience of human finitude. To put it more succinctly, it is the sacrifice of ‘our’ dying.
Once again, Blanchot’s subversive aim is to write Sade into the dialectic at a moment indicated by Hegel himself, to draw forth the ‘imaginary’ character of the negation from which literature proceeds when it works to offer a presentation of the meaning of being in its totality, or the world as such; ‘the meaning and absence’ of the whole of what is (p.36/308). The finite, ‘imaginary’ character of the transcendence offered by language (and the possibility of its uncontrollable passage into the jouissance of ‘absolute sovereignty’: ‘life elevated to the point of passion, passion become cruelty and folly’ (p. 41/311)) haunts the negativity of meaning no less than the becoming-image of the word, as we shall see, haunts its material presence. Ultimately, Blanchot suggests (this is the conclusion of his essay and its challenge), the one veers into the other and is even indistinguishable from it; the ambiguity of literature lies in the communication of the image and the imaginary (the word, in its ‘reality’ and ‘significance’, doubly limiting this communication). Nevertheless, the foregrounding of the Sadean temptation is striking. ‘I am the revolution’—could this phrase also characterize Kafka and Ponge? (Kafka perhaps, but Ponge?) Or has Blanchot allowed himself to be carried into the movement he is describing when he claims that every writer knows such delirium? And could he be capturing something that not only haunts his own more literary writing, but also constitutes a temptation he has known in seeking to pass from literature to reality? Could he be thinking here of his own past political passions? This would be to point to something more than a ‘national aestheticism’, something far more profound (where identification or ‘mimesis’ is concerned) and more unsettling.
This last question is not without interest for Blanchot scholarship, but it certainly points beyond his person. Blanchot notes that in literature’s specular and speculative identification with that historical moment where ‘“life bears death and maintains itself in death itself’ in order to obtain from it the possibility and the truth of speech’ (p.41/311), the question of literature itself opens. Without transition, Blanchot writes: ‘That is the question…’ (p.41/311). The question, we may presume, has to do with the abstract character of the negation to which literature commits itself, possibly even the delirious character of this engagement when it is undertaken without reserve, but equally with something that haunts its murderous power: something that haunts its movement of negation and becomes an obsession.
Blanchot returns to Hegel here, a young Hegel, ‘the friend and neighbour of Hölderlin’, who recognizes in the ‘right to death’ (p.39/ 309) afforded by the negation borne by language a ‘strange right’ (p.42/ 312) (they are ‘friend and neighbour’ more by this recognition than by their physical proximity at the Stift). Adam’s act of naming, Hegel wrote in a text prior to the Phenomenology, is an act of annihilation—an act, Blanchot adds, to which every instance of naming or designation alludes. ‘The meaning of speech requires …that before any word is spoken there be a sort of immense hecatomb: a prior deluge, plunging into a total sea all of creation’ (pp.42/312–13). All of being must be given over to death for speech to be possible. Language itself brings this death, and we speak only from it. Blanchot’s words are worth following closely here:
Of course, my language does not kill anyone. And yet: when I say ‘this woman’, real death is announced and already present in my language; my language means that this person, who is there right now, can be detached from herself, removed from her existence and her presence and plunged suddenly into a nothingness of existence and presence. My language essentially signifies the possibility of this destruction; it is, at every moment, a resolute 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 united to it by an essential bond, I would not be able to accomplish that ideal negation, that deferred assassination that is my language.
(pp.42–3/313)
Most will be familiar now with the argument that says that for a word to be a sign, it must signify beyond any concrete context in which it might appear. Signification presupposes the possible absence of a referent and the absence of the speaker who might initially claim this language as their own. But Blanchot also appears to be saying something more that should be noted here, something in the order of an ontological claim. It is not only that language signifies in the possible absence of its speaker and its referent; it is that a ‘real death’ has occurred. The 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. How do we think this offering or opening—in what manner does the living being give itself to language? How does death mark itself? I shall not try as yet to answer this question, but I would note that this mark is what Blanchot names (in much of his earlier writing) ‘the image’.
Before any speech, there is the offering of a dying and the offering of my own dying. (‘I’ speak from my power to distance myself from myself, to be other than my being—in other words, from my death.) Might this help to explain why Blanchot figures the effort to return to what exists before language as the effort to recover a corpse? (As we shall see, Blanchot will argue in ‘Two versions of the imaginary’ that the becoming-image of the thing is best figured by the cadaver.) If what is ‘before’ language is not life, but life bound to death, life offering itself to language in the image (and in this, already language, at least as ‘the image of a sign’, to borrow Benjamin’s phrase5), is the before not already an ‘after’ (life)?
The question of the ‘before’ torments language. Were literature to cede to the temptation to gather to itself its very separation from existence, to attain and offer negation in itself and make the nothing (as the ground of meaning) everything, it would already have ‘a strange and awkward task’. But literature cannot forget the initial murder.
It recalls the first name that would have been the murder of which Hegel speaks. The ‘existent’ was called out of its existence by the word and it became being. The Lazare, veni foras made the obscure cadaverous reality leave its original depths and gave it, in exchange, only the life of the spirit. Language knows that its realm is the day and not the intimacy of the unrevealed; it knows that for the day to begin…something must be excluded. Negation realizes itself only from the basis of the reality it negates; language draws its value and its pride from being the accomplishment of this negation; but what was lost at the outset? The torment of language is what it lacks by the necessity that it be the lack of it. It cannot even name it.
(pp.45–6/315–16)
Since the first ‘slope’ of language’s movement is the slope of negation and the assumption and accomplishment of the murder from which meaning proceeds, one would expect the ‘before’ to be figured under the names of life. And indeed much of Blanchot’s language in this passage points in that direction (everything surrounding the evocations, ‘this woman’, ‘a flower’, ‘the cat’). But the living reality evoked by these words is unavoidably idea—entirely a product of language; and how can one avoid thinking the before without reference to some Eden? Blanchot’s move is to substitute a figure of death where we expect life, and a figure of the ‘after’ for the before. Literature, seeking what it has lost, does not want the living Lazarus, but the dead Lazarus. The resurrected Lazarus is short-changed in the tropological movement of negation—he gets only the life of spirit, not the death of material existence. The (un) revealed Lazarus would be Lazarus in this death. In a ‘commensurate’ exchange, he would be brought forth as death; or, beyond metaphor (as we read in Thomas the Obscure), he would be death (an absolute aporia), the death that is the non-dialectical other of living existence.
The language of literature is the search for this moment that precedes it. Literature generally names it existence; it wants the cat as it exists, the pebble in its siding with things, not man, but this one here, and in this one here what man rejects to say it, the foundation of speech and what speech excludes in order to speak, the abyss, the Lazarus of the tomb and not the Lazarus brought into the day, the one who already smells bad, who is Evil, the lost Lazarus and not the Lazarus saved and resuscitated.
(p.46/316)
‘The foundation of speech’—could this be, once again, the ‘real death’ of the existent ‘really capable of dying’ and bound to death by an ‘essential bond’? And what abyss lies in this ‘real’? For Blanchot’s evocation of the corpse of Lazarus suggests, I believe, that literature’s torment drives it actually beyond the threshold that is the opening of language and towards what, for spirit, appears initially as a tomb (‘appears’ in the sense that spirit knows here a lure—as Blanchot consistently suggests, spirit sees its outside first as something tempting). For the cadaver presents a materiality that refuses itself to language and gives only its refusal. The cadaver, in effect, is ‘exemplary’ in this way; a strange ‘non-thing’, it is of the earth, as Heidegger might say, but in the extreme form of the ab-ject, a residue that has always fallen from signification as inassimilable (in cadaver we should hear the Latin cadere). What ‘object’ is more other, more unheimlich, more charged in its obtrusive but fleeting presence, and what leaves a more indelible image when we chance upon it? A material (non-) presence that is not quite of nature, no longer of the world and given in the absence of life, the corpse presents the inassimilable other of spirit and meaning that has in fact always been there.
That has also always been there in words. Literature’s chance for returning to what language has left behind lies in the materiality of language. Its way back lies in the abandonment of meaning and a flight into the physical character of the word: ‘rhythm, weight, mass, shape, and then the paper on which one writes, the trail of the ink, the book’ (pp.46/316–17). It finds there not only the thingly character of the word, but its primitive force:
The word acts not as an ideal force but as an obscure power, as an incantation that coerces things, makes them really present outside themselves. It is an element, a part barely detached from its subterranean surroundings: no longer a name, but a moment of the universal anonymity, a brute affirmation, the stupor of a confrontation in the depths of obscurity.
(pp.46–7/317)
It is a thing and it draws forth the thing in its ‘hidden intimacy’ (p.41/ 312), leaving behind ideality and the consciousness of the writer in its negative force. It communicates the presence of things before consciousness:
It is not beyond the world, but neither is it the world: it is the presence of things before the world comes to be, their perseverance after the world has disappeared, the stubbornness of what subsists when everything is effaced and the dazedness of what appears when there is nothing. This is why it cannot be confused with the consciousness that illuminates and decides; it is my consciousness without me, the radiant passivity of mineral substances, lucidity in the depths of torpor. It is not the night, it is what haunts the night; not the night but the consciousness of the night that lies awake ceaselessly in order to catch itself and for this reason dissipates itself without respite. It is not the day, but the side of the day that the day rejected to become light. And it is not death either, for in it there shows existence without being, the existence that remains beneath existence like an inexorable affirmation, without beginning and without end, death as the impossibility of dying.
(p.47/317)
I cite at length for the beauty of this passage (this night that dissipates itself in a vain effort at self-reflection), but also because the movement of Blanchot’s argument as he follows literature’s way back must be followed with the greatest care. Sinking into its physicality, Blanchot suggests, literature communicates an uncommunicating presence that is not quite self-presence and never quite posits itself, but nevertheless stirs and persists (‘moment’, ‘affirmation’, ‘presence’, ‘perseverance’, ‘stubbornness’, ‘appearance’, ‘passivity’, ‘lucidity’). The ‘nature’ of words, ‘what is given to me and gives me more than I can grasp’ (p.46/ 316), thus communicates something of what Blanchot, following Levinas, terms the il y a: ‘The anonymous and impersonal current of being that precedes all being: being as the fatality of being’ (p.51/320). Given that Blanchot thinks the il y a as an abyssal opening, we could in fact have more grounds for comparison with Heidegger’s es gibt than one might at first assume (inasmuch as Hegel appears to be the determinant philosophical reference). One might in fact stage the confrontation between Heidegger and Blanchot around precisely these words of ‘thought’ that normally serve as translations for one another but also resist with the diversity of the idiom. For Blanchot as for Heidegger, il y al es gibt names the opening of essence; but the pas of this opening in Blanchot (to which I shall return) also paralyses the setting underway and turns the way itself into an endless detour. The il y a is a name for what might be called the ‘underside’ of the hermeneutic circle, the abyssal opening from which Heidegger consistently turns away even as he remarks its presence. But rather than pursue Blanchot’s relation to Heidegger directly, let me continue to follow the movement of Blanchot’s meditation, for it is the ‘signifying’ structure of the communication we have seen that most interests me here (and precisely in its bearing on Heidegger’s reflections on language).
The paragraph following the one from which I have cited at length appears to take back what is given in the first: the effort to return to what is before revelation (which by all ‘appearances’ has been a success) is now labelled ‘tragic’. Literature may well have succeeded in abandoning a signified meaning, but it cannot avoid signifying this abandonment: its language continues to show its own intention and expose its pretence:
It says: ‘I no longer represent, I am; I do not signify, I present.’ But this will to be a thing, this refusal to mean that is immersed in words turned to salt, in short, this destiny that literature becomes as it becomes the language of no one, the written of no writer, the light of a consciousness deprived of self, this insane effort to bury itself in itself, to hide itself behind the fact that it appears—all this is what literature now manifests, what literature now shows. Should it become as mute as stone, as passive as the cadaver enclosed behind this stone, the decision to lose the capacity to speak would continue to be read on the stone and would be enough to awaken this false corpse.
(pp.47/317–18)
The ‘death’ it thought it could find (and by all appearances it found: nothing of the preceding paragraph was qualified as illusory) turns out to be ‘false’. But then we recognize in retrospect that it wasn’t exactly the ‘death’ of the cadaver or the silence of the stone in which it is enclosed that was supposedly found. If literature set out to find the ‘real’ beyond language in the form of a materiality that gives itself only in refusal, it actually found something else: the obscure reflection without reflection of the il y a, that affirmation that is a failure of negation to negate itself, the fatality of the day. The turn in Blanchot’s argument from the first to the second paragraph remarks the traits of reflection (without reflection) in the preceding paragraph, but only then to recover them in the succeeding paragraph in a more affirmative manner. It is as though the ineradicable reflection of language’s intention and self-offering remarks the prior reflection in such a way as to offer its ‘truth’. For when Blanchot summarizes the movement that has just occurred in the preceding paragraphs, it changes sign once again. Literature knows that it cannot go beyond itself: ‘it is the movement by which what disappears appears’ (a statement that recalls the first slope but is also already ambiguous since what ‘disappears’ is also what refuses itself). He then goes on, summarizing the second movement:
When it refuses to name, when it makes of the name an obscure, insignificant thing, witness to the primordial obscurity, what has disappeared here—the meaning of the name—has indeed been destroyed, but in its place signification in general has come forth, the meaning of the insignificance encrusted in the word as an expression of the obscurity of existence. So that, if the precise meaning of the terms has been extinguished, the very possibility of signifying now affirms itself, the empty power to give a meaning, a strange impersonal light.
(p.48/318)
The inability to avoid signifying its intention (its vouloir dire) has become the presentation of signification in general, the very possibility of signifying. Words that would become things, that offer themselves as things, remain words that offer themselves in this way; but the persistence of the word as word (‘qu’il y a—ici—langage’) becomes the indication or expression of the il y a itself. All of the ambiguity of this movement is expressed in the phrase, ‘in its place has arisen…the meaning of the insignificance encrusted in the word as an expression of the obscurity of existence’. ‘The meaning of the insignificance’ may be read, after the preceding paragraph, as referring to the marking of the fatal destiny of the word in its effort to be a thing (p.47/317), the ineradicable designation that this insignificant ‘thing’ is a word offering itself as insignificant. But ‘meaning’ here also takes on another meaning: for it is the obscurity of existence appearing as insignificance —the appearance of insignificance as such. The self-reflection or selfoffering of language becomes the showing of the il y a. The tragic undermining of literature’s endeavour has become a discovery of the fatality of the day (tragedy itself changing meaning with a new sense of ‘fatality’):
Negating the day, literature reconstructs the day as fatality; affirming the night, it finds night as the impossibility of the night. That is its discovery…. If we call the day to account, if we reach the point of pushing it away in order to find what there is before the day, beneath the day, we then discover that it is already present, and that what there is before the day is still the day, but as a powerlessness to disappear and not as the power to make appear, an obscure necessity and not the light of freedom.
(p.48/318)
The inability to avoid signifying, become the ‘empty power to give a meaning’, is the expression of the ‘powerlessness to disappear’ of the being of what is before the day, the existence from which one must turn away to speak and to understand.
Has Blanchot worked a kind of dialectical sleight of hand here—have we read something more on the order of a slippage than an argumentation? It may well be a slippage, but Blanchot would suggest, I believe, that this is the ‘slippage’ that makes dialectic possible (and impossible). Blanchot will return to it once again after a summary of his two slopes in what seems an effort to catch more precisely the movement we have just followed. Summarizing the second slope, Blanchot affirms that literature’s effort to refuse to say is not in fact tragically undermined. The metamorphosis in itself has not failed, he says:
It is quite true that the words are transformed. They no longer signify shadow, earth, they no longer represent the absence of shadow and earth that is meaning, that is the shadow’s light, the transparency of the earth; opacity is their response; the rustle of closing wings is their speech; material weight presents itself in them with the stifling density of a syllabic accumulation that has lost all meaning. The metamorphosis has taken place.
(p.49/319)
But in this metamorphosis, he continues, and beyond the solidification of words, there reappears (like a ‘revenant’, a kind of spectral return) ‘the meaning of this metamorphosis which illuminates them and the meaning they draw from their appearance as things or even, if this should happen, as vague, indeterminate, ungraspable existence where nothing appears, the heart of depth without appearance’. The meaning of the metamorphosis refers us back once again to language’s inability not to present itself as language offering its abandonment of meaning, an inability not to show itself as language offering itself as thing. But the appearance of the meaning language draws from its appearance as a thing, or, ‘if it should happen’, as non-appearance, is also the appearance of meaning itself, or more precisely, ‘meaning in general’, the ‘empty power of signification’. The possibility of the ‘as such’ of meaning is given as the word gives itself as a word giving itself as a thing. Once again, these are words appearing as things appear, offering this as by which a thing may appear as a thing, or even by which insignificance may appear as insignificance, but doing so by their own self-giving, which is a giving as. This is a presentation of the possibility of the as such via a self-presentation that is irreducibly a marking of dissimulation. The word gives (itself) as, thereby giving ‘meaning’ as
detached from its conditions, separated from its moments, wandering like an empty power with which nothing can be done, a power without power, a simple powerlessness to cease to be, but which, because of this, appears as the proper determination of indeterminate and senseless existence.
(p.50/320)
The word showing itself offering itself as (existence in its refusal to signified meaning)—giving itself giving as—is the condition of signifying or offering to understanding (or better, thought) what escapes signification. ‘Qu’il y a langage’—a remarking of the fact of language, but in its irreducible figurality: this is what literature produces as a ‘question’ (or perhaps a stunned discovery: something related to Kafka’s joy when he writes, ‘He was looking out the window’ (p.26/ 298)) as it says the fact of Being—as it says ‘is’—in its fundamental dissimulation. Literature, on one of its slopes at least, is language remarking an irreducible figurality, its own, but as a saying of the dissimulation that belongs, as Blanchot asserts, to Being itself; ‘mimesis’, we might say, ‘figuring’ (itself) like a wandering corpse.
The image, once again, is from ‘Two versions of the imaginary’. Borrowing this title and summarizing the movement we have followed thus far, we might say that the two slopes of literature’s ambiguity are constituted by the movement between the ‘imaginary’ point of view literature adopts in seeking to give expression to the world that is the meaning of things in their totality (‘I am the revolution’) and the becoming-image of the word (‘I no longer represent, I am’). As Blanchot suggests in his concluding footnote to ‘The essential solitude’,6 the language of literature is language that has become entirely image. Not a language full of images, but a language that has become the image of language, figuring by this non-reflection the dissimulation of Being itself which is the condition of appearance in general and which appears when the thing is absorbed by its image. The damaged tool offers such an appearance, Blanchot remarks (recalling Heidegger):
The category of art is linked to this possibility that objects have of ‘appearing’, that is to say, of abandoning themselves to pure and simple resemblance behind which there is nothing—except being. Only what has surrendered itself to the image appears, and everything that appears is, in this sense, imaginary.7
The corpse, again, is most ‘exemplary’ here, though it figures this time (on another ‘slope’) not only a materiality that offers its refusal to signification via the absence of life, but an ‘ideality’ that has grown thick with ‘the elemental strangeness and formless heaviness of being that is present in absence’8—it figures, in other words, the very possibility of appearing, vacillating between ideality and materiality and marking their point of confusion (which is also the ‘confusion’ of the idealism of classical art, as Blanchot notes with a certain perverse irony). As a cadaver falls from the hold of our affective interests and the world of names and identities, Blanchot writes, it will come to resemble itself and in this ‘self’-reflection that reflects no one and nothing (it is not ‘simply’ a corpse, nor is it a human being, for the being that appears is ‘impersonal’, a monumental double of the one we have known: ‘the apparition of the original—until then unknown—sentence of last Judgment inscribed in the depths of being and triumphantly expressing itself with the help of distance’9) it will offer resemblance itself, resemblance absorbing the thing:
The cadaver is its own image. It no longer has any relations with this world, in which it still appears, except those of an image, an obscure possibility, a shadow present at all times behind the living form and that now, far from separating itself from this form, transforms it entirely into shadow. The cadaver is the reflection becoming master of the reflected life, absorbing it, identifying itself substantially with it in making it pass from its use and truth value to something incredible—unusual and neutral. And if the cadaver is so resemblant, this is because it is, at a certain moment, resemblance par excellence, entirely resemblance, and also nothing more. It is the like, like to an absolute degree, overwhelming and marvellous. But what does it resemble? Nothing.10
Perhaps it would suffice to stop here with the observation that with his thought of the image, Blanchot has effectively generalized the Verstellung that Heidegger recognizes as belonging essentially to truth and that art offers in its own withdrawal and thingly quality. Heidegger’s ‘that’—what the work of art says as it offers the event of truth in a movement of simultaneous approach and withdrawal—has been rethought as the ‘that’ of language (which in fact it was for Heidegger inasmuch as the essence of art is said to reside in language). But here the ‘that’ marks an irreducible figurality that undermines any stability in the pose. The re-presentation of language is the remarking of the ‘imaginary’ dimension of truth—the remarking of the dissimulation of Being.
Could we go further? Is this not a limit for thought? It is a limit, but a limit of a very particular kind. For we might observe in each of Blanchot’s descriptions of the becoming-image of the word that it marks a ‘meaning of meaning’ (or perhaps better, a meaning without meaning) that is neither material nor ideal, but something prior to each of these categories that embraces both while inclining towards an ‘elementary depth’ in an infinite movement towards what Blanchot names the ‘neutral’.11 The image is a threshold—a limit, as Blanchot will emphasize in asserting that it has a protective function,12 but a limit that marks an infinite abyssal relation and that is therefore already a crossing towards what Blanchot calls in The Space of Literature the ‘other’ night. For the consciousness that undertakes this crossing (though initiative will reveal itself always to have been the fatality of desire), it will be a movement towards the other of consciousness—towards itself as other:
The other night is always the other, and he who hears it becomes the other, he who approaches it departs from himself, is no longer the one who approaches, but the one who turns aside, goes hither and yon. He who, having entered the first night, seeks intrepidly to go toward its profoundest intimacy, toward the essential, hears at a certain moment the other night—hears himself, hears the eternally reverberating echo of his own progress, a progress toward silence, but the echo sends it back to him as the whispering immensity, toward the void, and the void is now a presence that comes to his encounter.13
The noise at the threshold is the echo of approach, but an echo that reverberates with an otherness that itself becomes approach. What consciousness hears is its own absence, itself becoming other in opening to the other—something that can be ‘known’ only as a kind of madness. Or as a kind of exposure. Here is the same movement across the threshold I have just followed as it is described in ‘Literature and the right to death’:
In this effort, literature does not confine itself to rediscovering in the interior what it wanted to abandon on the threshold. For what it finds, as the interior, is the outside which, once an exit, has now changed into the impossibility of leaving—and what it finds as the obscurity of existence is the being of the day which has changed from an explicatory light, creative of meaning, into the harassment of what one cannot prevent oneself from understanding and the stifling haunting of a reason without principle and without beginning, which one cannot account for. Literature is that experience by which consciousness discovers its being in its powerlessness to lose consciousness, in the movement in which, disappearing, tearing itself from the punctuality of a self, it reconstitutes itself, past unconsciousness, in an impersonal spontaneity, the desperate eagerness of a haggard knowledge, that knows nothing, that no one knows, and that ignorance finds always behind itself as its own shadow changed into a gaze.
(p.50/320)
This is consciousness become the gaze of fascination, a blind seeing that is contact with the outside and the impossibility of not seeing what obtrudes with the collapse of the separation that is constitutive of consciousness. Consciousness become a passivity or an opening that proceeds from an effraction or a touch: thus it is the passion of the image when the thing becomes image in withdrawing from the world and the passion of writing when the word veers towards the image and opens on to the outside—the passion of the outside.
To write is to arrange language under fascination and, through language, in language, remain in contact with the absolute milieu, where the thing becomes an image again, where the image, once an allusion to a figure, becomes an allusion to what is without figure, and where, once a form sketched on absence, it becomes the formless presence of that absence, the opaque and empty opening on what is when there is no more world, when there is no world yet.14
It is a seeing that is at once a suspended self-reflection (‘a lost neutral glimmer that does not go out, that does not illuminate, the circle, closed upon itself, of the gaze’15 and a being seen—once again, an exposure. In ‘solitude’, Blanchot writes, ‘I am not alone, but in this present I am already returning to myself under the form of Someone (Quelqu’un).’16 And then further on the same page:
Where I am alone, the day is no longer anything but the loss of an abode, intimacy with the outside that is placeless and without repose. The coming, here, makes it so that he who comes belongs to dispersion, to the fissure where the exterior is a stifling intrusion, the nakedness, the cold of that in which one remains discovered, where space is the vertigo of spacing.17
My consciousness without me, appearing as other in the form of an impersonal anonymity that is less a presence than the presence of an absence, the intrusion of the outside, relation with an irreducible alterity. Fascination is hetero-affection, ‘self’-affection that is an infinite becoming-other in a fundamental passivity. The coming of on, il or quelqu’un is an infinite opening to the outside, not a ‘human’ presence, but the presence of the other to a self that is no longer the ‘same’, no longer a ‘self’. Where Blanchot names the other—‘Eurydice’, for example—this name is a figure for a nameless other dissimulated by the night, the ‘other’ night or ‘dissimulation itself’, an infinite, abyssal movement.
Thus the image is not a limit, if by this we mean a point where reflection—or thought—must stop. Rather, it is a site of engagement and passage where reflection halts, but in becoming the approach to/of the outside. It is a threshold, in this sense, but a threshold already marked by a crossing, a passage, that Derrida has identified and engaged in exemplary fashion by tracking the pas (both adverb of negation and noun: ‘step’) that echoes throughout Blanchot’s text.18 I shall not try to subject this extraordinarily rich demonstration to summary, precisely because it works to demonstrate pas, describing the movement in question in both a thematic manner and in a trajectory (like the viens which it attempts to think while making it sound). But I should like to note the point of juncture with the current discussion by observing that in Derrida’s reading, pas names and ‘is’ what happens in the becoming-image of the word. Pas is what is marked (or marks itself) in the powerlessness of the word to efface its own re-presentation of its effacement of meaning, in this remarking of the very possibility of meaning that inhabits it as a wandering, empty power whose ‘ghostly’ presence Blanchot figures as a movement, ‘a walking staircase, a corridor that unfolds ahead’, as he describes it in ‘Literature and the right to death’ (p.54/323).19 Together with sans, as Blanchot uses this term almost formulaically to mark the same effacement of meaning and a passive opening to the other, it is the ‘re-trait’—at once remarking and withdrawal—of a movement of distancing that infinitely suspends the ‘as’ given in language’s re-presentation of its possibility, rendering this ‘giving as‘abyssal.20 If the ‘as’ I have isolated marks the very possibility of metaphor or figurality in general, the pas that marks it is the re-trait of metaphor, and, as set to work in the text, the marking of what exceeds the order of the signifiable—or the signifier—in a movement beyond meaning and beyond Being. The step (not) beyond that occurs in and with the opening to the il y a in the becoming-image of the word is the opening (and closing) of a thought of Being. Here is Derrida’s inscription of pas in this becoming-image that we have followed in ‘Literature and the right to death’:
To remain near oneself in one’s effacement [the movement from je to il we have seen], to sign it still, to remain in one’s absence as remainder, there is the impossible, death as the impossibility of dying on the basis of which death without death announces itself. The remainder without remainder of this effacement that no longer effaces itself, here is what there is perhaps (by chance) but that is (not) pas: here is pas under the name of forgetting as he uses it, as one can no longer think it, think it that is, starting from (a partir de) a thought-of-Being. If ‘Being is another name for forgetting’, it names a forgetting of forgetting (that it violently encrypts) and not a synonym of forgetting, exchanging itself with it as its equivalent, giving it to be thought. Or naming it, it unnames it, makes it disappear in its name. This thought which is no longer of Being or of the presence of the present, this thought of forgetting tells us perhaps what was to be heard under this name (thought), which named, as you remember, without declaring her name, she (elle: la pensée) to whom Death Sentence said ‘eternally: “Come”, and eternally, she is there’; or the unique word to which, in He who, ‘Come’ is said so that it (elle: la parole) should cry its name. ‘When I say “this woman….” That’s you, that’s your name.’21
Derrida (or more precisely, one of the interlocutors in this dialogue— the ‘counterpart’ to the one marked as feminine: ‘Derrida’, as Blanchot might put it, only to the extent that he is not ‘himself’) goes on to say here that this forgetting that gives forgetting to be thought (pas d’oubli), this forgetting that gives (thought), is il y a. To which he adds: ‘this il y a enjoins viens’.
The becoming-image of the word is the opening to a call, Derrida suggests, that must have already occurred for the pas to have been engaged in the first place. Viens is the ‘invitation’ that provokes the pas of approach, but that this step provokes in its turn in such a way as to allow it to sound for a first time as the word of the other. Viens is the word of approach, the word that is written in approach (on the body) as the word of/to the other that comes to our encounter (never ‘our’ encounter). This other, once again, is not another human being. What approaches is the other night, an infinite alterity whose coming is the opening of what is named in Thomas the Obscure ‘the supreme relation which is sufficient unto itself’.22 There is (il y a) joins in approach, enjoins itself in a giving prior to the law that is the birth of the law. The call is wholly anonymous, wholly other.
Blanchot will emphasize later that this joining of relation occurs only in engagement with the Other as autrui. As one of the voices from his own dialogue in The Infinite Conversation asserts, ‘All alterity presupposes man as autrui and not the inverse.’ This voice then continues:
Only it follows from this that, for me, the Other man who is ‘autrui’ also risks being always Other than man, close to what cannot be close to me: close to death, close to the night, and certainly as repulsive as anything that comes to me from these regions without horizon.
—We well know that when a man dies close to us, however indifferent his existence might be to us, in that instant and forever he is for us the Other.
—But remember: the Other speaks to me; the decisive interruption of relation speaks precisely as infinite relation in the speech of the Other. You are not claiming that when you speak to autrui, you are speaking to him as though to a kind of dead person, calling to him from the other side of the partition?
—When I speak to the Other, the speech that relates me to this other ‘accomplishes’ and ‘measures’ that inordinate distance (a distance beyond measure) that is the infinite movement of dying, where dying puts impossibility into play. And in speaking to him, I myself speak rather than die, which means also that I speak in the place where there is a place for dying.23
The address comes from the other (human being) as the address of the other. Viens marks an infinite relation to which the other (human beings) give themselves up in giving themselves to language. This is ‘real death’ as Blanchot emphasizes in ‘Literature and the right to death’—a ‘real’ dying into language that Blanchot defies us in The Writing of the Disaster to distinguish from a murder.24 But this death is infinite. The others, in their dying, ‘know’ the il y a, the absence of being (‘such an absence that everything has forever and for always been lost in it, to the point that the knowledge affirms and dissipates itself there that nothing is what there is, and first of all nothing beyond’).25 This is what they ‘give’ in their dying: ‘the absence of being through the mortifying gaze of Orpheus’.26 This is why Derrida can assert that behind the ‘thought’ to which Death Sentence addresses itself (or behind the ‘word’ addressed in Celui) there is the ‘thought’ of the il y a. The presence of the others in their infinite dying, in the ‘infinite’ of their dying (and which ‘I’ approach only in forgetting), is the presence of an infinite absence.
Literature happens, we noted at the outset, when its language becomes a question addressed to language itself. We may add now, perhaps, that literature becomes a question in response, in fascinated and repeated response, to the speaking that occurs as language remarks ‘that there is language’. That there is language is the opening of the question (in response)—the question of Being or difference, we might say now (recognizing how abyssal this question is for Blanchot), but also, and only, as it comes to us from a ‘real dying’ Blanchot persistently assigns to the self (prior to the self) and to another. Not the dying of ‘this woman’, but of ‘her’ whom this designation returned to the night. A distinction, I would have to add immediately, that is crucial but ultimately untenable, as Derrida suggests, I believe, when he takes up the question of citation and repetition in Blanchot’s narratives, arguing that writing introduces what he calls an irreducible contamination in the address of the other.27 The deconstructive move in literary criticism would be to stress the contamination to which Derrida refers. Such a move is in no way a falsification; indeed, it has been a necessary one both in the context of the politics of criticism and in relation to the matter at hand. But this emphasis on the ‘contamination’ of writing and its citationality has served to purify the recitation of contamination by what I am tempted to call a reference, i.e. a relation to the other that opens in the singular event of address.
When we figure this speaking in relation to ‘Literature and the right to death’, and give it a word (viens), we undoubtedly precipitate a movement that will only be made thematically by Blanchot in subsequent texts. But is not the condition of writing viens something like the haunting ‘real’ presence of an other? And can it be called a new ‘departure’ when Blanchot draws out the thematics of autrui in The Infinite Conversation, for example (disregarding for the moment what he offers in his fiction, where the question of autrui is almost always present)? Has he not drawn out something of the relation already marked in his text?
It is undeniable that a step is made when Blanchot takes up overtly the problematic of autrui in The Infinite Conversation. And though I am hesitant to use the same language in comparing narratives, I am tempted to say (and will have to demonstrate elsewhere) that a step has been made between texts such as Thomas the Obscure and Death Sentence with regard to the question that has furtively appeared here. But the insistence of what I am prompted to call the question of reference in Blanchot’s thought on literary language marks out the site of the problematic of autrui. Literature becomes a question, Blanchot seems to suggest, because a ‘touch’ of some kind has occurred. Literature’s origin is the ‘signifying’ of that touch: the writing of an infinite relation that opens there, the writing, for example, of viens. Here is one version of its structure (one that I find particularly useful for approaching Death Sentence):
In the room: When he turns back toward the time when he signalled to her, he senses clearly that he is signalling to her in turning back. And if she comes and if he grasps her, in an instant of freedom of which he has nothing to say and that for some time he has marvellously forgotten, he owes to the power of forgetting (and to the necessity of speech) that grants him this instant the initiative to which her presence responds.28
Here we have pas, ‘forgetting’ and ‘viens’ unfolding in the space of writing. It goes without saying that we must not reduce the touch to an empirical event. The event would only have happened in writing. But it would only have happened had it already happened in a past that is no less ‘real’ for being immemorial. There has been a touch. A text such as Death Sentence, I want to suggest, remarks it as the ‘real’ condition of the infinite relation in which it is given and lost. The step Blanchot makes (has always made) draws it out as the touch of autrui.
1 Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the right to death’, in The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis, ed. and with an Afterword by P.Adams Sitney (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), p. 21. All quotations in the text refer to this edition. The additional page numbers immediately following these numbers refer to the French edition published in La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). I have occasionally modified the English translations.
2 ‘The life that endures death and maintains itself in it’ (Ibid., p. 54/224)— both ‘the life that brings death’ (as in a murder) and ‘the life that bears death’ (the death it can never murder or be done with, not even in suicide).
3 A translation of this essay is published in On Bataille, Yale French Studies 78, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Jonathan Strauss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 9–28.
4 ‘At this moment, freedom pretends to realize itself in the immediate form of everything is possible, everything can be done. A fabulous moment— and no one who has known it can completely recover from it, for he has known history as his own history and his own freedom as universal freedom. Fabulous moments indeed: in them, fable speaks, in them, the speech of fable becomes action.’ Blanchot, ‘Literature and the right to death’, p. 38/309.
5 See ‘On language as such and on the language of man’, in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978), p. 326.
6 Maurice Blanchot, The essential solitude’, in The Gaze of Orpheus, p. 77.
7 Ibid., p. 84.
8 Ibid., p. 83.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 See, for example, the opening paragraphs of ‘Two versions of the imaginary’, in The Space of Literature, trans. and with an Introduction by Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).
12 The point is suggested in ‘Literature and the right to death’, p. 60/328; for a reference to the image as a limit, see ‘Two versions of the imaginary’, in The Gaze of Orpheus, p. 79.
13 The Space of Literature, p. 16.
14 The Gaze of Orpheus, p. 77.
15 Ibid., p.75.
16 Ibid., p. 74.
17 Ibid.
18 See ‘Pas (préambule)’, Gramma, 3/4 (1975), pp. 111–215. A slightly modified version of this essay appears in Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), pp. 19–116. In this text I shall cite the original version. All translations mine.
19 These phrases mark what Derrida identifies as the labyrinthine topology —or tropology?—of pas: the vertiginous spacing of pas.
20 ‘Il y va de l’autre’, Derrida writes, ‘qui ne peut s’approcher comme autre, dans son phénomène d’autre, qu’en s’en éloignant, et apparaître en son lointain d’alterité infini qu’ à se rapprocher’ (approximately and reductively, starting with the first words: ‘It is a matter of the other: which can only approach as other, in its phenomenon as other, by distancing itself, and appear in its distance of infinite alterity by drawing nearer’ (‘Pas’, p. 130)). The engagement of/with/in that movement of Entfernung, é-loignement, is pas.
21 Ibid., ‘Pas’, pp. 196–7.
22 See Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure, trans. Robert Lamberton (New York: David Lewis, 1988), p. 105.
23 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. and Foreword by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 72.
24 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), pp. 65–71.
25 Ibid., p. 72 (translation modified).
26 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 38.
27 ‘Between (her) who “is there” for (not only in order to but also by the fact of) responding to “Viens” and (her) who already will have given all her force and called “Viens”, there is no incompatibility, no contradiction, but also no synthesis or reconciliation, no dialectic. Hence the boundless affliction. And the impossibility of deciding between an eternal return of the affirmation in which the recited…is intact, good only once, the unique force of a “Viens” that never reproduces itself (saving “Viens”) and, on the other hand, but at the same time, a repetition of what has already been reissued in quotation marks, writing and citation in the everyday sense. Contamination by the everyday sense is not an accident but it belongs to the structure of affirmation; it is always risked inasmuch as it demands the narrative. Writing is also this irreducible contamination, the narrative the boundless affliction of which he can say, “I rejoice immeasurably”’ (Derrida, ‘Pas’, p. 117).
28 This passage from L’Attente L’Oubli is cited ibid., p. 128.