Ann Smock
In L’Attente L’Oubli (Waiting, Forgetting),1 it seems that a man, looking out of a hotel room window, saw a woman on her balcony and signalled to her. Moreover, he called. He called, and she came, and they met in his room, where they stayed, speaking together all night long. For example, in the course of their long conversation—in the course of L’Attente L’Oubli—she asks him repeatedly to describe the room they are in.
She asks him to describe their meeting place as though, strangely, it weren’t right there, and they right in it both together: as though they were meeting in a place which isn’t found there. Or, where they don’t find themselves. In fact, they seem to be looking for the way that leads to where they are. ‘It’s as if they still had to look for the road to arrive where they already are’ (p. 122).
Now, L’Attente L’Oubli doesn’t ever exactly begin. Rather, it stops on page one, its starting point. Its first sentence states that ‘here, on this sentence’, he was obliged to quit. It appears that he had been writing everything she said, but she made him stop here, because she didn’t recognize her words. She couldn’t gauge where she was or who was speaking; she’d ‘lost the centre and everything was turning before her eyes’ (p.8).
So, L’Attente L’Oubli doesn’t exactly start at its starting point—it stops, instead (at its start it arrives instead at its finish)—but of course it doesn’t exactly stop there either: about one hundred and fifty pages follow the sentence which states on page one that it is the last. In place of the start a stop; in place of this stop a start. It is in this manner that start and finish cannot be disentangled and that in this tangle neither is to be found. There is neither start nor stop to L’Attente L’Oubli but in place of each the intervention of the other, and this inseparability—this indifference of the two—gives the interval, the difference; it gives the separation, the divide, the entire stretch between the start and finish. Which is to say: L’Attente L’Oubli. L’Attente L’Oubli is the conjunction of its start and stop interfering, intervening or interceding; L’Attente L’Oubli interrupts the ‘same’ thing, the convergence or the meeting ‘itself’; it displaces the place it ‘is’, the meeting place. L’Attente L’Oubli: the place not found there, not found but lost (‘she had lost the centre…’).
The place not found but lost there—or again: the place en route there. The place approaching it. Suddenly, with the advent of L’Attente L’Oubli, L Attente L’Oubli is over, to be sure—forgotten upon arrival— but how could this abrupt cut-off have occurred yet? There never was anything at all to interrupt, consign to the past or forget till afterwards, till now, that is, now that there’s L’Attente L’Oubli stretching out— tending, turning towards, awaiting its interruption, which is to say, ‘itself’, the convergence of its stop and start which it ‘is’—is rather, diverging from and thereby returning towards. And departing the better to approach, and seeking the better to lose. Turning, turning.
To wait is to experience this type of swerve, this sort of veering off of and from the conditions under which, for example, one might ever find oneself, or, indeed, under which anything at all might do so: might manage to be where and what it is at that point. To wait is notably to experience the diversion of language from the reflexive structures, the auto-referential patterns that would have been reassuring, just above, when we were attempting to articulate the effect that L’Attente L’Oubli has on L’Attente L’Oubli: it would have been handy to be able to say, L’Attente L’Oubli interrupts itself, but what is interrupted is precisely the possibility of such a construction, and among the results is the appearance, on and off in the following, of unanchored, floating pronouns: L’Attente L’Oubli interrupts it, for example. Or, the place approaches it. Another possible example: language says it. Language diverted in this manner—turned away from itself—turned away by its turn back, and returned by its departure, converses, we want to suggest.
But we were intending, at the start of the paragraph we have just left behind, to describe the swerve in question in terms of waiting which, in Blanchot’s thinking, defers waiting and introduces a wait instead. If one ever waits, it’s simply because one cannot do so, not yet. One just has to wait, instead. Whoever waits thus in lieu of waiting endures a mysterious difference—endures waiting which isn’t waiting, but which isn’t anything else, either. It is not itself, but there is no other waiting, no ‘waiting itself’ from which it would differ. Neither of the alternative terms you might automatically employ to designate it—or, incidentally, to designate interlocutors in a conversation: the one, the other—suits it. It is neither: neutral.
Waiting differs, but not with respect to anything, which is to say it is a difference—or, you could also say, a sameness—that can’t be measured. Whenever Blanchot speaks of the measureless—including in passages that emphasize immoderation, transgression, madness, ravishment—the dis-, the re-placement of which we try to speak here, is relevant: the motionless careening, that is, of what has no position and knows no placement whatsoever save this removal; indifferent difference, incomparable sameness; loss, but not of anything, not of anything there ever has been.
So impatient! One cannot wait, not even for a second, one quits right off. Without even waiting, one starts right in, starts right in waiting without waiting for the start. Thus for whoever waits, nothing is permitted save what is ruled out, and that is unavoidable; there is only waiting which there is absolutely not. To wait, therefore: to approach a limit one doesn’t encounter; to enter the place not found there. To wait is to be held in that place, at that boundary, on that edge—and l’entretien, conversation, does the holding.
On the subject of what there is and what there isn’t, when one waits— on the subject of waiting—Blanchot writes that ‘the one is the other’ (p. 53). Abundant wealth of waiting, waiting without end; utter dearth of waiting, waiting with no beginning: the one is the other. Their relation must be that of the start and finish in L’Attente L’Oubli (waiting must be this relation). That is, it would seem that there is neither infinite waiting nor none whatsoever, but in place of each the other, the intervention of the other, and this inseparableness of wealth and dearth must give the in-between, the vacant interval—in short, the wait: one thing, as it were, or ‘the one’. But the one is the other. Wealth and dearth, in other words, are one thing—waiting (l’attente)—but it isn’t the same.
Blanchot asks this question about conversation at the beginning of The Infinite Conversation: ‘Why two to say one thing?’ The answer: ‘Because whoever says it is the other’.2 So it seems that whatever is said in conversation is said by no one; it requires two, that it (‘one thing’) might be said at all—said, that is, by neither. By no one. We have suggested that the indifference of end and beginning—or of infinite waiting and extreme impatience—introduces the interval, the difference, the empty in-between where one and the other do not find themselves and are not found. Here there is no one. Not even the other one. No one at all, only the other. Perhaps it is this in-between that says ‘one thing’.
In fact, there is plenty in L’Attente L’Oubli to suggest that this interval (l’entre-deux) is the in-between of conversation (l’entretien), and that the interlocutors are held there (tenus) in the interval: tenus entre, entretenus ensemble. There is plenty in L’Attente L’Oubli to suggest that the two who meet and spend a whole night speaking together are held both together in between themselves, or maintained (entretenus) there where neither is—in a convergence which intervenes to interrupt it (consigning it to the past and delaying it indefinitely). For the man and the woman who speak together in this story feel that they are together because of having parted instead, and they suggest moreover that their being together prevents them from meeting. ‘Are we together?—Only if we could be apart.—We are apart, I’m afraid.—But together because of that. Together, apart’ (p. 42).
So conversation isn’t, perhaps, anything at all that he says or she says or that they say, and even its characteristic movement—its back-andforth, to-and-fro—isn’t, perhaps, a function of their being two distinct persons taking turns talking, but rather a function of their being neither one nor two. Conversation may be something like the pulse of their relation: together-apart; separate-joined; divided-united. Perhaps conversation could be described as the throb of that ambiguity (discontinuous-uninterrupted; without cease-without start; surging upsubsiding). And the interval where the two of them, the woman and the man (or rather just the one—or rather neither two nor one) are maintained far from themselves and, as it were, conversed (entretenus, entretenus)—perhaps this interval must be felt as a beat. ‘Know what rhythm holds men’, Blanchot writes, quoting Archilochus.3 In any case, when the man called to the woman in L’Attente L’Oubli and she came to him, the call and the answer appear to have intervened each in place of the other to form a relation which seems similar to that of start and stop in our earlier discussion, or of patience and impatience (the one is the other): ‘He had called her, she had come, coming in the call, calling in her advent’ (p. 71). The call arrives, the arrival calls; the call calls for the first time only later, in the answer, which came already earlier, in the call. Call and answer, address and response seem fused at a single point, which, however, precedes and follows…it. It: that is to say, the single point, which it has left behind and which lies still further on; the midpoint or meeting place from which it turns away, and back again towards which it thereby turns, saying, saying it.
‘She had lost the centre and everything was turning before her eyes…’
Every so often in L’Attente L’Oubli, while the man and woman speak together, she says to him, ‘I’d like to speak to you. Make it so I can speak to you’. He is willing, but what should he do? ‘Hear me’, she says. ‘Make me hear that you hear me.’4
When you hear another asking you to hear her so that she can speak— when you hear her asking you to hear what she can’t say until you’ve made her know you’ve heard it—how can you possibly reply? Nothing follows from such a prayer. So, you must lead. Thus, in L’Attente L’Oubli, like Orpheus leading Eurydice, the man leads the woman: ‘He had to precede her and always go on ahead, without ever being sure she followed’ (p. 53). All the while, however, it is he who follows, for he comes after and in response to her—in response to speech he hasn’t heard yet but which he must repeat, as if retracing the steps of a stranger through a trackless expanse. ‘Words one must repeat before having heard them’, we read; ‘rumor of which there is no trace and which he follows; rumor wandering nowhere, abiding everywhere’ (p. 13).
When the woman speaks, she doesn’t say anything, she just says; and when she asks him to make it so that she can speak, she doesn’t really ask for anything, she just asks (p. 80). And when he asks her what they are waiting for, she is surprised: she doesn’t understand how waiting could be waiting for anything (p. 21). Indeed, the answer she awaits from him is given in her demand or prayer, for she asks to speak and she is speaking—except that there is nothing for her words to answer, no demand for them to satisfy, because her speech consists in postponing speech, putting off the demand, the prayer. ‘She speaks deferring speech’ (p. 111). Speaking, she asks to speak and only speaks because she can’t get started, and if she can’t begin it’s only because she cannot cease; her speech is an intervening obstacle which interrupts it. A speech impediment. ‘Speaking, she is silenced (interdite)’ (p. 15). Her words seem to comprise a point of convergence (start and finish, speech and silence, call and answer—also interdiction and transgression) which isn’t found there, but diverges, as it were, or recedes.
To meet her is to approach this point, a ‘central point’ which Blanchot elsewhere says draws poets to it from deep inside the work they are to compose; he calls it ‘the concentration of ambiguity’ in The Space of Literature,5 for there the work’s perfection and its ruin cross, its commanding presence and its disappearance—the here it superbly constitutes and the nowhere to which it profoundly belongs. From this point there issues a muffled sound, a sort of rumour of language, which can’t really be heard—‘parole sans entente’—speechlessly demanding to receive a hearing. No speaker ever employs this language or ever addresses a listener in it; it interrupts the rapport between address and response and talks—but without any start—and says, but not anything— yet there is nothing negative about it, for before it begins already it is talking and after it quits it keeps on; it hasn’t started and still it persists, as if, were it ever able to start up, it could finally rest. Whoever feels he has to write, Blanchot says, feels subject to the demand that he make it so that this mute speech (this silence unable to keep still) can make him hear it. He hears a language that won’t even reach him till he has found the words to repeat it in, and conferred upon it thus some moderation, got it back within bounds. He hears it calling on him, from deep inside the boundless night, drawing him into the darkness whence no poem ever arose, the way the Sirens’ song attracted sailors, by being its own mysterious remove, its own not-here, not-yet, but near, soon, approaching—approaching its start or else its stop, drawing near or else sinking back.
In L’Attente L’Oubli the woman’s talk—stillness that won’t keep still, words that keep not being said—has the ambiguity of the Sirens’ song, the contrariness of the ‘central point’ and moreover the phantom quality of Eurydice in hell, whose invisibility shows, whose disappearance appears, in whose veiled face shines the dark of night, peril Orpheus must risk but with his gaze turned away6 just as Ulysses listens to the Sirens but lashed to the mast—and just as poets, in the account Blanchot consistently gives, have to expose themselves to the tumultuous, nocturnal excess, la démesure, and by withstanding this catastrophic immoderation, this devastating immediacy, bestow measure on it and on sheer boundlessness the limit of a form, in order that the mystery which poets hear might receive a hearing, thanks to their bold mediation. And yet, this boundlessness—incommunicable, demanding mediation of the poet: is it not the centre? The middle? The in-between—the interval? Mediation ‘itself’, perhaps. Maybe it’s somehow measure ‘itself’, measure without measure, which threatens to overwhelm all limits and which must be modified, qualified, moderated… led back within bounds, at great risk corralled and made gentle, like some wild creature. Perhaps the poet’s task is to mediate the middle: to between, as it were, the in-between.
What does Blanchot mean by poet, or by whoever has to write, whoever belongs to writing? He just means whoever happens to encounter another human, any other at all in any other’s capacity as the Other— that is, the Very High, infinitely surpassing any power that anyone can ever call upon. The approach of the Other is that of separation, infinite distance. No commonly held idea of equality or of difference has any pertinence in his regard. No shred of reciprocity mitigates the shock of his separateness. He has nothing in common with anyone, which is to say he is any other, but not under just any circumstances: the Other is any other encountered when there is nothing between the two of you, nothing at all such as shared tasks and values, common commitments, a common language to initiate by limiting (sustain by mediating, preserve by allaying) this encounter. Thus one meets the Other outside any meeting place, there where, for example, Achilles met Priam when the latter approached to beg for the body of Hector, unprotected by any human law (as stranger and suppliant, he was in the care of a god, Blanchot recalls, and was the bearer of no common language…). Priam was not weaker than Achilles, or than anyone: his weakness and misfortune were measureless. To encounter such an Other requires one to endure difference that differs, just differs—not from you, or from anything, without any point of reference or comparison, immeasurably. The Other: separation, but that doesn’t separate anything or anyone; a boundary—even a limit—but that doesn’t define or delimit anything at all.
Sheer separateness draws near and this approach says, if only we could be different, if only we could part. Oh, let us part; oh, make it so I can approach you. ‘Make it so I can speak to you. Make me hear that you hear me…’
Answer me so that in your response I might find the words of this, my plea: such is the obligation, without any conceivable beginning or end, which the Other brings to bear. It is the duty to restore him to the world of limits, where rights and obligations define each other, where equality and inequality can be measured—where it is possible to recognize resemblance, distinguishing it from difference, and to gauge distance and proximity, not confounding near and far, here and elsewhere, together and apart. Thus in L’Attente L’Oubli the man undertakes to answer the woman in such a way as to get her back within bounds. He hears the continuous murmur of her even speech— even but not with itself or with anything, ‘equal without equality’, measurelessly equal. He hears her speak—it sounds like an uninterruptable echo of speech—and he undertakes to answer in such a way as to introduce measure: ‘a measure of equality’ (p.156). He undertakes to answer and thereby to delimit this boundless limit— perhaps to place this boundary, which seems unlimited to any place, but wanders no place, abiding every place. By his answer perhaps he tries to reach this border or this edge, and thereby to install it, within bounds.
Whence his resemblance to Orpheus. But Orpheus, in Blanchot’s account, never would have undertaken to lead Eurydice back to daylight and to life—his face turned resolutely from her—if he hadn’t from the start already been turning around the other way: if it weren’t the disappearance of her face that he wanted to see. Nor would poets undertake to bestow on sheer immoderation the limit and propriety of form if, when they start to work, they weren’t already turning the work away from its perfection and back towards its absence, the fathomless indeterminacy whence it relentlessly calls. They would never even have felt the urgent requirement to mediate if it weren’t the intermediate— the in-between, measure ‘itself’—that calls to them from the terrible point central, the deep of night whence no poet returns and no work ever arises.
Blanchot expresses this in The Space of Literature when he describes the work as the relation between the contrary demands that it take form in the light of day and that it be the devastating disintegration of form in the limitless mystery of night. These two requirements are both opposite and inseparable, he emphasizes. They never come to bear separately or even by turns, as if they were distinct from each other, for the light in which the work must appear is visibility itself: not merely the appearance of one or another thing, or of everything, but the appearance of nothing appears, the dawn of all disappears. So the work’s demand— l’exigence de l’oeuvre’—is that it emerge brilliantly in the light of the obscurity threatening to engulf it. Or again, the measure required is measureless, while the chaos laying claim to the work is measure ‘itself’. Thus it is only by a vague sort of approximation, Blanchot says, that one can think of l’oeuvre as a dialogue between a reader on the one hand and the writer on the other, stabilized embodiments of two distinct demands bearing on the work—or of its two poles, as he also, provisionally, puts it: possibility and impossibility; determination and the indeterminate. Such a picture only vaguely approximates the relation, the communication in question (the work, that is), for neither of its so-called poles can really reach itself and come to bear except where it cedes to the other, its contrary. They come to themselves and are themselves to the full extent of their uncompromising opposition— their unbridgeable separation—only by departing from themselves: ‘quitting themselves and detaining each other together outside themselves in the restless unity of their common belonging’.7
Their common belonging: each one belongs to the other instead. The place where each would find itself is the place the other takes. This, then, is what they have in common: the place where, together, they do not find themselves. This is their meeting place: their violent collision interceding in between them. Parting them. The work is this intercession. This intervention. This interdiction.
Language in its capacity to attenuate contradictions, modify differences, defer conflict, limit force, ward off violence, is of no avail in the face-toface encounter with the Other as Blanchot thinks of it. To him the approach of the Other means that the two of you are utterly exposed to each other without so much as bread to share between you and certainly no common language as a middle ground. So nothing prevents you— should you wish to have recourse to some capacity or other in this infinitely trying situation, and finally to respond by doing something, at this juncture where language abandons you in all its capacities, and simply isn’t there at all as a form of ability or a kind of power or even as a possibility—nothing prevents you, when you confront an Other face to face, from exerting unlimited might. ‘I say this encounter is terrible, for here there is no longer either measure or limit…. One would have to say…that man facing man like this has no choice but to speak or to kill.’8
Speak—when speech is not a possibility—or opt instead for possibility unlimited, brute power. Speak or kill, there is no halfway in between, and the Other brings this stark alternative to bear. Yet, Blanchot adds, it is not really a matter of such a simple either/or, for to choose speech over murder is not simply to opt for one of two opposed alternatives and against the other, but rather to enter the interval between —when, however, there is no in-between. It’s to approach a limit one cannot encounter, a boundary one cannot reach; it’s to enter the place not found there. ‘To speak is always to speak from out of this interval between speech and radical violence’, Blanchot writes, ‘separating them, but maintaining each of them in a relation of vicissitude.’9
‘Vicissitude is essential’, he adds: ‘il s’agit de tenir et d’entretenir.’10 Which means that it’s a question, where the essential ambiguity is concerned, of holding firm (tenir), and of holding in-between (entretenir), and of maintaining (entretenir)—maintaining the ambiguity— and also of conversing, since the entretien or maintaining of vicissitude would also mean, in French, its conversation. Straining both English and French somewhat, one wants to say that to maintain the ambivalence (to preserve the interval) between speech and violence is ‘to converse it’. And thus it seems that to speak—when the Other approaches and one must speak in order that he be heard—thus it seems that to speak under these circumstances, and not to kill, is to maintain (or ‘converse’) a relation of ambiguity between speech and violence, thereby, paradoxically, separating them. Speech is their unresolvable ambiguity, interceding in between them and warding off this devastating loss of clear boundaries, defining limits. Speech is moderation and restraint all indistinguishable from abandon and transgression, interceding to inhibit this drunken intermingling. One might as well say that the unlocatableness of the limit—between restraint and savagery— draws it. Or, that drawing it removes the boundary. This is vicissitude’s entretien: the maintaining of ambiguity, or its conversation—this is speech.
The ambiguity that it’s a matter of maintaining is the middle, the intermediate or central point. Entretenir la vicissitude means to hold the middle in the middle. To mediate or, if you will, to middle it. To keep it ambiguous—to preserve it ambiguously. To keep it pure, as it were— making sure it is adulterated. To undecide or to between the in-between.
To converse is the more graceful way of putting this. Or, just to speak.
But no one speaks this way. Only the other. Only the conversation (the entretien).
Often Blanchot refers to the gods when thinking of immoderation. (Of immoderation—which is to say, the preservation from it.) If the divine is linked in his writing to excess, the temptation of transgression and especially the risk of madness, this isn’t because the sacred is simply the opposite of measure, law and reason, responsibilities of human proportions, but rather because it is a relation of vicissitude where law and violation, madness and reason (gods and men, the human and the divine)—madly overriding their absolute difference and the infinite distance that divides them—intervene together to safeguard it. Preventing, in this way, the intervention, the prevention, the safeguarding. Madness is this concentration of ambiguity, expressed in the disarming thought of Dionysus the mad god: not the god of madness or wine, but a god whose divinity overcomes him, a god like a law whose rule transgresses it and whose violation declares and preserves it. A limit, that is to say, drawn by its erasure, erased by its inscription. Waiting, as we’ve briefly described it in this chapter—waiting, just motionlessly waiting—could well be just such savage folly: an experience inescapably imposed by its abrupt and unappealable exclusion, not to mention vice versa. Waiting, vicissitude’s entretien. The maintaining, in other words, of this ambiguity: interdire, entredire: to prohibit—and in particular to prohibit speech (to silence)—and to speak, to say, in between.
Among the mysterious characteristics of the récit—of narrative according to Blanchot—is this: there is no such thing as a récit, and on this account, no lack of them whatsoever. Or, conversely, there is something inevitable about the récit, and for this reason, no such thing. So le récit could be understood as a relation of vicissitude and its entretien or preservation: as an ambiguous rapport between impossible and inevitable—and as the safeguarding (l’entretien) of this rapport.
Récits generally feature but a single episode, Blanchot states, in Le Livre a venir: a meeting, une rencontre.11 Ulysses encounters the Sirens’ song, Nerval Aurélia, Breton Nadja…. This rencontre turns the person who experiences it into the one who tells of it. It’s the turning of the event into the récit—the advent, then, of the récit, and thereby a turning back again the other way: the récit turns into the event: into the occurrence it tells about, that is. For the event the récit tells is the event of telling. It starts—or it will, or would—by being what it ends—if it can —by telling. Such is the meeting, then: it’s the rencontre of the telling and of what is told—the convergence of the event the récit ends by telling and the same event—the end—which the telling starts by being. The meeting, la rencontre, is the event of their reaching one another and indeed the occasion of the récit which, at this meeting, finds itself. Except that that is where it disappears, or would: would disappear or lose…itself? Before ever having reached, or been, itself or anything? Meeting point, central point, concentration of ambiguity…. Another characteristic of the récit is that ‘it seeks to meet up with itself at that point’.12 And the récit would, indeed—find itself there, at the centre— except that at that spot, just as there is about to be (or rather, to be no longer) such a thing as start or stop, event or account, each one veers off and turns into the other. This is why there is event (but unaccounted for), and why there is account (but not of anything): it is because the récit intervenes and right at the spot it might otherwise have found—or maybe lost—‘itself’, opens a measureless remove from it. It opens and it is this boundless distance, at every point the point it scrupulously skirts, and all the time rashly the precise moment it prudently avoids. The récit veers round, you might well say, or detours…it. That is why there is account and event, start and stop (wisdom and folly, care and carelessness) or rather neither one, for that is why there is only ever one, which is always the other. Which is always turning, turning into the other again, turning and returning and which simply is this swerve. At the very start of L’Attente L’Oubli, remember, the woman couldn’t get her bearings; she had lost the centre and everything was turning before her eyes (p. 8).
Everything was turning. Turning and finding: for trouver (to find)— as Blanchot suggests in ‘Speaking is not seeing’ (a text in The Infinite Conversation which repeats more than one sentence from L’Attente l’oubli)—doesn’t only or even primarily mean trouver, but rather tourner—to turn, turn round and circle, searching. ‘To find is almost exactly the same word as to seek, which means to “take a turn around”.’13 Thus the centre veers off and turns—turns and finds, finds and turns—it just doesn’t find itself (L’Attente l’oubli, p. 132). Everywhere it turns it finds, but it isn’t to be found, it isn’t ever there. Concerning this listing language, Blanchot recalls what Heraclitus said of sacred speech: ‘I wonder’, he writes, ‘whether Heraclitus, when he says of sacred speech that it neither exposes nor conceals, but gives a sign, is not saying something about this.’
Now in The Step Not Beyond,14 Blanchot notes a number of words which signal, give a sign, indiquent. Il is one: it. Also God, and madness. He calls them nameless names which do not name anything— words for which there are none, and which are words for nothing. A few words too many, it seems, and also a few words too few. By chance they are hooked, Blanchot says, on to the edge of language. Le récit might well be defined in the same fashion—as if it were such an extra, such a missing, such a border word. For as we’ve said, a récit is an event, it is an account, each turning uninterruptedly into the other, together ceaselessly interrupting their relation and giving either an event no story ever tells—nameless, unaccounted for (by no means hidden, though)—or else a story that recounts nothing (but which is by no means silent or secretive: it just recounts): either something unspoken or speech that says, but not anything. Or rather, neither one, exactly. For whichever one it is, is turning already, into the other. Neither event nor account, then, neither words nor what they say, signs nor what they designate, a récit is through and through its in-between, altogether the interval between being, and saying, it.
It is, in other words, an entretien, which is the form language takes when it turns altogether into the very edge of it.
Into the edge that’s neither exposed nor concealed. Into the limit neither drawn nor erased, observed nor overstepped. Into the meeting place that’s never either found or lost; into the middle—which signals, or points.
In L’Attente L’Oubli it seems that a man, looking out of a hotel window, saw a woman on her balcony and signalled to her. She came and they met in his room and during their long conversation, she says to him every so often, ‘Give me that’ (for example, pp.27, 81, 112).
But what? Give what? She doesn’t say, or show, not that she keeps any secrets; but when she speaks, language just points. That. Give me. She says that there isn’t anything so difficult in this demand or very mysterious in this pointing: everything is simple, she says. ‘I am not asking you for it, I am putting it in your hand’ (p. 80). Apparently that is not a term for it, an indication of it or of anything, but is something and, precisely, that. A term, to be sure, but not for anything; just a word, but that names nothing, an indication, but that doesn’t designate or point to anything. It can’t, because it is the thing it would, presumably, otherwise have designated: that—a nameless thing, since the word that would, presumably, name it (that) is the one it isn’t any longer, the one withdrawn from among the names that language includes when, to the number of things there are to account for, it was added.
She doesn’t ask him for anything, she doesn’t indicate to him what she wishes him to give her but presents it to him; there it is, that, very plain, a sign, that is all, not for anything, just a pointer and yet, there being no pointer to indicate it, no sign or word for it any more, it goes all undesignated and is indeed what the woman does not say when she says…. When she speaks and says…
, there is, as it were, less than before, as if her sentence had intro duced its removal. What there never was before withdraws when she speaks, as if she were marking the border whose drawing erases it. And the prayer which presented the gift already, already turns into the presentation asking for it. ‘He called, she came, coming in the call, calling in her advent…’
Language signals in this ‘mysterious’ way because of something that happens at its border, Blanchot says (in The Step Not Beyond). On account of words such as it, that, God…hooked, by chance, on to its edge, language ‘se fait signe’.15 Which means turns back and signals to itself, as the récit does—the récit which tells the event it is, the event of telling. This is what ‘se fait signe’ means, but only in so far as instead it means becomes a sign, which is to say, in place of a thing its name, in place of its name, the thing. Turned thus twice over away from itself language points, not at anything and without any power to designate. It just points, indique. It is the presence to each other of names and things, of language and its meaning—it is this meeting place, where it finds itself, except that nothing names the name and it names nothing; it is neither a name nor a thing, but is turned away from names and away from things, like the interlocutors in L’Attente L’Oubli who, ever since he turned back and gestured to her (from his hotel room to the balcony where he glimpsed her), are ‘turned away from one another in order to be present to each other in the interval’—in the interim or delay, that is; in the wait (p. 94). They meet in between, where their meeting is interdite: interrupted, inter-spoken.
1 Maurice Blanchot, L’Attente L’Oubli (Paris: Gallimard, 1962). All references in this chapter to L’Attente L’Oubli will be to the Gallimard edition, and all English translations are my own.
2 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. ix.
3 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 5.
4 These sentences recur in L’Attente L’Oubli: for example, pp. 14, 26, 110, 155.
5 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), p. 44.
6 The section entitled ‘Orpheus’ Gaze’ is the ‘central point’ of The Space of Literature.
7 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 200.
8 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 60.
9 Ibid., p. 62.
10 Ibid., p. 30.
11 Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre a venir, (Paris: Gallimard, 1959). See the opening section, ‘The Sirens’ Song’, in The Sirens’ Song, Selected Essays by Maurice Blanchot, ed. Gabriel Josipovici, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982).
12 ‘La parole vaine’, in L’Amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
13 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 25.
14 Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).
15 Ibid., p. 121.