Aesthetics of Negativity: Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy 9780823269310

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Aesthetics of Negativity

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Series Board James Bernauer Drucilla Cornell Thomas R. Flynn Kevin Hart Richard Kearney Jean-Luc Marion Adriaan Peperzak Thomas Sheehan Hent de Vries Merold Westphal Michael Zimmerman

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John D. Caputo, series editor

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WILLIAM S. ALLEN

Aesthetics of Negativity Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy

F ORDH A M U NIVERSIT Y P RESS New York

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2016

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Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Allen, William S., 1971– Aesthetics of negativity : Blanchot, Adorno, and autonomy / William S. Allen. — First edition. pages cm. — (Perspectives in Continental philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-6928-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Negativity (Philosophy) 2. Autonomy (Philosophy) 3. Aesthetics. 4. Critical theory. 5. Blanchot, Maurice. 6. Adorno, Theodor W., 1903–1969. 7. Continental philosophy. I. Title. B828.25.A45 2016 149—dc23 2015034483 Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16

5 4 3 2 1

First edition

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Contents

List of Abbreviations Acknowledgments Introduction: Abstract and Concrete Modernity The Language of the Everyday, 14

ix xiii 1

P A RT I : C O N T R E - T E M P S 1

Autonomous Literature: The Manifesto and the Novel The Formative Drive after Kant, 37 ■ Benjamin’s Historical Critique of the Novel, 45 ■ Hegel and the Ambivalence of Prose, 53

29

2

The Obscurities of Artistic Innovation Blanchot on the New Music, 68 ■ Adorno’s Notion of Aesthetic Material, 74

58

P A R T I I : N E G AT I V E S PA C E S 3

Dead Transcendence: Blanchot, Paulhan, Kafka Transdescendence of the Writer, 99 ■ Negating Transcendence, 108

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93

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4

5

An Image of Thought in Thomas l’Obscur The Idea of Literature as Force of Repulsion, 122 Bataille and Klossowski, 127 Indifferent Reading in Aminadab Mallarmé and the Space of Writing, 139 Imaginary Space, 145

114 ■

Recapitulation: 135

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Material Vision,

P A R T I I I : M AT E R I A L A M B I G U I T Y 6

7

The Language-Like Quality of the Artwork Mimetic Identity and the Dialectics of Semblance, 165 of Linguisticality in Language, 178

161 ■

The Form

The Possibility of Speculative Writing Hegel, Blanchot, and the Work of Writing, 199 ■ Serial Hiatus Form in Hölderlin, 209 ■ Linguistic Works of Art, 214

191

P A R T I V : G R E Y L I T E R AT U R E 8

Echo Location: Beckett’s Comment c’est

223

9

The Negativity of Thinking through Language

241

Appendix: Thomas l’Obscur, Chapter 1

255

Notes Bibliography Index

263 299 313

viii

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Contents

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Abbreviations

Where double page references have been used they refer to the French or German text and then the English versions, as translations have generally been modified. A

Am

AT

Cap CC

CM

Maurice Blanchot, Aminadab (Paris: Gallimard, 1942); tr. Jeff Fort as Aminadab (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002). Blanchot, L’amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971); tr. Elizabeth Rottenberg as Friendship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971); tr. Robert Hullot-Kentor as Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, tr. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, tr. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity, 1999). Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. David McLellan, tr. Samuel Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). ix

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Com

CPJ

DA

DSH

ED

EI

EL

Exp

FP

GS

HLP

M

x

■

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Samuel Beckett, Comment c’est (Paris: Minuit, 1961); tr. by the author as How It Is, ed. Édouard Magessa O’Reilly (London: Faber, 2009). Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, tr. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Max Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, GS 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980); tr. Edmund Jephcott as Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, GS 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971); tr. Shierry Weber Nicholsen as Hegel: Three Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993). Blanchot, L’ écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980); tr. Ann Smock as The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). Blanchot, L’entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969); tr. Susan Hanson as The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Blanchot, L’espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955); tr. Ann Smock as The Space of Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). Georges Bataille, L’expérience intérieure (Paris: Gallimard, 1973); tr. Leslie Anne Boldt as Inner Experience (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988). Blanchot, Faux pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1943); tr. Charlotte Mandell as Faux Pas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–91); SW: Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003). Blanchot, “How Is Literature Possible?,” tr. Michael Syrotinski, in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 49–60. Adorno, Metaphysik: Begriff und Probleme, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998); tr. Edmund Jephcott as Metaphysics: Concept and Problems (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). Abbreviations

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MM

MS4/5

ND

NL

OGT PAS

PF

PG

PH PNM

S1 SN SW TN

Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, GS 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979); tr. E. F. N. Jephcott as Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: New Left Books, 1974). Adorno, Musikalische Schriften 4/5, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Klaus Schultz, GS 17/18 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982–84); Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Adorno, Negative Dialektik, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, GS 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972); tr. E. B. Ashton as Negative Dialectics (New York: Seabury Press, 1973). Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, GS 11 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974); tr. Shierry Weber Nicholsen as Notes to Literature, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991–92). Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, tr. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977). J. M. Bernstein, “Poesy and the Arbitrariness of the Sign: Notes for a Critique of Jena Romanticism,” in Philosophical Romanticism, ed. Nikolas Kompridis (London: Routledge, 2006), 143–72. Blanchot, La part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949); tr. Charlotte Mandell as The Work of Fire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969); tr. A. V. Miller as Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Hegel, The Philosophy of History, tr. John Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956). Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, GS 12 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975); ed. and tr. Robert Hullot-Kentor as Philosophy of New Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). Bataille, Sur Nietzsche (Paris: Gallimard, 1945); tr. Bruce Boone as On Nietzsche (London: Athlone, 1992). (See GS, Benjamin.) Blanchot, Thomas l’Obscur, nouvelle version (Paris: Gallimard, 1992); tr. Robert Lamberton as Thomas the Abbreviations

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xi

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Obscure, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill, 1999), 51–128. Blanchot, Thomas l’Obscur, première version, 1941 (Paris: Gallimard, 2005).

TP

xii

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Abbreviations

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Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of chapters 3–5 appeared in the following articles: “Dead Transcendence: Blanchot, Heidegger, and the Reverse of Language,” Research in Phenomenology 39, no. 1 (2009): 69–98; “The Image of the Absolute Novel: Blanchot, Mallarmé, and Aminadab,” MLN 125, no. 5 (2010): 1098–1125; “Repulsive Image: The Idea of Literature after Blanchot,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42, no. 2 (2011): 139–59. I am grateful to Brill, the Johns Hopkins University Press, and the Taylor and Francis Group for permission to reprint these articles here in revised forms. I would also like to thank Gerhard Richter for the use of his Grau hinter Glas (2002) on the cover of this book, as well as to express my warmest appreciation for the support and hard work of the staff at Fordham University Press in bringing this book to publication, particularly Tom, Eric, and John, many thanks to you all.

xiii

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Where in a work lies the beginning of the moment when the words become stronger than their meaning and the meaning becomes more material than the word? When does Lautréamont’s prose lose the name of prose? Isn’t each sentence understandable? Isn’t each sequence of sentences logical? And don’t the words say what they mean? At what moment, in this maze of order, in this labyrinth of clarity, did meaning lose its way, at what turn did reasoning notice that it had stopped “following,” that something was continuing, progressing, concluding in its place, something like it in every way, in which it thought it recognised itself, until the moment when, waking, it discovered this other that had taken its place? But if it retraces its steps in order to denounce the intruder, the illusion immediately vanishes, it is itself that it fi nds, the prose is prose again, so it goes further and loses itself again, letting a sickening material substance stand in for it, like a staircase that walks, a corridor that unfolds itself, a reason whose infallibility excludes all reasoners, a logic that has become the “logic of things.” Then where is the work? Each moment has the clarity of a beautiful language being spoken, but the whole has the opaque meaning of a thing that is being eaten and that eats, that devours, engulfing and reconstituting itself in a vain effort to change itself into nothing. —Maurice Blanchot, 1948

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Negativity has a central place in Blanchot’s writings, whether in terms of the experience of literature, the possibility of the work, or the nature of its language, and it thus provides a privileged mode of access to what can otherwise appear to be a forbiddingly obscure body of writings. However, its role in his thinking is unique and is not to be subsumed to the negativity found in the thought of Hegel or Heidegger, although it partakes of aspects of both. Instead, negativity for Blanchot operates at the level of the ontological status of language, which oscillates undecidably between the assertion and negation of meaning and thereby affects the experience of literature and the possibility of the work. To explicate the significance of this negativity it is necessary to turn to another figure for whom this notion has become as central and as ambiguous, Adorno, whose Hegelian background is much stronger, but who also works against this tradition to form his own negative understanding of dialectics that is crucially exemplified in the work of art. For Adorno, the work of art exists as a particular model of its historical and material context, one that both demonstrates its contradictions and indicates what has been obscured by them. The negativity of the work is thus both that of the critique that it levels against this context and of the possibilities that it negatively raises in its place. While remaining incommensurable in their approaches and concerns, the ways in which Blanchot and Adorno examine the place and role of negativity are mutually illuminating. What this double perspective then offers is an understanding of negativity that is neither nihilistic nor pessimistic but rather indicates how it persists within the body of language and thinking as a material ambiguity, one that is speculative insofar as it brings materiality to thought in the form of linguistic negativity, and critical insofar as it indicates how this experience arises out of, and in contradistinction to, its actual historical context.

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Introduction: Abstract and Concrete Modernity

Blanchot’s first novel, Thomas l’Obscur, begins with a scene that has long been regarded as paradigmatic for his approach to writing in general, and it is remarkable, as Jean Starobinski noted, how much of his later thought is already apparent in these opening lines:1 Thomas sat down and looked at the sea. For some time he remained motionless, as if he had come there to follow the movements of the other swimmers and, although the fog prevented him from seeing very far, he stayed there obstinately, his eyes fixed on the bodies that advanced through the water with difficulty. Then, when a wave more powerful than the others reached him, he in his turn went down the sandy slope and slipped among the currents that quickly immersed him. [TP: 23; cf. TN: 9/55] Thomas looks at the sea and then goes down into the waters, and so the novel begins. There is very little space here between a literal reading of this opening and an allegorical reading that would see it as an entrance into literature, for example, as each appears to give way to the other. Nothing in the text seems to prevent this slippage and fi x it as one kind of text or another; on the contrary, the simplicity of the writing, its apparent lack of adornment or artifice, enables this ambiguity to emerge. For in its simplicity the writing seems to operate as if the literal and the figurative could not be definitively distinguished, and the figure of Thomas then proceeds as the exposition of this narrative ambiguity. 1

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Later, Blanchot would cite those lines of Hegel’s where he discusses the difficult situation of one confronted by his inability to start a work, which requires him to have already begun in order to begin, such that the “individual who is going to act therefore seems to find himself in a circle in which every moment already presupposes the other, and thus no beginning can be found for his actions” [PG: 297/240]. Hegel’s solution to this problem is that the individual should simply start, immediately, without further ado. But, as Blanchot then remarks, for the writer this means that “the work cannot be planned [projetée], but only carried out [réalisée], that it has value, truth, and reality, only through the words that unfold [déroulent] it in time and inscribe it in space,” thus the writer “will set to writing, but out of nothing and with nothing in mind [à partir de rien et en vue de rien]— and, following an expression of Hegel’s, like a nothingness working in nothingness” [PF: 296/304; PG: 296/239]. But this means that such a nothingness is inherent to the continuance of writing, and as such this problem of starting, which is “the essence of literary activity,” is one that “that the writer must and must not overcome” [PF: 295/303]. Blanchot’s response to this problem is made apparent in these opening lines and throughout the remainder of his writings in the peculiar flatness of his style and, although widely noted, it has not been recognized how this style activates the movement of nothingness working in nothingness by way of its employment of a mode of abstraction. The nature of this abstraction is at once obvious but also hard to grasp, and the reasons for this would seem to lie not only in Blanchot’s manner of persistently suspending the moment in which this abstraction would realize itself, but also in the nature of abstraction itself, which is both conceptual and aesthetic. The difficulties associated with the notion of abstraction arise from the differences between the ways in which it is viewed when seen as part of epistemology and in terms of visual art. Coupled with this disparity is the further use of the term in sociology, where it takes on an even more daunting role as the means by which human relations are dominated by abstract values.2 Typically the source for this multiplicity lies with the separation Kant makes between the conceptual and the aesthetic, in which the understanding withdraws from the particularity of the sensible in order to conceptually determine it. There is thus a sense of both generalization, through the loss of particularity, and mobilization, through the way that the sensible motivates thought, which is why it is a mistake to view abstraction as divorced from the concrete, since it only ever arises by way of it. It is this broader sense of abstraction as combining both a conceptual understanding and an attenuated rather than severed relation to the sensible that then underlies Hegel’s adoption of the term. Nevertheless, the 2

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problem reformulates itself insofar as knowledge of things is achieved by withdrawing from them: by generalizing away from their particularities their essence apparently reveals itself, since knowledge does not lie in the thing itself but in the universality of its determinants, which is how this process coincides with language. The sensible therefore remains the limitcondition for thought, just as it is in turn determined by thought through the process of abstraction. For Hegel then, there is a dialectical relation between the concrete and the abstract, in which the concrete becomes abstract in the form of concepts just as abstractions become concrete in terms of their force, a model later extended in Marx’s understanding of the reifying effect of exchange-value on the relations between people and things, where the concrete relation to others is rendered abstract through exchange, while the abstract relations between things becomes concrete in their fetishcharacter. There is thus the smell of death in this language of abstraction, as Mallarmé was aware, but for Hegel this is only when it proceeds with its own interests in mind, rather than as part of the ongoing actualization of the absolute idea or concrete universal. Abstraction within modern art has an even more complex meaning, as it designates the move away from figurative art toward a greater formalism or greater materiality, which conveys a relation that is either more conceptual or more aesthetic.3 This formal-material bivalency of abstraction derives from the ambivalence of its withdrawal, which is at once a withdrawal from and a withdrawal into, and it is this undecidability that undermines any sense in which the essence might be discovered by way of this withdrawal. It is not the case that by removing or reducing some aspects of the artwork its essence will reveal itself; rather it is only an aspect of the work that is revealed by way of this attenuation—that is, abstraction is a form of (negative) pressure in which the work is induced to expose itself. And what is thereby expressed is only that aspect of the work that is exposed in the movement of estrangement, for abstraction does not solicit this material form of the work to appear in a perfect void but instead draws it out into a greater and greater remove. It is this movement of abstraction that is reflected in Blanchot’s insistent demand to go further, when this means further away, toward the outside, and where this exteriority is the most extreme point of unfolding and fragmentation of the work, exposing a power of destruction or change within it that offers “the possibility of a radical transformation,” as he would later write in relation to the opening lines of Thomas l’Obscur— a possibility that is inherent in the movement of language.4 For language is already a power of abstraction, but within literature this abstraction is brought to bear upon itself, such that there is a withdrawal from language within language, and it is this immanent Introduction: Abstract and Concrete Modernity

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movement that characterizes Blanchot’s fiction, to actualize not its absolute idea but rather its “concrete emptiness” [PF: 86/81]. And it is in prose fiction that this power of abstraction is strongest, for insofar as it is a form of language that depends on nothing for its development, it is able to bring this nothingness to its point of greatest exposure. The negativity that Blanchot sees in language is the same as that which distances it from representation and figuration, but in order to understand its persistent negations it is necessary to examine not only what is negated and how but also what this leaves behind and where it leads language. It is thus possible to suggest that Blanchot’s approach to fiction demonstrates a departure from generic narrative fiction that is comparable to the contemporaneous changes found in visual art as it moved from Surrealism and Expressionism to abstraction. Such changes occurred in painting as it became concerned with the problems of representation and began to adopt approaches that were more extreme or more austere as a response to these problems. It was not a question of what to paint in the disenchanted world as much as how, given that the possibility and even necessity of painting were in question. The manner in which artists responded to this problem provides a vocabulary that can prove very illuminating when placed in the context of the equally intransigent problems that faced writers in this period, of which Blanchot is a particularly extreme example. The terms of the history of art laid out in Hegel’s aesthetics suggest that modern art takes on the forms that it does as it becomes more and more concerned with itself. Th at is, without the defining context of religious thought, artworks become preoccupied with the problem of defining their own context and necessity. This self-definition, which is a guiding theme of Enlightenment and Romantic thought, leads to the reflexivity and conceptualism common in modern art and takes the form of an increasing abstraction in the mode of its appearance. Hegel would see this as a mark of the decreasing significance of art as it ceases to be concerned with the highest things and is only concerned with itself, which ultimately means that it becomes less autonomous, as it now requires other discourses to provide its explication. The experience of the artwork is no longer a direct experience of its manifestation of truth, but rather is doubly refracted through its own reflexivity and its discursive dependence. Such a verdict arises from the comparison Hegel makes between the art of ancient Greece and that which follows it. But in his descriptions of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings there lies an alternative possibility that relates the sober and quotidian quality of these artworks to a sense of prosaic truth—that is, one that is not indirect in its manifestation of truth simply because it is no longer associated with a religious context. Rather, the secular world of 4

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Dutch painting provides its own manifestation of truth in its disenchantment, as these pictures of domestic or urban spaces are expressions of a newly found material experience, one that found truth in the everyday and was able to convey it through an equally direct artistic expression. The clarity and richness of oils lent themselves well to a painting that, in moving away from the depiction of religious figures, chose to focus on particular scenes of everyday life in their space and their detail. For these are pictures that have a richness of content that derives from the fact that the space of the painting is no longer focused on a single central image but now fills out its space with a range of detailed images, which can then do justice to the depth of material existence in the disenchanted world, where meaning is immanent and particular and permeated by contingency and negativity. But the sense of purpose that arises in this mode of painting comes under pressure as the difficulties of representing these images become harder to avoid. These difficulties inhere in the problematic flatness of pictorial representation (which will have significant resonances with the concomitant developments in modernist writing), which requires a renegotiation of the relation of painting to the world that centers on the duplicity of its semblance—the fact that its images depict by way of deception and thereby require interpretation, actual creative involvement, from their audience.5 From this point of view it is easier to understand how artists like Piet Mondrian, Lucio Fontana, and Clyfford Still are following in the line of this sense of representation, but have abstracted its detail and focus to an extreme. Their works are not secluded in a conceptual niche that removes them from the possibility of conveying an experience of truth, but are intensively focused on the nature of this experience in its conceptual evasion. Such a revised reading of modern art may then provide a means of approaching the transformations inherent in Blanchot’s fictions, which seem to follow an equivalent path of prosaic abstraction and intensification. Undoubtedly Blanchot’s early fictions follow in the vein of Surrealism, although one perhaps closer to Jean Paul and Lautréamont than Breton or Aragon, and in doing so they focus on the inherent mystery of the writing process, its endless capacity for positing (and thereby negating) meaning. This is not done in pursuit of representation but rather in the realization that anything can be written down and in doing so becomes real, but also elusive. And in finding that his words become real the writer is obliged to respond to them as such, with all the weight and obscurity of their material existence. It is thus that the writer comes to appreciate that the relation of writing to reality occurs by way of writing, through the obligations it places on him. Blanchot thus finds that despite its gratuity writing is also Introduction: Abstract and Concrete Modernity

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onerous and inescapable, and in response to this inextricable milieu the writer is drawn to abstraction as the only means of focusing these excessive demands, refining his approach so as to understand the relation writing has to the world when it bears the responsibility of discovering and inventing actual material articulations. That is, the writer finds that his writing is part of the prose of the world and thereby indirectly represents and transforms it through its own processes of experimentation, with all the pressures and difficulties that this implies for both the matter of writing and its style. Although the enigmatic quality of Blanchot’s style has often been remarked upon, it is difficult to define precisely what constitutes this enigma. Lydia Davis, Blanchot’s most sensitive translator, noted in 1985 on the occasion of her translation of Au moment voulu that the challenge for the translator “is to write the book in English with an equivalent of Blanchot’s limpid obscurity” without rendering his prose “too limpid or too obscure.” 6 Obscurity has been an unavoidable term in relation to Blanchot’s writings since his first novel, but so has limpidity, and yet understanding the manner and nature of their paradoxical interrelation has proved persistently elusive. At a crucial point in the development of his own writing, though, Blanchot offers a possible understanding of this play of clarity and obscurity in his considerations of the changes marked by the language of Heraclitus. A sense of affinity inevitably links Blanchot’s thought to that of Heraclitus (as is also found in Adorno’s reading of Hegel in “Skoteinos”), and his remarks thus appear to be referring even more than usual to his own discovery of a mode of writing in which obscurity is affirmed as “a sign of rigour, an exigency of the most attentive and the most collected [recueillie] speech, the most wellbalanced between the contraries that it tests [éprouve], faithful to double meaning, but only out of fidelity to the simplicity of meaning, and in this way calling upon us never to content ourselves with a reading that would have a single sense [sens].” But whence arises this double meaning, “the depth of simple words” [EI: 124/87–88]? Quite simply, and yet necessarily epochal in its significance, Heraclitus found, in a certain “sober and severe” formulation of words, a form of language whose enigmatic power enabled it “to seize, in the network of its duplicities, the disjointed simplicity to which the enigma of the variety of things responds.” In other words, Heraclitus’s style of writing uncovered the relation between words and things, such that his apparent obscurity has “the resolute design of making answer to one another [de faire se répondre] in writing the severity and the density, the simplicity and the complex arrangement of the structure of forms and, on this basis [à partir de là], to bring into correspondence [de faire se répondre] the obscurity of language 6

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and the clarity of things” [EI: 122/86–87]. The sense of difficulty in Heraclitus’s language, which Blanchot seems to adopt, comes from this understanding that words, no less than things themselves, have their own complexity, for at one moment “it is the thing that represents the movement towards dispersion, and the name that says unity,” and at another, “it is the name that pluralises the one thing, and language, far from gathering, disperses” [EI: 128/90]. His writing “is thus written in proximity to surrounding things, coming to terms with them [s’expliquant avec elles] in a movement that goes from them to words, then from words to them, according to a new relation of contrariety that we are powerless to master once and for all, but that makes us hear— concretely—this mysterious relation existing between writing and the logos” [EI: 125/88]. The play of light and dark in Blanchot’s language is nothing less than its negotiation of the relation between words and things in their mutual duplicity, which expresses itself in his writing in the paradoxical obscurity of its simple formulations and the clarity of its images, an inversion that gives rise to its combination of abstraction and flatness, its uncertain and thus enigmatic, fascinating depth. All this is to some degree reflected in the transition between the first and second version of Thomas l’Obscur, between the novel of 1941 and the much-reduced narrative or récit of 1950 (which was published as Thomas l’Obscur, nouvelle version), as I will now show. The decade between these two versions comprises the most critical period in Blanchot’s writings, during which he established himself as a literary critic as well as finding a way of bringing his critical and fictional investigations into dialogue through the development of the récit as a specific form of reflexive prose. It was also the period of the war, and everything that entailed. First Version Thomas sat down and looked at the sea. For some time he remained motionless, as if he had come there to follow the movements of the other swimmers and, although the fog prevented him from seeing very far, he stayed there obstinately, his eyes fixed on the bodies that advanced through the water with difficulty. Then, when a wave more powerful than the others reached him, he in his turn went down the sandy slope and slipped among the currents that quickly immersed him. The sea was calm and Thomas was in the habit of swimming for a long time without tiring. So there was nothing to disturb the efforts he made to support himself, although the goal that he was fixed on suddenly appeared very remote and he felt a kind of discomfort in going towards a region whose borders were unknown. What Introduction: Abstract and Concrete Modernity

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ordinarily allowed him not to fear tiredness was that he knew the way that he was going, that in crossing the water he rediscovered it as something familiar that he knew he could follow to the end without his strength coming to fail him. But today it was not the same. He had chosen a new route and, far from distinguishing the marker points that would have shown him the best path, he had difficulty recognising the water through which he slipped. Yet he made no effort to turn back. The fog hid the shore, and his hope was not in the possibility of reaching land again, but in carrying himself towards a more important and more difficult goal that he had still to make out. While up until now he had been struggling with a solitude that weighed upon him, not far from him he caught sight of a swimmer whose movements surprised him by their rapidity and their ease. It was a spectacle he would have wanted to admire at leisure. He was himself only feeling more of the fatigue that was slowing him down. But he also had a comforting feeling and he would have wanted to have enough strength to cry out and get another cry in response. So his voice attempted to raise itself above the noise of the waves that were tossing about in an endless swirling. He expected that the sound would lose itself in the roar that was deafening him, but on the contrary he was surprised by the distinct and vibrant cry that rang out amidst the whistling of the wind and that seemed to burst into a silence that it shattered. Nevertheless the swimmer ignored the call and his indifference appeared so incomprehensible that it was if he had been deleted from reality. Swimming then became an activity whose importance kept on growing for Thomas, although he had the impression that it was being practiced strangely. A cloud had descended upon the sea and the surface of the water was lost in a pale glow that seemed the only truly real thing. Very violent currents were shaking Thomas’s body, drawing his arms and legs in different directions, without giving him the feeling of being among the waves and of rolling in elements that he knew. The certainty that the water itself was missing imposed on his effort to swim the character of a tragic and at the same time non-serious exercise from which he drew nothing but discouragement. Perhaps it would have been sufficient that he gain control of himself to chase away these desolate thoughts, but his gaze could find nothing to catch hold of, and it seemed to him that he was contemplating the void with the absurd intention of finding some help there. [TP: 23–25]

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New Version Thomas sat down and looked at the sea. For some time he remained motionless, as if he had come there to follow the movements of the other swimmers and, although the fog prevented him from seeing very far, he stayed there obstinately, his eyes fixed on the bodies that floated with difficulty. Then, when a more powerful wave reached him, he in his turn went down the sandy slope and slipped among the currents that straightaway immersed him. The sea was calm and Thomas was in the habit of swimming for a long time without tiring. But today he had chosen a new route. The fog hid the shore. A cloud had descended upon the sea and the surface was lost in a glow that seemed the only truly real thing. Currents shook him, without giving him the feeling of being among the waves and of rolling in elements that were known. The certainty that the water itself was missing imposed on his effort to swim the character of a frivolous exercise from which he drew nothing but discouragement. Perhaps it would have been sufficient for him to gain control of himself to chase away such thoughts, but his gaze could find nothing to catch hold of, it seemed to him that he was contemplating the void with the intention of fi nding some help there. [TN: 9–10/55] (I have included complete translations of both versions of Chapter 1 in the Appendix.) Understanding what is at issue in this transition is essential to any understanding of Blanchot’s style in general, which otherwise seems so elusive, and given that there is a reduction between the first and second extract it seems reasonable to think that this style has something to do with abstraction. Aside from a few changes that seem related to felicity of expression, there are many explicit reductions that take place, such as that between the “pale glow” of the waters in the first version and the unqualified “glow” of the second, or the “absurd intention” of finding help and the later “intention.” The removal of adjectives suggests restraint, and this reading is supported by the reduced middle section, but it would be too hasty to assume that this explanation covers the entirety of the transition. For a large amount of information has been lost through this reduction—information that hardly appears unnecessary even if its tone is markedly more dramatic; indeed the second version is in some ways inferior insofar as its abbreviation leaves its ambiguities less uncertain. But it may have been Blanchot’s aim to reduce the verbosity of the text because it moved too quickly into a series of quasi-dialectical contradictions and descriptive intensities, for while the later version is not lacking in contradictions, its tone is less Introduction: Abstract and Concrete Modernity

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overwhelming, whereas the uncertainties of the earlier text become more and more fantastic. It may not be the case that Blanchot thought the first version deficient, but rather that its excess only indicates one way in which the narrative could be pursued and that there might be another version that was more restrained in its demonstration. In this way the move toward the récit may have been guided by a sense of offering a narrative that could emerge without going by way of excess. Starobinski suggests that the movement between the two versions extends the same movement of attenuation that is accomplished in the images of the narrative itself, such that they become more transparent to their ambiguous literary status as both (abstract) thoughts and (concrete) images. As he goes on to show, this refinement of the language of the narrative consists in a reciprocal contamination of the concrete and the abstract in which abstract terms are encountered concretely and material objects are conceptually voided, to the point where what remains is an intermediary zone that is neither one nor the other but consists of those elements in which objectivity is experienced by thought or in which thought becomes physical (fatigue, difficulty, paralysis). Unfortunately Starobinski misses the significance of this point by then reading Thomas’s relation to the sea as an adversarial confrontation of negation and overcoming, but its insight will be central to what follows here.7 Because these extracts are from the beginning of the narrative they show how Blanchot introduces the world of his concerns. That is, they grant us a vision of the manner in which he will proceed, the specific tone and approach he will use, and thus the particular kind of narrative he is pursuing. The sense of reality that is conveyed in these opening lines is seemingly unproblematic, and the language is clear and unadorned, but there is a lack of definition to the situation that becomes more and more troublesome. Within the second sentence there is already a creeping instability that is hardly noticeable, for the hypothesis that is posited (“as if he had come there to follow the movements of the other swimmers”) is partly negated (“the fog prevented him from seeing very far”) and yet not only maintained but also treated as real (“he stayed there obstinately, his eyes fixed on the bodies”). While the reflexive nature of this opening (as a narrative about entering narrative) is submerged, it is not clear what it is submerged beneath, for the descriptions are generic and underdetermined and thus would seem insufficient to bear any narrative development; there is sea, fog, sand, and waves (all decidedly undefined elements), but no indication of where or when this is occurring, no details about Thomas or anyone else. But the narrative voice does not have the impassiveness of the nouveau roman, for it is intimately engaged with the actions of its protagonist, indeed, it strug10

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gles to remain apart from them, it is just that these actions remain as uncertain as the language in which they are described. The subsequent development of details (in the second version) is almost naïve in its simplicity (“the sea was calm,” “the fog hid the shore,” “a cloud descended upon the sea”), and their introduction does little to enhance the narrative; rather they offer the bare minimum of orientation, and yet there is still scope for disorientation. It is as if Blanchot has chosen to simplify the language in order to show that, even at this level of narrative simplicity, there is still no guarantee of clarity or certainty. What was shown in the earlier version extensively is, in the later version, rendered intensive. The first version proceeds by a more elaborate development and negotiation of these dialectical ambiguities as the sentences uncover uncertainties and negations that are then enlarged (“the goal that he was fixed on suddenly appeared very remote and he felt a kind of discomfort in going towards a region whose borders were unknown”; “he had chosen a new route and, far from distinguishing the marker points that would have shown him the best path, he had difficulty recognising the water through which he slipped. Yet he made no effort to turn back. The fog hid the shore, and his hope was not in the possibility of reaching land again, but in carrying himself towards a more important and more difficult goal that he had still to make out”). There is a goal, but it is remote; he is moving toward it, but the borders of this region are uncertain; he has chosen a route, but it is difficult to recognize. The limpidity of the medium is less the conveyor of security than it is the marker of an indiscernability that quickly becomes extreme, since it lacks not only borders but also any stable characteristics, and this would seem to undermine the possibility of determining any movement through it. It might seem absurd to try to recognize water (which is almost quintessentially featureless), but this indeterminacy has been extended to the possibility of even recognizing it as water. And yet he goes on, and in this persistence would seem to lie the distinguishing mark of Blanchot’s fiction (although the pathos of this gesture is one of the affects from which he later restrains himself ), for, despite this extreme disorientation, Thomas does not lose heart; quite the opposite, he seems energized by the lack of certainty, as if it betokened some greater discovery, although what happens next only leads to more confusion rather than less.8 The appearance of another swimmer and the ensuing maelstrom is sudden and inexplicably dramatic and introduces a sequence in which each description is followed by its negation, seemingly without reason. But this untethered language of wind and waves is directly (if negatively) related to the indifference of the swimmer to Thomas’s shout (just as the passage begins with a series of underdetermined, almost passive Introduction: Abstract and Concrete Modernity

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relations: Thomas looks at the sea, and when the waves reach him, he descends into the waters). It may be uncertain what kind of medium he is submerged in, but it still enters into a furious tumult in which the movements of its parts seem uncoordinated, as if they were subsisting in different spheres. But this is not quite the case, for the swimmer only appears after Thomas has been struggling with himself, and the roaring of the wind and waves is only apparent when he seeks to raise his voice, thus it follows that against this background his shout should burst into a silence, which is nevertheless shattered, and which is furthermore ignored by the other swimmer, which then leads to the thought that it is Thomas who does not exist. At each point the sense negates or inverts itself and is thereby carried forward. Certainly this is a strange mode of movement, for it is as if the insistent negativity of language (which can reverse its meaning at any stage) is bearing the sense of the narrative but without there being any overall organization that would coordinate this negativity into a positive sense. Thomas is struggling with his solitude, and through this internal separation there arises another; he shouts to him but is only met by the previously unheard roaring waves and whistling winds; and yet the sound of the shout is not lost but rings out amidst the tumult in a burst of silence that is then broken; despite or because of this (and this ambiguity is precisely the point, as it is not possible to say what the link between these stages of inversion might be) the swimmer ignores Thomas, and it is thus Thomas whose reality becomes undermined, even though it was his situation that first gave rise to the other, for these negations have now recoiled against him. It can be understood now why this scene should be conducted amidst such an amorphous turbulence, the vicissitudes of the turbid and the limpid, for the indeterminate clarity of the medium bears a churning negativity. Thus the very nature of the medium comes into question and, as a result, the possibility of movement or orientation. Certainty in the most general sense has been lost, and the next sentences magnify this ambiguity in the relation of their clauses so that their status or point of reference becomes unclear, just as has become the case for Thomas. Given the drama of the preceding scene Blanchot may have decided to leave it out of the second version, as it preempts what happens later in this chapter (see the Appendix), but it does make explicit the form of the confusion in which Thomas finds himself in terms of how it arises out of the uncertainties of language and the effects this has when it is allowed to reveal itself. As the remainder of the chapter shows, the way that Thomas finds his body invaded by the sea such that it becomes fluid and the water becomes ideal suggests an exchange between the two, but the relation is made more 12

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complex by the fact that it is deeply unstable and because Thomas exists in relation to his body in the same way as his body exists in relation to the element in which it is immersed. This is not a relation of dialectical interchange or containment but a pervasive interiority (or negativity) that communicates materially and spatially with that which is permeated, leaving it uncertain what the relation is between position and milieu. What Thomas finds is that the negativity of his situation is without limit, as it is continually able to reverse itself, and in doing so it brings about the material and spatial peculiarities he has experienced. It is thus that he can ask whether this element is really water or its thought, whether he is immersed in it or is a fluidity that passes through its absence. These reversals are never settled and remain suspended in a hypothetical in which it is not possible to decide the relation between the sea and the “sea,” or one’s situation and one’s status. Faced with such undecidability, an enormous doubt unfolds about the very possibility of literature as a form of linguistic navigation, for when Thomas sits down at the end of the chapter to look back at the distance he has crossed, everything becomes cloudy, as Blanchot was led to remark in response to Jean Paulhan’s work: “when we reach the end, we suddenly see that he has put into question not only a certain critical conception, not only all of literature, but also the mind, its powers and means, and we look back in horror at the abyss we have just crossed—but have we really gone over it?— and which a succession of veils had skilfully hidden from us as we crossed over” [HLP: 49]. The line that Thomas has crossed has become a chasm that cannot be fi lled, and so there is no possibility of the dialectical reversals becoming resolved or sublated. The illusion of a perfect fit between interior and exterior cannot last; instead, the remoteness of the far side of this breach is such that its relation always escapes him. But perhaps there is more, for just as he found that the thought of swimming would propel him through the ideal sea and that his fluid body would allow him passage through the waters, from which he was nevertheless always separated by his situation, then is there a correspondence between the obscurity of his prospect and the cloudiness that comes over his face? This would be to find a relation in and through material distance, by way of a mutual estrangement and remove. What then can be said about Blanchot’s style? Designating it as abstract or realist provides little illumination, as the nature of realism in fiction is far from straightforward, which can only have an effect on what might be understood as abstraction. However, these two terms seem to be central to his work insofar as there is a clear sense of narrative abstraction (from plot, character, and scenario) but despite (or because of ) this abstraction there is just as clear a sense of realism, even if this is not so immediately apparent. Introduction: Abstract and Concrete Modernity

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For there is a realism of thought in relation to language as it seeks to express itself, through all the vicissitudes that this entails, not in the same way that this has become understood in the works of James or Proust, Joyce or Woolf, for there is a greater sense of engagement or commitment, of an actual narrative voice being at stake, and this is precisely because it has abstracted itself from any other recourse. It is perhaps thus that the relation between Blanchot’s writings and the development of abstraction in modernist painting can be understood, as it is this sense of absolute risk that is at work: everything is at stake in the attempt to pursue a form of writing that only has itself to turn to, that refuses representational conventions in order to understand what is underway in the very gesture of language. If the language of Blanchot’s text thus takes on an “unusual expression,” as Thomas is described at the end of the chapter, then this is precisely because it is unusual (inusitée), both in the sense of being out of the ordinary and as a precursor of the sense of being unused or beyond use that is later discussed as worklessness. The Language of the Everyday For Adorno the concept of the modern is privative; it does not bear positive assertions but is simply the negation of “what should now no longer be” (was nun nicht mehr sein soll). This is why the new is necessarily abstract and why, when confronted by it, we react with shock and confusion, for insofar as it is new what it negates is not simply particular aspects of traditional practices, but tradition itself [AT: 38/20–21]. The new thus appears as a blind spot that is both forbidding and obscure, “highly abstract and extremely concrete,” in which “the absolute artwork meets the absolute commodity.”9 If under monopoly capitalism it is largely exchange-value and no longer use-value that is consumed, in the modern artwork it is its abstractness, that irritating indeterminacy of what it should be and for [was es sein soll und wozu], that is its cipher. Such abstractness has nothing in common with the formal character of older aesthetic norms such as Kant’s. Rather it is provocative, challenging the illusion that life goes on [es wäre noch Leben], at the same time it is a means for the aesthetic distancing that traditional fantasy no longer achieves. [AT: 39–40/21–22] Thus, as Peter Osborne has shown, the modernism of modern art defines itself through a process of affirming the new at the expense of the old, a determinate negation in which the artwork aligns itself with the temporal 14

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experience of the new as such.10 Such determinate negations have taken different forms in the different stages of modernity depending on which elements are negated in favor of the new to which they are opposed. Thus the negation of the old can operate at the level of the subject or content of the work, its material form or medium, or at the level of its conceptual nominalization. In relation to the concomitant developments in modern literature the position of these different stages and levels may be less easy to discern, for language has the ability to reconstitute itself regardless of the ways in which it may be controlled. Within the changes found in modernist writing it is possible to see how the determinate negation of some aspects such as plot or character, genre or style, or the narrative form itself, have led to significant innovations in the literary art, but for each such negation language responds by reasserting itself otherwise. Language does not operate in the same way as the visual arts, for it is extended across time by way of its expression, and also, and perhaps more significantly, there is an extreme transparency between its material and semiotic aspects, which means that it can change its meaning at the slightest provocation. This does not mean that the historico-material model that Osborne has adapted from Adorno is invalid when applied to literature; rather, it needs to operate at a more microscopic level, which can be captured in the extended readings of certain exemplary texts. Beckett in particular is representative here in terms of the extent to which the attempt to apply these artistic notions of formal innovation to writing leads to a stringency that is almost too demanding to sustain. Blanchot finds what is perhaps a more subtle approach to this difficulty by inhabiting the ambivalence of writing in such a way that its ambivalence is exhibited as such, which thereby brings into view the peculiar way in which the material and the formal dimensions of literary writing share in the process of innovation to such a degree that they cannot be separated from the ontological experimentation of literature. That is, the possibility of distinguishing between the conceptual, generic, and material dimensions of a literary work becomes more difficult when it is realized that the ambivalence central to language in general operates across all these levels. Formal innovation that actualizes such ambivalence will thereby bring about a multiply ambivalent form, which is perhaps Blanchot’s most significant discovery. It is precisely this ontological dimension, in which the literary status of the work engages the existential relation to language, that is omitted by more far-reaching formal experiments in the various kinds of modernist poetry that have emerged in the tradition of Pound, Apollinaire, and Stein. And it is the relation that Blanchot’s fiction has to the simplicity of everyday prose that grounds this sense of ontological instability. Introduction: Abstract and Concrete Modernity

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It is thus that the relation between convention and innovation in literature is thoroughly permeated by the duplicity of negation as both abstract and concrete, which is the problem addressed by Paulhan, in the essay mentioned earlier, of the dangers of a form of revolutionary linguistic critique that he calls terrorist. The name comes from the desire to rid language of rhetoric by removing commonplaces, clichés, and ready-made phrases so as to allow for the unencumbered expression of thought. While it may sound extreme, the motivation for such a negative critique derives from the peculiarity of commonplaces whose status as conventions cannot be definitively ascertained, since it may be that the phrases that are perceived as clichés were actually coined by this author, or that they were used because of their commonplace transparency, whether ironically or not, so that, rather than being an impediment to the expression of thought, they are in fact its condition.11 Either way such commonplace phrases are the points where understanding breaks down, and this presents a problem for literature as it becomes uncertain whether the expressions an author has used are conventions or innovations. Hence Paulhan’s conclusion, that writers should not attempt to eradicate such transparent phrases but instead treat them as conventions by fixing them with an agreed meaning, can only be taken half-seriously, not simply because it is not feasible but also because it simply resurrects critique as a form of rhetoric, which just restates the problem rather than resolving it.12 But in showing how the problems of transparency are inescapable Paulhan is also indicating something more profound, which is that the critique he calls terrorist is also that approach which concerns itself with the limits and possibilities of language in general, which is literature. For thought in its relation to language can neither succeed in expressing itself truthfully if it subordinates language to itself nor communicate purely if it submits itself to language. From both approaches language becomes more of an obstacle rather than less, and this starts to put in question the very possibility of linguistic communication. Such a conclusion would seem to arise out of the prior distinction between thought and language, along with the apparent sense of lost purity that stems from their commingling, whether this is the purity of language without thought or vice versa. But although this guiding belief may be false, the role of commonplaces in language remains a problem as they highlight the way that words oscillate undecidably between intended meaning and actual sense, or what might be considered their exchange-value and use-value. For there remains a belief that language, like the commodity, should operate transparently, and it is literature that has arisen as the exploration and critique of this transparency, which is why it is a practice that is never sure of itself, 16

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but it is out of this practice that literature remains attached to the everyday, to the impure language of the concrete from which it arises and to which it returns in its abstractions [HLP: 58–59]. The language of the everyday, the concrete, literal, and immediate, is also the language of the prosaic, quotidian, and banal. The redemptive qualities of this language, by which the concrete somehow surpasses the banal, have been emphasized in the investigations conducted by Kracauer and Benjamin and by Bataille and the Surrealists, and this sense of concreteness also recurs in artworks from the ready-made to the formless. For each there is an impetus to focus on the disregarded elements of ordinary existence as a way to confront the Hegelianism of concepts with a materiality that cannot be assimilated or overcome, but that nevertheless bears its own profane mode of enlightenment. Whether in political, aesthetic, or philosophical terms the redemption of the everyday works on the basis that the everyday bears singular truths that have been obscured by everyday life. Such models persisted after World War II in the Marxist thinking of Henri Lefebvre and Agnes Heller and in artistic movements from Minimalism to Fluxus. But this movement of transfiguration by which the banality of the everyday is sublated by the revelation of its hidden vitality elicits a clear rejection from Blanchot: Against this movement there is nothing to say, except that it misses the everyday, as the ordinary of each day is not such by contrast with some extraordinary; it is not the “null moment” that would await the “marvellous moment” so that the latter would give it meaning or eliminate it or suspend it. What is proper to the everyday is that it designates for us a region, or a level of speech [niveau de parole], where the determination of true and false, like the opposition of yes and no, does not apply, being always before [en deçà de] what affirms it and yet incessantly reconstituting itself beyond all that negates it. [EI: 361/241–42] These lines are a response to the Lukácsian “theory of moments” that appears in the second volume of Lefebvre’s Critique de la vie quotidienne, which Blanchot finds to be flawed because it retains a dialectical model of the relation between concepts and reality.13 Consequently, the point would be to unsettle the possibility of such a dialectical relation by showing how, on the one hand, the conceptual cannot be so simply distinguished from the concrete, and, on the other hand, that despite this difficulty there is that in the everyday that will nevertheless always escape, making its relation to thought that much more obscure. As with language, or with the dialectic itself, the everyday cannot be outmaneuvered by seeking to find that Introduction: Abstract and Concrete Modernity

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which it does not include, even as it cannot be grasped by that which seeks it. The banality of the everyday cannot be defeated if one seeks to respond to it on its own terms by making the concrete more concrete, or the abstract more abstract; rather we find a more successful response in the ambiguities of the commodity, which is by turns both concrete and abstract, both subjective and objective, as Lefebvre later realized in the third volume of Critique de la vie quotidienne. The possibility and desirability of a dialectical salvation of the everyday was unquestioned as this would require accepting that life in the disenchanted world had in some ways become irredeemable. The mechanisms of exchange-value require a view in which the banal imposition of wagelabor can be compensated by the resuscitation undergone in leisure activities, and the manner in which the commodity operates as a fetish means that such resuscitation is seen as the product of these commodified activities, as a justly earned reward, rather than as a meager salve to ensure continued productivity that only exists as part of the economic structure of daily life. In seeking a redemption of the everyday there is a parallel move to this compensatory structure that seeks to show that utopia persists in the fabric of the ordinary despite the overbearing presence of exchange-values. Such an argument rejects Adorno’s insistence on the irreversible compartmentalization of the contemporary world by appearing to confirm that something escapes this economic dialectic of assimilation. But the key to the way that Adorno’s position is articulated is its subtlety, for it is a question not of finding that which escapes the dialectic or the commodity, but rather of finding that within the dialectic and the commodity that activates its own instability and lack of uniformity. There is perhaps a sense of irony to this procedure but one that is profoundly sober, for it never denies that the everyday is banal and cannot be ignored or removed or that the commodity remains a commodity, yet the commodity is itself thoroughly ambivalent, as it is an object freed from its relation to its own production—an artefact that has become a thing in its own right and that thereby bears a meaning irreducible to its production. The existence of the commodity in the modern world has thus created a sphere of diremption that includes the artwork, a fact addressed by Duchamp when he asked whether it was possible to make works that were not works of “art,” and also affects our approach to language insofar as it also bears meanings that are irreducible to its materiality and yet that persist alongside it in the work of literature.14 The “language of the everyday” is thus a paradoxical phrase, for, as the everyday, it is that which does not reach the level of language but remains indeterminate. Blanchot makes what are some of his most unequivocal 18

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statements in this regard, for although he supports Lefebvre’s work generally, this is only to the degree that he undermines its possibility by indicating the irrecuperable nature of the everyday, which, as he insists, escapes: the everyday [quotidien] has this essential trait: it does not let itself be seized. It escapes. It belongs to insignificance, and the insignificant is without truth, without reality, without secret, but is also perhaps the site of every possible signification. [EI: 357/239–40] The everyday where one lives as though outside the true and the false is a level [niveau] of life where what reigns is the refusal to be different, the still undetermined animation, without responsibility and without authority, without direction and without decision, a reserve of anarchy in that it repels [rebutant] all beginning [début] and undoes [déboutant] every end . . . and these opposing but juxtaposed traits on the one hand do not seek reconciliation, and on the other hand do not hinder one another without merging with each other either: it is this very vicissitude that escapes all dialectical recovery [reprise]. [EI: 362–63/243] Not only is it necessary not to doubt [douter] it, but it is necessary not to dread [redouter] it, instead it is necessary to seek to recapture the secret destructive capacity in play in it, the corrosive force of human anonymity, the infinite wearing away [usure]. . . . To experience everydayness [quotidienneté] is to undergo the radical nihilism that is like its essence and by which, in the void that animates it, it does not cease to hold the principle of its own critique. [EI: 365/244–45] It is unsurprising to find Blanchot making such use of word play in this essay, when what is at stake is precisely the language of the everyday, where the genitive is to be understood subjectively as well as objectively—that is, the language that describes the everyday also partakes of its indeterminacy and changeability. For the everyday, like language, is that which cannot be fully drawn into the sphere of thinking but is always apart, repelling every beginning just as it undoes every ending, for it has the corrosive capacity of changing any meaning, “indifferently allocating a negative or positive sign to each of its moments,” while remaining at the same level [PF: 328/341]. And yet in its indeterminacy there is life, an animation that bears the possibility of meaning and thus the principle of its own critique; language as this endless nihilism then provides a form of dialectic without reconciliation, an emaciated spasm of contradictions without clear meaning, truth, or value, a swirling commotion of activity that is never fully realized. Such instances of word play also refer back to the Surrealist uses Introduction: Abstract and Concrete Modernity

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of language that underlie Lefebvre’s belief in the significance of the everyday, but such instances of words becoming things with a life of their own have an ambivalence as well, as Blanchot makes clear by asking whether this leads to words set free in the form of “sentences decomposed” or just “scraps of advertising texts set end to end.”15 Nevertheless, “these free words become centres of magical activity, more than that, things as impenetrable and opaque as any human object withdrawn from its utilitarian signification. We are now far from the category of the immediate. Language no longer has anything to do with the subject: it is an object that leads us and can lose us” [PF: 94/89]. Like the everyday, language escapes. As with his essay on Lefebvre, there is an undercurrent of criticism in Blanchot’s response to the Surrealists, whom he suggests failed to realize the extent of the division that marked their relation to language. For the emphasis on automatic writing indicates a greater control of language by thought, insofar as it relies on unconscious thought processes expressing themselves freely in language, which is at odds with the release of language from thought in the desire to set words free into their playful existence. But, as he would indicate later, these divergent emphases become hard to distinguish as each leads into the other. So while the Surrealists may be acclaimed for the manner in which they have brought the two slopes of linguistic materiality and conceptuality, concreteness and abstraction, into greater visibility, they still remained unaware of the contiguity of these two slopes or their profoundly alienating depths. And it is only in realizing these depths that we can fully appreciate the strangeness of language and thereby realize the extent of our impotence in relation to it. The awareness of limitation here is cautionary rather than pessimistic, for it indicates the extent to which thinking obliterates its own grounds, which yet remain, unstable and indeterminate and able to reappear. Such grounds do not become essentialized in the process, for this is the negativity that thought carries with it, rather than some reified exteriority, and as such it bears witness to what Hegel discussed as the contingent— sheer indeterminate materiality that is, in the everyday, or in language, unbound. The recuperation of this contingency in sociology or poetry cannot proceed without taking account of the extent of its permeation of language, which requires a very different kind of response, one that seeks to bring itself closer to the indeterminacy that it bears rather than trying to convert it into something else. A language that seeks to draw closer to this swirling commotion of unrealized significations is one that does not pursue an empty meaninglessness, but rather seeks to inhabit its oscillating ambivalences of meaning in their profusion, a language as sensitive to its own movements as it is to those of that which it is attempting to reach, especially when these two movements 20

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converge or diverge. In relation to the Surrealists, Blanchot speaks of a rhetoric that becomes material such that we can be caught up in a storm or swamp of words that have values beyond our own, like an ocean that appears at one moment to be convulsed by tumults and at the next to be as calm and expansive as a desert [PF: 94/89]. It is at this point that the trap becomes most difficult to avoid, because language has become as autonomous as the commodity and so is at risk of losing itself to an alienated and alienating objectivity. Language in the literary work, as for the artwork in general, would then operate at the point of almost succumbing to this sheer objectivity, only differentiating itself from it by virtue of the enigma of its own appearance, which has arisen out of and as contingency itself. And in doing so it thereby provides a critique of the commodity-form by demonstrating its lack of totality— a potential, inevitably never fully realized in all its paradoxes, that is nevertheless the genuine legacy of Surrealism. The ambiguous sense of this negotiation is what is underway in the first chapter of Thomas l’Obscur, in the confusion of being immersed in something that appears not to be there and yet also appears to take one’s own place and form, without this leading to a dissolution of self. For while this episode might resemble the Hegelian understanding of Entäußerung as an experience of estrangement that ultimately leads to a fuller realization of self, Thomas neither loses himself nor returns to himself. Instead, he experiences a form of intimacy in which he partakes of the materiality “beyond materiality” of the strange medium through which he passes. And in doing so he is able to feel the form of his own existence from without as it moves and takes shape, just as he does in the sequence in the second chapter of the novel, where his gaze seizes hold of its own absence, and, as he later affirmed, “this supreme effort, by which man tries to turn round on himself and to seize a gaze that is no longer his own, has always been the dream of Surrealism” [PF: 98/93]. It is an experience of the objectivity of the subjective, and vice versa, without a unification of the two or a simple exchange between them, but rather as an experience of the essential indeterminacy of determination, which means that the Thomas who sits looking out to sea at the end of the chapter is not the same as the one at its beginning but without this transition being one of greater fulfilment or understanding. Or, if it is an understanding, then it is of the ambiguity of language that both is and is not itself insofar as it is always capable of inverting itself into something else. What Thomas has found by the end of the chapter is that corrosive power of radical negativity in which meaning undoes itself but does not leave sheer meaninglessness, as its negativity persists in turning itself over in an endless vicissitude of words without things becoming things without name. This ambiguous transformation in which Introduction: Abstract and Concrete Modernity

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we do not know if we are confronting words or things in the materiality of language is the basis of the relation between the concrete and the abstract, the literal and the metaphorical, the sensible and the supersensible, which is underway not just in our relation to objects, insofar as they are always able to become commodities, but also in our relation to language through reading and writing, as this work will explore. For language is at heart a process of abstraction in which names are substituted for things, which is then the basis for the emergence of exchangevalue that leads us to believe that commodities are the things that we have named them as, rather than being things that have emerged through a complex historico-material process of actual labor. And it is because they present themselves in such an encrypted form that commodities need to be deciphered, for not only are their values inscribed in place of their naturalhistorical existence, but such configurations need to be read correctly for exchange to take place. But this immaterial linguistic value can only operate as part of an exchange by way of the irreducible material element that it substitutes itself for, but that remains concealed within it as the shadowy image of itself or “ghostly objectivity” ( gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit), as Marx calls it [Cap: 128]. For without this material element there would be nothing to exchange, even if, as part of this exchange, the material element plays no part. For there to be exchange the material must give way to the immaterial, an abstract common value that makes exchange possible, but for there to be value at all the immaterial must still harbor the material, without which it would be purely nominal. Abstraction thereby becomes the means through which the material can be put into movement, without which it would remain simply unknown. As such, the ghostly objectivity that remains after the material has been replaced by the abstract is also the image of this abstraction, as well as of the material that has been substituted for; it is as much a ghostly objectivity as it is a ghostly objectivity.16 Abstraction is a process of rendering things language-like (and vice versa). Thomas becomes like the sea in a way that renders the sea knowable in its immanent material form, as he is abstracted from his own materiality and finds a common form with the sea and thereby comes to “know” it: he inhabits the sea in such a way that it takes on the facility of language to change its valency between the material and the semiotic, the literal and the metaphorical. While the commodity-form implies a reification (Verdinglichung) of the subject-object relation, this does not only lead to alienation (Entfremdung), for its structure is much more unstable and complex; rather it sets the terms of its relation in (dialectical) motion such that they can be recognized, as reification is also the basis by which things (Dinge) can come into relation with each other by discovering their material 22

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affinities, which appear to have a life of their own: the correspondence in which the linen and the coat come to materially recognize themselves through each other, by virtue of their mutual exchange-value, is the same kind of material affinity that Adorno named Sprachähnlichkeit in order to describe the “linguisticality” of things and that Thomas discovered in Aminadab in the form of a regard touff u (a form of literary material vision that will be examined in Chapter 5 of this volume), a relation that, in common with a familiar lineage of thought, Marx calls the language of commodities (Warensprache), which only a form of “nominalist irony,” as Beckett termed it, would prevent from turning into Cratylism [Cap: 143].17 For, as Marx made clear, the fetish-character of reification, like the commodity itself, is double-edged, as it involves a transformation in which “thingly [dinglich] relations between persons and social relations between things” are found to materialize [Cap: 166]. Of course, from the perspective of orthodox Marxism, Blanchot’s position is highly problematic, as it appears to retreat from the concrete historical analysis of reification into the idealist essentialism that Marx diagnosed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, where he claimed that Hegel failed to differentiate between ontological objectification and actual alienation, as his account was detached from the concrete historical analyses that would demonstrate the specific conditions of alienated labor. Certainly, for Blanchot, alienation cannot be overcome as Marx would insist, since it is not limited to the specific historical instances of contemporary capitalism. Or rather, the alienated labor of which he speaks in relation to writing is different in kind to that of modern wagelabor and thus seems closer to the ontological model that Hegel develops. But equally, the concrete analyses of writing that Blanchot pursues indicate that there is no greater possibility of its alienation being overcome through the sublation of its idea than through the liberation of its practices. In fact, Blanchot would seem to uncover the material conditions of linguistic alienation, which may not offer the opportunities for liberation that Marx desired, but instead provide a powerful analysis of the pervasive powers of negativity, without which the Marxist critique of reification and alienation risks slipping into naïve utopianism. Only from the position previously outlined, where the reification of the commodity-form is understood to be unstable and nonuniform, can there develop a form of resistance within the structures of alienation that does not simply assume that these structures can be eliminated. The alienation of labor and the reification of social relations may be historical instances of an ontological objectification, but they are also riddled by a pervasive negativity that finds its roots in the ambivalent structure of language. It is insofar as this reification is Introduction: Abstract and Concrete Modernity

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derived from the negativity of language that language can provide an analysis and critique of it. Blanchot’s position might be extreme, but without a critique of the alienation inherent to language any emancipation of social relations will remain shallow and transient. Fortuitously, the fetishcharacter of the commodity-form provides a concrete instance of how this negativity and alienation operate and thus indicates how the critique of language can be put into play. As Blanchot wrote in 1948, citing Hegel, “if true language is to begin, then it is necessary that the life that will carry this language has experienced its nothingness, that it has ‘trembled in the depths and everything in it that was fixed and stable has been shaken.’ Language can only begin with this void; no fullness, no certainty can speak; for whoever expresses himself something essential is lacking” [PF: 314/324; PG: 153/117]. It is as such that Blanchot comes to occupy a similar position to that of Jean Hyppolite, who would invert the Marxist reading of Hegel so as to reintroduce an ontological depth and complexity to historico-material critique.18 Although Blanchot, like Adorno, would find this redevelopment of critique only in the most subtle negotiations of negativity—that is, in artworks, by virtue of their material deployment of linguisticality, which is what occurs in abstraction. This point enables us to see the different emphases adopted by Adorno and Blanchot in relation to commoditization, for Adorno is quite clear that exchange-value is not to be dismissed in its entirety. Rather, the purpose of critique in relation to the commodity-form is to understand how it operates in order to bring out the possibilities of a more fair exchange that lie latent within it and not simply to aspire to a putatively ideal state where use-value still holds sway. The latter position is one that Adorno finds in the work of Lukács and entails a romanticism that made his thought vulnerable to the excesses of state socialism insofar as it idealizes a precapitalist relation to objects [ND: 149–50/146–47]. In contrast to this position, Adorno will insist that the commodity and its attendant reification can only be understood fully, and thereby release the promise of fair exchange that it bears, if we consider what is underway in the process of reification, which is to say that critique needs to focus more fully on the object and attempt to discern which parts of it are wholly subsumed into its exchange-value and which parts remain resistant to such subsumption [ND: 191–92/190–91]. Both aspects are necessarily part of its reification insofar as this indicates the process whereby the object becomes a thing of exchange or a thing of materiality. Thus critique must work through these internal relations through a determinate negation of its divergent aspects. It is as such that the artwork can never free itself from its relation

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to commodities and yet can never entirely lose itself within it either; it is both its risk and its promise. It would be hard to reconcile Blanchot’s thought of language with a hope of releasing its latent possibilities of fair exchange, since for him such a horizon is sheerly utopian. Nevertheless, he retains a concern with seeking to understand the manifold nature of the literary object and to attempt to negotiate its ambivalence so as to negatively indicate its possibilities of expression or communication. Achieving consciousness of one’s alienation vis-à-vis the reification of the object is then the task not only of the worker or the proletarian but also of the writer, as Blanchot will pursue through an array of complex and subtle analyses, a consciousness that may offer awareness but not liberation, since this condition of mutual estrangement is constitutive of the relation to language as such. Thus the key to understanding Blanchot’s style turns out to be a central issue in the history of how modernist artworks have negotiated the relation between their material form and their individual articulations—in the case of literature, the relation between everyday language and the language of fiction and the strategies of negativity and abstraction that are used to navigate this interrelation. While this may introduce Blanchot’s works to a broader current of aesthetic and materialist thought, it is important to be clear about the limits of such an overlap. It is not my intention to develop a comparative reading of Adorno and Blanchot here, as such an approach would be severely limited by the incommensurability of their methods and concerns.19 It would however be possible to consider the two together by way of their responses to certain issues in literary aesthetics, particularly the problematic combination of autonomy and materiality found in modernist artworks. The issue of autonomy comes to be of importance to this inquiry, as it is a key part of the way that Blanchot views literature, the literary work being in some way autonomous, or absolute, as it is phrased on a number of occasions. By approaching this sense of the absolute from the history of the aesthetic understanding of autonomy, a perspective is gained that enables a greater understanding of how Blanchot works within and yet also without the tradition of post-Kantian thought, which provides a muchneeded position from which to assess the implications of his works. It is for this reason that I will begin with an overview of the history of the notion of autonomy so that it will be possible to see how Blanchot complicates and compromises this notion through his insistent emphasis on negativity. What is significant about his approach is that it does not completely disable the sense of autonomy but rather exposes it to the effects of

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negativity, which transforms it in a variety of ways. It is from this position that Adorno proves to be the most helpful guide to how this transformed sense of autonomy remains critical to the modern work of art, which is why I will go on to discuss how his writings on aesthetics enable an interpretation of autonomy that yet remains open to history and materiality. Conversely, however, the manner in which Blanchot has reconfigured the sense of autonomy provides a perspective on Adorno’s thinking that forces his considerations of artworks, and in particular, literature, into a greater awareness of their inescapable negativity, which again does not completely undermine their scope for sociopolitical or epistemological critique but reformulates it in ways that reveal the material ambiguity at its heart.

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1

Autonomous Literature The Manifesto and the Novel

Modernism in its fullest sense does not just refer to a mode of aesthetics but to a broader set of interconnected technological and sociopolitical issues. As such, it may be understood as the prevailing mood of a certain phase of industrial capitalism, which in turn can be characterized by the prevalence of certain contradictions: on the one hand, there is the modernist current that is optimistic about technological change and its social implications in terms of transport, communication, and leisure; on the other hand, there is the modernist strand that is very anxious about these technological changes and the increasing pace and uniformity of urban existence. On another level, but related to these responses, there is the attempt in certain modernist currents to reposition art as a secular religion, granting to it the role and significance of a normative hegemony, while, conversely, there is another strand of this current that seeks to reposition art within the apparently privileged sphere of natural experience and thus subordinates it to folk methods and practices. Accompanying these attempts to find a new place for art is the further distinction arising from political activism, which fuels the debates about the relation between modernism and the avant-garde, for it is a question of whether the art that wishes to express innovation and bring about changes to society should work within the structures of the existing culture or should reject them and try to reconceive culture from without. Each of these aspects of the modernist mood is thus coupled with its inverse, suggesting that the mood as a whole consists in this instability and lack of harmony. It is because of 29

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this inner discord that the issue of modernist aesthetics remains pertinent, for in its broadest sense it is an attempt to come to terms with a world that is fundamentally riven with contradictions and lacks a secure unifying meaning.1 It is as it was described by The Communist Manifesto in 1848: Continual revolution in production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, rusted conditions with their train of venerable ideas and intuitions are swept away, all newly formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air [Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft: everything fixed and upright evaporates], all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to view with sober eyes his position in life and his mutual relations. [CM: 6] Art is then torn between seeking to change its situation and seeking to express it, as there is a fundamental uncertainty about the place of truth: does it lie in the discordancy of the fractured world or in imposing a new unifying sense upon it? And it may be the case that these two aspects cannot be separated. Thus modernism does not just arise out of the technological and sociopolitical changes of industrial capitalism but is also an expression of the disoriented secular world, which, following the Enlightenment and Romantic periods, for the first time fully experiences itself as without any foundation that it does not provide for itself. Modernism is thus the name for the mood in which the crisis of self-determination fully experiences itself. As a result, there are two sides to this mood—that of autonomy, which is concerned with the mode and form of this determination, and that of materiality, which is that existence of the “self ” both before and after its determination— along with the dialectic that both brings them together and holds them apart. Broadly speaking, the central question of this book is that of how this relation between autonomy and materiality occurs in the experience of literature and how it is affected by it. If literature enables us to approach the materiality of language, then it only does so insofar as it allows materiality to speak, which has an impact on our understanding of materiality per se in that it is no longer mute. That is, the role of literature in its exposure of the materiality of language is not to indicate how things could be otherwise by offering edifying examples or escapist allegories, but by objectively presenting those linguistic relations in which there is another way of living. It is this idea that is behind the use of formal innovation in literature, as the fact of such experimentation indicates that there is a belief that literature can respond to the times, and it is only because of the material and cognitive valences of literature that such 30

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a belief can arise, for what this duplicity reflects is that literature is both of the times and yet outside them and thus can speak both from them and to them. The way that early avant-garde movements like Futurism and Dada made use of the manifesto is exemplary in this regard, for these manifestos operated under the belief that their words could bring about actual change; that they were not just texts but a direct intervention in the world whose proclamations initiated a radical break with tradition. For Futurism in particular, as has been shown by Marjorie Perloff in her pioneering study, the manifesto was the primary mode of literary expression, and the art manifesto was Marinetti’s most successful invention, launching an entirely novel literary form that would encapsulate much of what was most significant about the formal innovations of modernist literature. It is for this reason that I will begin this inquiry into literary negativity with the relation between autonomy and materiality in the manifesto, as it makes clear the peculiar nature of such experiments—their nature as artefacts that yet appear to be self-generating and thus somehow go beyond the status of what is. A number of elements combined to make the Futurist manifesto so successful in its innovations, for if it were to realize itself as an avant-garde expression then it needed to show that its proposals were not simply theoretical but were already in operation through the act and fact of the manifesto itself. Thus Marinetti’s first Futurist manifesto starts with a narrative, which is then explicated by the theses that the new movement proclaims such that the proclamations can then take this narrative as their own legitimizing instance, much as Marinetti’s model, The Communist Manifesto, had done before him, as will shortly be shown. A second aspect of this theatrical positioning is the fact that the manifesto speaks not from the lyrical “I” of the personal subject but from the disparate and impersonal voice of a community, a new “we” that the manifesto grounds and speaks from and thereby manifests. Together these two aspects serve to bring its theoretical concerns into practice, and one of the formal corollaries of this is that the writing of such manifestos operates across any generic division between poetry and prose and instead exhibits a dynamic heterogeneity that cannot be limited to a purely artistic sphere. But of equal significance, as Perloff points out, is that the manifesto articulates itself according to a new material medium: “the page supplants the stanza or the paragraph as the basic print unit,” which becomes explored through the typographical collages and ephemeral publications so distinctive of the movement. These tactics not only grounded the texts in the everyday materiality of language (newspapers and advertising) but also indicated how this materiality itself spoke through juxtaposition and nonharmonious Autonomous Literature: The Manifesto and the Novel

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simultaneity, the dissonance that, as Perloff continues, “was to call into question the integrity of the verse line itself.”2 Such notions would be key to the development of Benjamin’s thought in his desire to construct a work entirely of quotations that would present its dialectical theses through its textual-historical juxtapositions, and the equally weighted chunks of Adorno’s prose, in which large paragraphs or short fragments follow each other in a nonhierarchical or paratactical manner that expresses their focus through their arrangement as constellations. Understanding the avant-garde manifesto requires more than an analysis of the intentions and rhetorical tactics of its writers, for these approaches do not address the underlying fact that the manifesto actualizes its desire for innovation by its very form. It does so because materially it is already part of that world, which is what is actualized as its form presents or manifests itself—that is, the manifesto exists primarily as a novel textual formation. Aside from its contents, what the manifesto presents is itself as a new material conjugation of thought and the world. The performative or rhetorical analysis of the language of manifestos may help with indicating how a certain use of language engages with the world, but these approaches do not explain what makes this engagement possible in the first place. Only by appreciating the fact that language is of a kind with the things of the world is this possible, in that it is not only affected by its historico-material context but also affects it in turn, as is apparent in the way that it primarily operates by affecting itself. Language is subject to the changes that are underway in its historico-material context, and by formally realizing these changes in itself it reveals the modes by which it is able to affect the world. This understanding of language operates according to a speculative logic in which thought engages with the things of the world, but it does so from a materialist rather than an idealist perspective so that there is a perpetual inadequation between thought and materiality. The philosophical background to this form of material speculation can be traced back from Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach to the question of autonomy in Kant’s aesthetics via Novalis and Schiller, and it is this connection that provides the basis for the work to come, as it is fundamental to Adorno’s understanding of philosophy that it works endlessly to uncover problems and riddles by creating images that seek to dissolve them and itself into actual change, and to Blanchot’s understanding of literature as a mode of contestation, in which the act of writing inextricably combines the artistic and the political insofar as it exposes the relation between writing as an experience of literary space and writing as a mode of intervention in the world. The key work in the history of the manifesto is the Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei of 1848. Although social and political proclamations 32

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had been made since the early days of the Reformation and came to fruition during the English Revolution, it was only with the appearance of The Communist Manifesto that the form of the genre became established. Several important aspects contributed to this, but they fundamentally orient themselves around the question of history. The manifesto as a form of writing that seeks to make manifest a particular set of beliefs, to proclaim them such that they are no longer beliefs but are to be made actual, already begins to complicate its form by insisting on the fact that its written appearance is merely propaedeutic to its actualization in the real world. In this way its performative language takes on an even more powerful role, as it is not just the case that these words are to be seen as making a certain state of affairs real, since it is only able to create this state of affairs by wiping away all that previously existed through its declarations, which necessarily includes the words of the manifesto itself. So while it proclaims the new as hereby manifest, the manifesto removes itself from this revelation. Thus the early proclamations of the English Revolution were colored by an apocalyptic zeal in which the entrance of the newly manifest could only occur alongside the destruction of the old, and so the manifestos’ words were displaced from that which they were proclaiming just as it was being proclaimed. This issue was seemingly apparent to Marx and Engels, for in seeking to draft a credo for the newly established Communist League they sought to resolve this problem by situating their proclamations within a narrative history that would then provide a context for their announcements. While this does not change the fact that the words of the manifesto are displaced from that which it proclaims, what it does is invert this relation by situating the proclamation within the framework of the manifesto’s narrative: as they composed their work, the proletariat, for whom they were writing, did not exist as a self-conscious body within European society, thus Marx and Engels first had to indicate its existence through their narrative history of the class struggle, which not only showed how it had developed, but how it should make itself appear to itself and so become a self-conscious revolutionary force. Furthermore, they did not just indicate the past and the present of the proletariat but also its future by showing how it would eventually take over the means of production within society and become autonomous, self-governing. Thus the appearance of the Manifesto also announced the appearance of the proletariat to itself as a novel revolutionary force with its own history and future. In appearing to speak for the proletariat, as its internal voice externalized, the manifesto in fact creates the proletariat through its appearance as the manifesto of the proletariat, which is to say that the contemporaneity of the document is continually reaffirmed Autonomous Literature: The Manifesto and the Novel

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by its own proclamations, countering the risk of its displacement. Thus it manifests itself as an essential part of its proclamations about the proletariat, rather than being obliterated by its own utterance as was the case for the religious pamphlets of the apocalyptic tradition. It is this aspect that enabled the genre of the manifesto to achieve such a potent degree of vitality for political and artistic movements ever since. But this does not undo the fact that the document removes itself from the time of its own utterance and thus cannot itself participate in the revolution, for although it creates the proletariat and in a sense embodies its history, it is nevertheless not the actual coming to self-consciousness of the proletariat as a revolutionary force itself; instead, it holds this place provisionally by enacting what the proletariat would be were it to appear: as its hope and its challenge. The document of the Manifesto constructs the proletariat so that in its proclamation it will have existed and will exist, but in the meanwhile the Manifesto holds its place open for it. Thus the manifesto ushers itself onto the stage of history instead, seeking to effectuate its own words, to somehow make them real. As we are told on its opening page, two things result from the “fact” that the spectre (Gespenst) of communism is haunting Europe: first, that “communism is already acknowledged . . . to be a power”; and second, that communists should openly publish their views and aims in order to “confront this story [Märchen] of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself ” [CM: 2]. In place of the fictions that purport to be about it, but that paradoxically register its power as a fact, albeit a ghostly one, communism needs to present its own manifesto. So the document presents itself as not just a text but as a means of redefining reality by replacing what is unreal with what is real, but what it presents is itself: not the actuality of communism but its manifesto. On behalf of the not-quite-real-yet status of the party, it exhibits an impatience with its own status as a text and seeks to assert itself as an actual state of affairs, a new reality.3 But it can only do this by actualizing its own status as a manifesto, which includes its perpetual reaffirmation of itself, such that it appears to be more than what it is, for that is what its peculiar relation to time brings about: a manifestation of its own excess as that which manifests itself, which is the only way in which the authority for its statements can be (autonomously) generated. It is not a surprise that the first edition appeared anonymously and that, due to its international distribution over the following years, the preface added to the 1872 re-edition should contain a remark from its authors stating that the Manifesto “has become a historical document that we no

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longer have any right to alter.” Which is not to say that it had become outdated; rather the reverse, for “however much the state of things has changed during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in this manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there some detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing” [CM: 40–41]. The Manifesto had taken on a life of its own, its own authority and transhistorical position, and by proliferating across numerous languages and new editions its own history now reflected or actually represented the history of the proletariat itself, since it too was no longer rooted in any country or age but had become international, such that “not only the state of the labour movement but also the degree of the development of large-scale industry can be measured with fair accuracy in every country by the number of copies of the Manifesto circulated in the language of that country” [CM: 57]. Hence, what is found in the ambiguities of the manifesto as a genre is no more than a rendering explicit of the basic representational problematic of language: the fact that there is a disparity between what a language says and what it is, what is represented and what is actually (materiallyhistorically) presented. This is the question of Darstellung, which became a central theme in the work of post-Kantian thinkers and writers as they sought to understand how the transcendental critique of thinking could address the issue of thought’s relation to its own language in terms of both its meanings and its materiality. No better place to begin to approach this issue can be found than in the following piece: It is true that speaking and writing are foolish things; a real conversation is mere wordplay. One can only be amazed at the ridiculous mistake—that people think they speak for the sake of things. No one knows the peculiarity of language, that it only concerns itself with itself. That is why it is such a wonderful and fruitful mystery—that when someone speaks merely in order to speak he pronounces the most magnificent, original truths. But if he wants to speak of something determinate, capricious language makes him say the most ridiculous and perverse stuff. From this also springs the hatred that so many serious people have for language. They notice its wilfulness but do not notice that contemptible chatter is the infinitely serious side of language. If one could only make people grasp that with language it is as with mathematical formulae—they constitute a world for

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themselves— they only play with themselves, express nothing but their wonderful nature, and this is why they are so expressive—why moreover the unusual play of the relations of things reflects itself in them. Only through their freedom are they members of nature and only in their free movements does the world-soul express itself and make them into a delicate measure and outline of things. So it also is with language—whoever has a fine feeling for its application, its rhythm, its musical spirit, whoever hears within himself the delicate effects of its inner nature and moves his tongue or hand accordingly, will be a prophet; conversely, whoever knows this well but does not have ears and sense enough for it, will write truths like these but will be made fun of by language and will be mocked by people, like Cassandra by the Trojans. If I believe that I have thereby set out the essence and office of literature [Poesie] most clearly, then I yet know that no one can understand it and that I have said something completely stupid, because I wanted to say it, and thus no literature can come to be [zu Stande kommt]. But what if I had to speak, and this linguistic drive to speak were the badge of language’s inspiration, of the effectiveness of language in me? And if my will could also only want what I had to do, could this then, fi nally, without my knowing and believing it, indeed be literature and make comprehensible a mystery of language? And would I thus be a writer by vocation, for a writer is really only one who is enthused by language [ein Sprachbegeisterter]?4 What is being dramatized in this monologue is the problem of articulation, which lies behind both the proclamations of the manifesto and the innovations of much of modernist literature, since it concerns the realization that the possibility of speaking directly can only be found indirectly— that is, the attempt to state one’s intended meaning must pass by way of language’s own manner of being, its own material refractions of meaning, which is what suggests that language only concerns itself with itself, that it constitutes a world of its own. This would mean that it is only by releasing oneself to language’s own movements that one could come to speak, but what is then pronounced is perhaps no more than the expression of this situation of language, just as the Manifesto began to sound as if it were only proclaiming its own appearance. But the significance of this monologue is that it places even this appearance in doubt, thereby indicating that with language there can never be any certainty about what it is that appears, for it never manifests itself without also suspending this appearance, which is an essential part of its appearance. 36

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The Formative Drive after Kant The basis for this relation between the manifesto and modernist literature comes from the fact that both derive from a concept of autonomous literature that finds its roots in Kant’s third Kritik. If we recall Kant’s argument, then it is apparent that autonomy is a complex notion, for on the one hand it relates to the lack of purpose in the work of fine art, and on the other hand it concerns the disinterest of the observer. However, both these aspects are immediately complicated further, since as an artwork the work must appear as that which has been fashioned so that it can be distinguished from natural objects, and yet it must also possess an inner purposiveness (Zweckmässigkeit) as if it were a natural object. Equally, although the response of the observer is disinterested as the artwork lacks any purpose, for it to be a work of fine art, and not simply one that arouses pleasure, it must also give rise to reflexive considerations; it must promote “the cultivation [Cultur] of the mental powers for sociable communication” [CPJ: §44, 185]. As a result, the autonomy of the work, the sense of it determining and existing only for itself, comprises a set of aspects that apparently contradict this notion in terms of its purposes or its purposiveness, but in doing so only substantiates it. This paradox arises from the manner in which Kant has developed this notion of autonomy, for the purposiveness without purpose of the artwork is considered by analogy with the way that the natural object is treated as if it were purposeful, which is to say, as if it were itself a work of art with its own natural purpose (Naturzweck). Thus there is a dialectical relation between the artwork and the natural organism such that each only comes into its own (as beautiful) insofar as it resembles the other (Kant thereby anticipates the dialectic of the natural and the historical in Benjamin and Adorno) [CPJ: §23, 130; §45, 185]. Even while Kant insists that this analogy between the artwork and the organism is only heuristic, he nevertheless pushes it further by explaining that the organized being or organism (the former term is used in the third Kritik, the latter is only used in the Opus postumum) has to be considered as if it bore a natural purpose for it to be considered as an organized whole, and thus for it to be considered at all, since reason cannot proceed if its objects are lacking in necessity and coherence. But the limits of our understanding mean that we cannot determine whether these natural objects genuinely possess such a purpose, even though it appears to be what organizes and animates them, for all we can apprehend are the particular mechanical interactions of cause and effect rather than (the idea of ) the whole. So we propose this idea of the whole (and thus the very notion of the whole) by analogy with the sense of purpose that organizes and Autonomous Literature: The Manifesto and the Novel

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animates our own thoughts, and on the basis of this affinity we are then able to understand the object as an organism: as a purposive autonomous entity.5 While this natural purpose is conceived along the lines of an idea of the whole, it is also to be understood as an inner formative drive (Bildungstrieb) that enables the object to be an organism capable of reproduction and regeneration. These two aspects together provide the full sense of the organism as both product and purpose, since they show, however indeterminately, that the organism “must be related to itself reciprocally as both cause and effect” [CPJ: §65, 244]. Kant is clearly having trouble holding this thought within the framework of the critique, as it constantly threatens to turn into a thought posited about the essence of things in themselves. But this difficulty arises from the encounter with the autonomous object, whether natural or artificial, which cannot be explained solely by establishing its mechanisms of cause and effect, as this lacks necessity, and yet any notion of an organizing idea has to be distinguished from any notion of a soul or external agent. But in conceiving of the organism as bearing a natural purpose, by ascribing a coherence and necessity to it in terms of its formative drive, Kant is simply realigning it with the artwork, which also seems to exceed the bounds of empirical description, as it bears a purposiveness that cannot be reduced to the intentions of the artist or to the properties of its materials. What this means is that the properties ascribed to the organism by analogy with ourselves, its wholeness and formative drive, are themselves illuminated by the way that this analogy is repeated in more explicit terms in Kant’s discussions of the work of art. For in understanding the artwork by analogy with the natural object, the difficulties of understanding the natural object are thrown into greater relief, revealing the organizational impasse that is called autonomy, an impasse that Kant attempts to bridge by way of the analogy of natural purpose, but that is then shown to be anything but an analogy in his discussions of genius. For although artworks, unlike organisms, are not in themselves capable of reproduction without the help of an external agent, such a formative drive is at work in the relation between the artist and the artwork, which then uncovers the actual nonanalogical relation between subject and object: since genius, as “an inborn productive faculty,” belongs to nature, it is “nature in the subject” that “gives the rule to art,” organizing and animating the work so that it “purposively sets the mental powers into motion, i.e., into a play that is self-maintaining and even strengthens the powers to that end” [CPJ: §46, 186; §49, 192]. Thus, the very idea of the organism as an autonomous whole, as well as the possibility of the autonomous artwork, arises from this actual material

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relation, and here Kant touches upon but quickly recoils from the limits of critical philosophy: One says far too little about nature and its capacity [Vermögen] in organised products if one calls this an analogue of art: for in that case one conceives of the artist (a rational being) outside of it. Rather, it organises itself, and in every species of its organised products, of course in accordance with some example in the whole, but also with appropriate deviations, which are required in the circumstances for self-preservation. Perhaps one comes closer to this inscrutable property if one calls it an analogue of life. [CPJ: §65, 246] Such an analogy risks vitalism as it suggests that the formative drive is inherent to matter, so Kant promptly drops the whole issue: “Strictly speaking, the organisation of nature is therefore not analogous with any causality that we know.” But the issue of organized forms, natural or artificial, is not so easily dismissed, and it is thus that the question of the autonomous artwork persists and finds a point of exemplary resonance in the vital relation between the writer and the work of language. It is just this idea of “literature,” as that which animates and organizes the coherence and necessity of writing as a reproducing and regenerating entity, that emerges in the years following Kant. This idea of literature as an entity in itself is not just another analogy, precisely because of what it implies about autonomous artworks appearing to bear a life of their own, since the nature of Kant’s analogy is that it spoke to the affinity between the apparent natural purpose of organisms and that of the subject in its idea of the whole. But in introducing this analogy Kant exposes the speculative moment within this problem, for it not only threatens to exceed the bounds of critique by suggesting knowledge of the thing itself but also indicates that the material basis for such speculation lies in the a priori material affinity of subject and object. So from the perspective of Adorno’s thinking, Kant has this relation exactly the wrong way around, for it is the a priori material affi nity between subject and object, or genius, that animates the possibility of this so-called analogy, which is now nothing more than an indeterminate way of speaking about this nonconceptual relation (genius, as Adorno will say, is exactly this “consciousness of the non-identical object” [NL: 488/NL2: 146])6 — a relation that becomes the raison d’ être of literature to explore, since its existence consists in the life that animates this relation of mediation and maintains itself in it. This is not to propose a form of literary animism, as that would be to reify the necessity with which autonomy arises within a material and

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historical context, since its presence is never given, and, although such a sense of autonomy may expose the lines of material affinity that Kant dismissed, it also limits our ability to fully conceptualize the work. Literature is precisely the resistance to this reification and as such appears as a form of material, speculative thinking, engaged in producing works that examine the affinity between thought and objects from within, which thus becomes the basis of its own self-perpetuating existence. The details and ramifications of this thought of autonomous literature form the body of the inquiry that follows, in which I will examine how this notion is to be understood. As such it is not my aim to substantiate the strong claim that literature can be seen as possessing a natural purpose, but rather to assess its implications, since it is clear from the way that the idea of literature develops from Schlegel to Benjamin that there is a considerable degree of affinity between it and the autonomy of organisms. It would seem that the early German Romantics began to think of literature as if Kant’s analogy were literal, in common with the general trend of Idealism, but what is of importance is the nature of the affinity thus postulated, for it is in this that a stronger sense of the nature of autonomy as such can be developed. As Adorno’s work will relentlessly demonstrate, it is through the examination of those apparent but suppressed linkages that we gain a clearer understanding of the material conditions of thought, and vice versa, the conceptual possibilities of natural objects, that are at the heart of what would become the more trenchant modernist program in literature: to explore the material and metaphysical possibilities inherent in writing. For the appearance of purposiveness in the sensuous suggests that there is a symbolic language (Chiff reschrift) latent within the forms of nature and, recapitulated in the artwork, the presentation of this formal language gives rise to what Kant terms an “aesthetic idea,” that which indicates an indeterminate content to which no concept is adequate, but in doing so it also presents the artwork as the fulfillment of nature, since it is only by way of the former that the formal “language” of the latter can be revealed. In effect the artwork, by repeating nature, speculatively realizes the affinity at the basis of the analogy of natural purpose that was postulated about nature. The idea of the whole, as an idea of reason, is realized through its representation in the artwork as an aesthetic idea (which will, however, affect its sense of the whole). Deciphering these ideas reveals that the artwork bears a nonconceptual knowledge in the form of its own existence as a codetermination of freedom and nature, for while its ideas “strive towards something lying beyond the bounds of experience,” as aesthetic they are yet presented within the nonconceptual form of the sensible [CPJ: §49, 192]. 40

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It is precisely this same set of dialectical relations that marks Adorno’s thoughts on autonomy, in which autonomy persists only insofar as it is not fully autonomous but incorporates a sense of the heteronomous, and in saying as much it is possible to appreciate how the traditional image of the autonomous artwork as hermetic and elitist, unconcerned with the world, is undercut by the fact that this autonomy is constituted by its relation to the world, with both its audience and its creators, as it is only by way of these relations that the work can attempt to free itself from them. It is this fact that enables a model of autonomous literature to be developed that can take account of the peculiarity and significance of both avant-garde manifestos, which although wholly derived from their context are still selfdetermining, and more familiar examples of modernist literature from writers like Musil and Duras, for in both cases there is a deployment of the literary work that is both intentional and yet self-contained, provocative and yet removed. And, contrary to Kant’s belief (especially in the form that Schiller sought to develop) that the cultivation of reflexive thought would lead to a greater sense of social cohesion, based on a more informed moral insight, it becomes apparent that the autonomy of the artwork primarily operates in a critical relation to its context, and critical to a degree that is not limited by any conventions, since the artwork only operates according to its own rules, a point that modernist literature exemplifies to an extreme insofar as it fails to offer any kind of imaginative edification. Although Schiller’s work has many weaknesses, it was of central importance for the way that Kant’s thought was disseminated through the 1790s. The main points around which his rethinking of Kant develops are his contention that the autonomy ascribed to the work by our aesthetic judgment is reconstrued as an aspect of the artwork itself. While the notion of aesthetic autonomy had already surfaced in Schiller’s thought before he started reading the Kritik der Urteilskraft, it became fully rethought once he had done so.7 Schiller’s intention in this was to extend Kant’s transcendental argument to the sphere of the cultural, thereby objectifying the notion of autonomy, although this is still autonomy as it is perceived and fashioned by the genial artist, whose role is now that of bringing about a cultivation of social and spiritual harmony through aesthetics. In doing so, what the artist brings about through the construction of the harmonious work is the expression of freedom (in the form of beauty), for the notion of harmony results from the mutual determination of form and content in the work, so that while each negatively limits the other, they are able to come to a free expression of themselves, which in turn allows for the expression of freedom in society (as a regulative ideal). The utopianism of this model made it subject to numerous attacks after his major work in this Autonomous Literature: The Manifesto and the Novel

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area, the Ästhetische Briefe, appeared in 1795, but the strength of these attacks only indicated the extent to which Schiller had exposed a central concern of the time (and the potential of this model has recurred as a touchstone for the thought of Marx, Lukács, Marcuse, and Rancière). Consequently, the fact of its development gave an opportunity to the younger thinkers of the Jena circle to extend Schiller’s ideas in a more robust fashion by rethinking the manner in which he adopted the model of reciprocal action (Wechselwirkung) developed by Fichte. For the approach underlying Schiller’s model of aesthetic education was one in which there is a mutual determination between the artist and the artwork, in terms of the relation between materiality and formality in both the work and the subject, which is the way that the notion of harmonious beauty passes from the object to the subject: Beauty is indeed an object for us, because reflection is the condition of our having a sensation of it; but it is at the same time a state of the subject, because feeling is a condition of our having a notion [Vorstellung] of it. Thus it is indeed form, because we consider it; but it is at the same time life, because we feel it. In a word: it is at once our state and our act. . . . But since in the enjoyment of beauty or aesthetic unity an actual union and exchange of material with form and of passivity with activity goes ahead, so thereby the very compatibility of both natures, the feasibility [Ausführbarkeit] of the infinite in finitude, hence the possibility of sublimest humanity, is proven.8 The demand thus exposed by this interactivity is that the artist “should externalise all that is within and give form to all that is outside” [AE: 77]. In doing so the autonomy that was only ascribed to the artwork by Kant, as our sense of it as freely self-determining, is translated by Schiller into an objective form that is then in a reciprocal relation with the subject’s own determination, such that on confronting the beautiful artwork the spectator finds that its harmonious expression of form and material becomes his own, thereby recasting Kant’s aesthetic ideas into a more concrete form so that “the human need not flee from the material in order to prove itself as spirit,” for “although the infinite opens up before his reeling imagination, his heart has not yet ceased to live in the singular and to serve the moment” [AE: 189, 175]. The task for the early German Romantics was thus clear: they needed to find a way of placing this approach on a more rigorous philosophical basis by examining the implications of this model of reciprocal actualization for the autonomy of the work and its relations to the world through a study of linguistic works and their relation to thought.

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Such an examination would need to start with a reading of the form of Fichte’s model of reciprocal actualization as it appeared in his Wissenschaftslehre, which attempted to ground knowledge, and thus philosophy, in the fundamental proposition I=I. By presenting his model in the form of this proposition Fichte had taken the inner formative drive used in Kant’s understanding of natural purpose and made it into a universal self-organizing force, so that it would not just lead to organic wholes but would also reveal the unity of subject and world, as the drive would both come from and return to the subject in its self-reflection. Thus this proposition would guarantee the unity and identity of the subject in a fundamental act of formative reflection, or Tathandlung, which would be both the act and the fact of its self-positing (as The Communist Manifesto would also seek to be): a self-realizing positing of consciousness. The early drafts of the Wissenschaftslehre circulated from 1794 onward and became the subject of much study for Schlegel and Hardenberg (Novalis), who found this model of reflexive self-positing both provocative and dissatisfying. Hardenberg’s notes on Fichte provide the most substantial reading, and they begin with an analysis of the Tathandlung by focusing on its linguistic representation, its appearance as a sentence or proposition in the form A is A: In the proposition a is a lies nothing but a positing, differentiating, and combining. It is a philosophical parallelism. In order to make a more distinct, A is divided. Is is presented as universal content, a as determinate form. The essence of identity can only be presented in an illusory proposition [Scheinsatz]. We abandon the identical in order to present it— either this occurs only illusorily— and we are brought by the imagination to believe it—what occurs, already is— naturally through imaginary separation and unification—or we represent it through its not-being [Nichtseyn], through a not-identical [Nichtidentisches]—a sign—a determined thing for an isomorphic determining thing—this isomorphic determining thing must actually determine the communicated sign in a completely unmediated way9 Hardenberg’s doubts about Fichte’s thought arise because the sentence that is meant to be a principle of identity (A is A) in fact offers no more than a positing, differentiating, and combining of terms, as the subject is split into a determining and determined form that is combined through the ontological copula, which asserts or posits their identity. This means that, as a statement of identity, “A is A” can only be an illusory or apparent statement, for what occurs is not identity but representation and thus differentiation; the potentially endless process of analyzing and synthesizing the

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subject. Th is is a statement of transformation rather than identity, for the subject has to be abandoned in order to be represented as A, which is to say that this statement is either merely regulative, an illusory proposition of identity as if it were to be so represented, such that the linguistic form of this representation is unimportant. Or, if it is a real statement, then it indicates that what is, the subject, can only be presented by way of what is not, linguistic signs, which then indicates that the subject is grounded in what is not, since the sign is nonbeing, the nonidentical, which also bears an element of the arbitrary, contingent materiality that cannot be represented as it is that which brings the movement of reflexivity to a halt [cf. ND: 139/135–36]. Thus, reflection cannot grasp that which it attempts to reach, identity, since in its representations it presents things in forms other than their own. So, on the one hand, the subject becomes ungrounded by the arbitrariness of its situation in linguistic signs, but on the other hand it is guaranteed, albeit opaquely, a material basis for its articulation through language. For, as Hardenberg points out, the relation of determination between sign and subject has to be isomorphic (gleichförmig), which is to claim that there is an essential relation between the two such that they cannot be considered entirely alienable, for even if the representation is not of the subject, it nevertheless arises in an analogous manner to it as it is of the same (linguistic) form. The subject is both grounded in the materiality of the sign and ungrounded by its arbitrariness, and in this way Hardenberg has found a means of reinserting the excess of Fichte’s idealism into a more rigorous Kantian finitude, between the extremes of which the subject’s being “hovers” (schwebt): never fully united with the object as Fichte had hoped but also never fully separated from it, constituted instead by this intermediary hovering.10 It is thus necessary for there to be what Hardenberg called an ordo inversus, where the reflection on language and self is countered by a further reflection in language so that the movement toward ideal representation is reversed into material presentation and vice versa.11 And the mode in which this protodialectical hovering takes on an exemplary form is literature, for it is through the way that literature already provides an explicit negotiation of the relation between the material and the regulative (what it presents and what it represents) that thought can itself become capable of acceding to the demands of language in its ambivalence. This is precisely the more developed analysis of aesthetic education that Schiller’s thought lacked, but it bears within it a requirement to rethink the relation between language and thought. Thus after Kant the entity of literature arises as something to be considered on its own terms (as was also found in regard to the enigma of the 44

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organism), something that in its quality of being an autonomous thing in the world now appears as a question. Furthermore, the notion of autonomy is understood to refer not only to the fact that the work is to be considered solely as it is in itself, insofar as it is solely concerned with itself, but also to the fact that in doing so the work refers beyond itself by virtue of its singularity. It is exactly this model that is exploited by the first generation of post-Kantian writers and thinkers as they developed an understanding of the artwork as an absolute, a notion that would bear the greatest cultural and historical consequences. What becomes apparent in the works of the Jena Romantics is the way that they form an alternative pathway between Kant and Hegel and beyond, since they start by considering the artwork to be a thing in itself with its own determinate structure but that is also necessarily linked to an act of critique that both completes and dissolves it. Thus they begin with a notion of reflexivity as such, not as subjective or objective but as a form of autocritique immanent to the work by which these poles are brought into relation, for from this perspective the (objective) artwork is to be viewed from the fact of its inherent (subjective) criticizability (Kritisierbarkeit), just as (historical) critique is to be viewed from the fact of its actual (natural) materiality, thereby indicating how the speculative potential of the Kantian position can be illuminated without leading into a Hegelian dialectic. It is then possible to gain a clearer idea of the issues at stake in such a model of literature and to appreciate the extent to which these issues have persisted to the present day and found their most considered examination in the works of Blanchot and Adorno. Benjamin’s Historical Critique of the Novel The early Romantics come to understand the artwork through the operation of critique because, on the one hand, it is critique that enables the work to appear as a work, and on the other hand critique comes to realize itself in doing so, thereby establishing an intimate dialectical interrelation between the objective and subjective poles of the work. This mutual realization is only possible if there is a preexisting affinity between critique and the work that would enable such an interrelation and, by developing Fichte’s ideas, Schlegel and Novalis find this basis in the notion of reflexivity, for when the objectivity of the work is understood as an intensively reflexive composition of its material and historical relations then it is not a priori separate from the actions of the subject. This interrelation seems to suggest an Idealist model of art similar to that found in Hegel’s aesthetics, but the early Romantics did not have the same conceptual ambitions for Autonomous Literature: The Manifesto and the Novel

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the artwork, as they were instead concerned with its actual and partial appearances, for these fragmentary manifestations seemed to indicate more about the nature of the medium of art as an absolute than any ideal horizon of complete actualization. Thus their work on the inner reflexivity of the work leads into a relation with critique that is endless, but that does not fall into the dissipation of endlessness that Hegel feared, for it is an endlessness that is complex—that is, an intensive, reflexive infinite [GS1.1: 26/SW1: 126]. As such, this sense of inner composition (Zusammenhang) comes close to the notion of the formative drive that marked the enigmatic center of autonomy for Kant, as it is an understanding of reflexivity that is autonomous, as it constructs the work from within, but is not solipsistic, as it depends on its contextual relations in order to persist. For Schlegel and Novalis the form in which such a composition finds its fullest actualization is that of the novel, whose hybridity and sobriety will give it the status of the artwork par excellence. Benjamin’s dissertation on the concept of critique in Romanticism concludes with the discovery that, because poetry cannot accede to the absolute on its own, as its inner reflexivity cannot extend itself without the intervention of critique, this leads to a model of the absolute medium of art as being itself impure. And the Romantics found this impurity exemplified in the novel, for as the form of the novel is one of bounded but endless reflexivity it can dissolve the mode of its own presentation without losing its form entirely or fixing it into a single form. Thus what is only possible in other artworks through critique or irony the novel develops autonomously as a consequence of its formal irregularity: The novel can in fact reflect upon itself at will and, in ever new considerations, can mirror back every given level of consciousness from a higher standpoint. That it achieves this by the nature of its form, whereas this is possible for other genres only through the bold stroke of irony, neutralises irony in it. But in contrast, just because the novel never oversteps its form, every one of its reflections can be viewed as limited by itself, for there is no regular form of presentation to limit them. This neutralises the presentational form in it, which prevails in it only in its purity, not in its rigour. [GS1.1: 98/SW1: 172] As Novalis explains, drawing out the similarity between the novel and the fragment, “The style [Schreibart] of the novel must not be a continuum; it must be a structure articulated in every period. Each small piece must be something cut off, delimited, a whole on its own” [cited by Benjamin in GS1.1: 99/SW1: 172]. This quality of the novel comprises its “retarding” character—that which balances its formless extensibility with a self46

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limitation, a reflexive autocritique that enables the work to be intensively composed as an autonomous part of the medium of art. This understanding follows from their general approach to the work of art, which in turn demonstrates why this approach should find its goal in the novel, since in essence the novel (Roman) is simply a Romantic book, whatever its style or genre, and so it is the work that best presents the Romantic theory of reflection. But this is also to say that Romanticism is simply that thinking that is of the novel, as will become apparent. This convergence between the novel and the work of art succeeds because it is essentially grounded in an understanding of prose as the idea of Poesie, as the medium of its absolute reflexivity. This is not simply prose as the inverse of poetry, nor is it the language of the prosaic, although both these aspects are significant; rather it follows from the characterization given by Novalis about the retarding quality and self-segmentation of the novel, for which he finds an emblem in the consonant.12 Benjamin makes much of this thought of prose, claiming that on it “rests the entire philosophy of art of early Romanticism, especially its concept of criticism,” for in prose the very reflective medium of art itself appears [GS1.1: 100/SW1: 173]. As such there is an active realization of the dialectical relation between unity and multiplicity and intuition and comprehension in the irregular form of prose, but not its final consummation or resolution, and this, for Benjamin, indicates why the work of the Romantics has been “so historically rich in consequences,” considering the effects such thinking would have on later writers like Flaubert and Mallarmé, and, closer to Benjamin’s own time, Stefan George [GS1.1: 103/SW1: 175]. Attendant to this development is the principle of sobriety, by which the interrelation of reflection and prose becomes a methodology, a craft that can be repeated, and here Benjamin, by way of Hölderlin, moves away from Romantic thought proper into the more profane, material sphere that forms the background of his reservations about the excesses of Idealism in early Romanticism. Although Benjamin has not studied Marx at this point in his career, so his sense of the profane is not materially conditioned, his thinking nevertheless has an impulse toward grounding the transcendent in the world of things, which is as much a literary art as it is historical, and as much a part of a social program as it is theological. But this sobriety also reflects the work’s unaccommodating (ungefällig) form, which is the expression of its autonomy and formal intensity, something essential to the development of modern art, literature, and criticism itself. For in bringing out the prosaic nature of the work, critique itself becomes prosaic, as it becomes “the eternal sober continuance [Bestand] of the work” [GS1.1: 109/SW1: 178]. Autonomous Literature: The Manifesto and the Novel

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In the epilogue to his dissertation—which is also the prologue to his next major work, his essay on Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften— Benjamin seeks to balance the Romantics’ emphasis on the form of the artwork with an examination of the ideal of art in Goethe’s writings, a balance that would lie in the unity of content and representational relation that the artwork attempts with nature. But it is precisely this relation of representation that is called into question by the artwork, for Goethe’s understanding of natural forms as ur-phenomena, forms that are sensuously concrete but also exemplary of the formation of the natural order as such, suggests that the artwork is always removed from this primal mode of presentation. As a result, the artwork is never able to reach the ideal of its content and will instead deteriorate over time as its attempts become ever more distant from the ideal. This understanding of art is in direct contrast to the perfectibility of form undertaken in the writings of the Romantics, who sought to attain an ever greater approximation to the medium of reflection through the formal intensification of the work. But for Benjamin both approaches are needed, so that there is not an excess either on the side of form or of content, but this can only be achieved through their dialectical combination, a problem that will bear not just on the question of critique but also of history, and will be decisive for the development of Adorno’s thought. Consequently, although Schlegel found that Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre was the model of the reflexively autonomous novel, Benjamin turns to Goethe’s later work for a specific reason. For Die Wahlverwandtschaften presents a rigorously formal model not only of reflexivity but also of affinity, thus allowing Benjamin to explore the way in which reflection operates between the poles of subject and object as a material critique of similarity and difference—that is, in the sense of the word given at the end of his dissertation, “critique is the preparation [Darstellung] of the prosaic kernel in every work,” where preparation is to be understood “in the chemical sense, as the generation of a substance through a determinate process to which other substances are submitted” [GS1.1: 109/SW1: 178]. The substance of the prosaic kernel that Benjamin’s presentation will expose is the content of Goethe’s novel, and more specifically, the way that its truth-content (Warheitsgehalt) and its material-content (Sachgehalt) are interwoven, which can only be exposed by their determinate critique. Such chemical metaphors are signally appropriate given the content of Goethe’s novel, in which it is not possible to be certain whether the chemical notion of affinity (and the paradox of elective affinities) is that which explains the structure of the work or that which is to be explained by it.13 This relation between a text and its meaning is precisely what is at issue in 48

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Benjamin’s usage of truth-content and material-content and the apparent affinity between them. For he starts with “that basic law of literature according to which the more significant the work, the more inconspicuously and intimately its truth-content is bound up with its material-content.” Over time the two become set apart, for the truth-content (its latent idea) remains hidden as the material-content (its factical appearance) is brought out, thus the role of the critic is much like a scholar before a palimpsest, who attempts to read through the surface layer of a text in order to access what is written beneath it by the way that this surface text refers to it, so that the question arises “of whether the appearance [Schein] of the truthcontent is due to the material-content, or the life of the material-content to the truth-content” [GS1.1: 125/SW1: 297–98]. Although this gives an early indication of the intrinsic relation between appearance and life that will guide Benjamin’s analysis of affinity, when we go on to read that the truth-content of the work can be discerned like the flame that rises above the wood and ash of its ruined material-content, then it is clear that he is remaining with the notion of an artwork oriented toward its transient but illuminating idea, which will be carried forward into the constellation of naming in the Trauerspiel study. The manner in which Benjamin pursues this notion in the essay on Goethe is notably more complex than that of his dissertation, for the relation between material-content and truth-content takes on the dimensions of a dialectically reconceived hylomorphism. As the earlier remark indicates, there is an ambiguity over whether the truth-content of a work is only apparent due to its material-content or whether it is instead the material-content that draws its life from the truth-content. Such an ambiguous interdependency, which deepens the problematic interrelation of critique to the artwork found in the early Romantics by effectively doubling its content, is central to the way that Benjamin reads Goethe’s novel in terms of both its actual contents (the debates over the nature of the affinities involved in marriage and adultery), and the mode of its appearance (its allegorical themes and reflexive structure), which is in turn recapitulated in the writing of his own essay. What emerges is a many-layered discussion on the relation of truth to beauty and vivacity and, by extension, the relation of appearance and obscurity in artworks, which moves away from the notion that material is shaped under the force of an artistic idea (which is the traditional model of hylomorphism) to one in which the truth-content of a work remains buried within its material-content. This does not mean that the basis of the artwork simply lies in making this truthcontent become visible, for as Benjamin has pointed out, it only exists through the material-content, so to render it apparent would also be to Autonomous Literature: The Manifesto and the Novel

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destroy it; equally, treating the material-content as transparent or immaterial will only lead to the obliteration of its truth-content. The truth-content that remains true is thus that which remains to some degree embedded within its material-content and is thus unexpressed; it becomes understood, as Benjamin will discuss in the last part of the essay, as the expressionless (das Ausdruckslose).14 The ancient meaning of the Greek word hylē, which forms the “material” component of hylomorphism, is that of “wood” in the sense of its thickness or density, the interiority of the tree that is drawn out for the purposes of its usage. In Benjamin’s understanding it is not a question of a raw material being configured according to artistic labor, but of the material guiding its own formation, as if it were the interiority of the wood that were being brought to speak in its uses, thereby indicating but not revealing its truth-content, which animates it from within like the protoflame that only fully erupts on the point of its destruction. It is precisely this sense of an immanent hylomorphism that is lost when it is assumed that the material itself is empty and can only be formed from without, which arises with the development of an instrumental approach to materiality. But this sense of a material bearing its own reflexivity, which allows for its autonomous composition, establishes a different criterion for artistry, which Novalis, Hölderlin, and Goethe saw in the notion that nature expresses itself through a language of hieroglyphics. Benjamin takes up some aspects of this mystical thinking in his reading of Goethe, which seeks to pursue its own immersion in allegorical indirection through the manner of his writing, but it is also clear that there is a sober methodological problem at stake for both writers and readers in this issue of materiality. For if the truth-content is only fully revealed through destruction, then how can it be found without this; what might be its own mode of existence? Here Benjamin brings his analysis back to the themes of Goethe’s novel, for he states that art and philosophy are like “siblings” in that the artwork bears an affinity to the ideal of the problem in philosophy. Therefore it is by way of this analogy that a dialectical relation is brought out between philosophy and critique, for in understanding the status of the problem in its ideal form in philosophy we can come to an understanding of the mode of appearing of the artwork, just as, conversely, the mode of appearing of the artwork provides a means of understanding the role of the problem in philosophy. It is because philosophy seeks to define itself not in relation to individual problems but to that which unites them that Benjamin speaks of the ideal of the problem, but as ideal it is beyond the reach of philosophy’s questions, which are only ever individual and thus cannot broach the 50

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systematicity of the ideal problem in its unity. It is to this ideal that Benjamin finds that the artwork bears an affinity, since the artwork produces the same absence of response in critique as the ideal of the problem produces in philosophy, as both bring the methodology of questioning to a halt. (In this way Benjamin can be seen to be recapitulating the analogy between the artwork and the organism from Kant’s third Kritik, which equally brought thinking up against a limit in the enigma of the autonomous form.) The task of critique in relation to the artwork is one of formulating its truth-content as a problem—that is, not in a concrete form but as the possibility of its being formulated, thus as a problem, which is the only form in which its truth-content can appear. What critique presents “is the virtual formulability [Formulierbarkeit] of its truth-content as the highest philosophical problem; that before which it pauses, as if in reverence for the work but equally from respect for the truth, is precisely this formulation itself” [GS1.1: 173/SW1: 334]. This means that the artwork presents itself as that which obliquely suggests its truth but nevertheless fails or resists formulating its form. Although such a problematic form resembles the Romantics’ notion of the idea of art as that which the work is attempting to reach, Benjamin has transformed this notion by claiming that the appearance of the problem is to be found in that which interrupts the artwork by not being expressed, for in doing so the expressionless “completes the work by smashing it into a patchwork [Stückwerk]” [GS1.1: 181/SW1: 340]. The enigmatic quality of the artwork, which for Goethe risks leaving it stranded between the beauty of its appearance and the remoteness of its source in nature, is brought to completion for Benjamin in a moment of rupture that breaks the spell of its enigma, for the expressionless reveals the possibility of form as the presence of the ideal within the work. In Goethe’s novel this moment occurs very late in the narrative when the lovers finally embrace their fate, leading the narrator to remark that, unacknowledged by them, this union takes place under the sign of a hope that passes overhead like a falling star [GS1.1: 199–200/SW1: 354–55]. The intrusion of the narrative voice both illuminates the arc of the story at this crucial point and indicates its inevitable decline, thus showing the artifice of the work but also its natural coordinates in the lingering possibility of hope, however transient. It is through this oblique mode of expression that the artwork contributes to philosophy’s attempt to understand the ideal of its problems, for the muteness of the truth-content within the work legitimizes the sense that it is the ideal of the problem that is the unanswerable problem that grants philosophy its status. This is not to grant to the work a sense of the ineffable that permanently eludes thought, but rather to see it as bearing Autonomous Literature: The Manifesto and the Novel

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a critical potential that not only fractures the work in its appearance but also disrupts thought by presenting itself in a new and catastrophic configuration, one that brings about a radical deviation through its elusive material contingency. In developing this notion of the expressionless Benjamin aligns it with Hölderlin’s use of the caesura as the structuring form of tragic drama and thereby indicates how he has moved as far from Goethe’s sense of the ideal unity of content of the artwork as he has from the early Romantics’ emphasis on the formal idea of art, which has consequences for how he conceives the place of the artwork in the world and in history, for the caesura is actualized in Hölderlin’s understanding of tragedy as the “pure word,” which will be reformulated by Benjamin as an expressionless gesture.15 The material-content of the work is not the transient, worldly veil of appearance behind which the truth-content lies waiting to be revealed, for the latter only is by way of the former and so can only appear with it, not merged indistinguishably together, but nevertheless inseparable. This means that the idea of the work (in the Romantic sense) is not eternal and transcendent, but is embedded within the material-content of the work, and so it is in the gradual historical unraveling of this material-content that the penumbra of its truth-content can be discerned, which is thus the task of the critic. The marks of beauty and vivacity of the work that persist within its disintegration are thus the points at which the interrelation of the material-content and the truth-content can be traced, as these are the signs of the expressionless that silently mark the work through its fracturing. Such a conception lays the groundwork for the more developed analysis of baroque allegory as the death mask of history that Benjamin will produce later, but it also provides a concise reading of the way that the material-content of the artwork acts as the historical index of its truth in its fragmentation and decay, which will take on a critical importance in Adorno’s later works. Some months after Benjamin’s essay was published, Adorno and Benjamin went to see Berg’s Wozzeck, which had just premiered in Vienna. Adorno had already gone to the opening night, but returned with Benjamin the following week for the next performance. Five days later he wrote to Berg with his impressions, and after various comments about improvements in the performance he said: Big tavern scene very clear this time: I do not know if it lies with Kleiber [the conductor] or myself, but I really find the centre of the whole work in this centrepiece today; it is an unprecedented feat of genius and successful in that here the lower diff use elements are 52

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grasped and taken up: the singing of wrong notes [Falschsingen] as a constructive motif is a metaphysically abyssal discovery and outdoes Mahler’s most secret intentions. I can find no other words for it than these great ones and for Benjamin, who may be a less suspect witness for you than myself—incidentally he understood what was going on in your work better than any musicians—for Benjamin it was no different. So it is also no accident that the scene stands exactly here: it is the caesura in Hölderlin’s sense and with it the “expressionless” can break into the music. And it is such a hope that precisely here, between the shreds of the expelled soul and truly malgré elle, the grand form asserts itself! That you had to wipe away [tilgen] the symphony for the sake of the symphony! And how fitting it is that this German Trauerspiel, which stands closest to Marx, should become captured [ getroffen] by your music, for your music has captured it in its history instead of depicting it compositionally.16 Adorno was twenty-two and had become Berg’s student earlier that year, so his youthful enthusiasm is not surprising, but the thoughts expressed here would remain unchanged in the rest of his writings. Wozzeck would remain the pinnacle of Berg’s works for him, and the tavern scene (act 2, scene 4) would be its culmination.17 While he has taken up Benjamin’s notion of the expressionless, this is only to give form to ideas he is already developing himself, particularly in regard to Berg. For in Berg’s music Adorno finds a mode of dialectics that is nonaffirmative in that it manages to hold together the two moments in which, as he states about Wozzeck, the symphony is wiped away in order to reveal it, without resolving this tension. Such a sense of the work expressing itself through its own dissolution indicates, for Adorno, the possibility of hope without asserting it, and thereby remains true to its expressionless content, at the expense, however, of the work, which is now somehow less (or more) than a fully formed work. As will be discussed in the next chapter, Adorno comes to this discovery through an analysis of the aesthetic material of artworks, which provides a methodology for approaching their truth-content by reworking Benjamin’s thought to show that the autonomy of a work arises not just from its critical reflexivity but also out of its natural-history. Hegel and the Ambivalence of Prose But first it is necessary to detour briefly into the question of prose as a form, for it is in prose that these issues of the material and speculative possibilities of language will receive their most stringent examinations. The origins Autonomous Literature: The Manifesto and the Novel

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of prose lie with the invention of writing and draw upon many sources, but most importantly writing develops as a form of recorded speech, so prose has the appearance of a straightforward transcription of everyday language. It is precisely this notion that has given rise to the hyperrationalist dream that language can be treated as information—that is, as purely utilitarian data, disdaining any material form and so capable of being instantiated into any medium, translated and manipulated without any side effects. But this is misleading, for the greatest facility of prose is its ability to make us believe that it is direct and transparent, that it lacks the form and figures of rhetorical language, but this apparent immediacy is itself a rhetorical tool with its own consequences, intended or otherwise (something that has been naturalized, and thus forgotten or obliterated, in the drive toward complete digital fungibility). Early prose writers realized this when they found that prose can give the impression of being incontrovertible, as statements can be written that— because they appear to lack rhetoric— seem to be statements of fact. This capacity comes about because prose does not base its authority on a usage of traditional forms, as poetry does, but instead asserts its own authority based on nothing more than its appearance. This enables prose to operate in a mode of permanent contestation because each new statement reasserts itself on its own terms.18 It was only in the time of Thucydides and Aristotle that writers of prose began to develop a formal logic that would provide an authority for prose by asserting that statements could only be combined in certain restricted ways. This formal logic arose out of the need to define the status of prose, as earlier writers like Herodotus and Plato had found their works were criticized for having an uncertain status, since they combined different genres, voices, and registers. In this way early prose betrays its background in folktales, especially those assigned to Aesop, which not only operate across different modes and with different narrative positions but are explicitly characterized by the way that this anomalous status is used as a means of indirection. This background is important for the later development of prose, as it indicates that its apparent immediacy conceals a depth of meaning that remains to be uncovered, which is the obscurity that arises from its lack of formal authority— since, as the status of prose is always open to question, the apparent meaning of any particular piece can be contested, which leads to an awareness that what is given is indeterminate insofar as it is incomplete, even as it purports to be incontrovertible. It is precisely this facility that will make prose a vehicle for endless reflexivity, for with each new statement the text provokes a rethinking of its authority, which is then the basis for the development of methodologies that will seek to make the position of prose authority more rigorous 54

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and more secure by trying to specify in advance what counts as clear or logical writing. But this approach necessarily still operates within the framework delivered by prose of asserting its own authority, seemingly without indirection or obscurity. Although Hegel does not examine the reflexivity of prose other than to associate it with the secularization of everyday life, he finds that it is exactly this reflexive quality that enables prose to play a role in the history of Spirit, and in particular in his sweeping analysis of culture in his lectures on the philosophy of history— a role, moreover, in which prose tacitly comes to engage in a dialectical relation with poetry that bears a strong resemblance to the master-slave dialectic, where it is prose that occupies the position of the slave due to its hard-won reflexivity while poetry remains subject to traditional structures of authority, as he notes in the Ästhetik in relation to Aesop: “In the slave, prose begins, and so the entire species is prosaic too.”19 Despite this, the dialectical relation of poetry and prose remains undeveloped, for prose as a form in the history of culture is simply a stage for Hegel on the way to the self-realization of Spirit that is achieved as poetry removes itself from the prosaic, which is precisely the point at which the Marxian/Adornian critique of this dialectic would come to bear so that the actual material conditions of thought and language are not displaced. Within his lectures on the philosophy of history Hegel consistently uses “prose” to describe the abstract mode of language use in which a culture finds the potential for self-consciousness. Thus the prosaic is an essential step in the movement of Spirit from myth to history, since it involves an awareness of finitude related to the ability to define and determine the world leading to the possibility of scientific, philosophical, and legal thought. In doing so, prose is tied to the emergence of the state, which not only produces such prosaic expression but also provides material that can only be expressed by it, establishing the norm of the prosaic as such [PH: 61]. Consequently, Hegel speaks of the way that Roman culture developed as a “prose of life” and so moved politically and historically beyond the lyrical and harmonious culture of the ancient Greeks [PH: 288]. But this is an ambivalent change, for prose lacks the spirit that animated the poetic existence of the Greeks, which enabled them to find a means of expression to surpass the prosaic existence of everyday life and thus experience the movement of Spirit beyond its material forms.20 Thus there is a profound uncertainty to the way that Hegel views prose, for in its ability to provide an expression of history it is an invaluable aspect of the movement of Spirit, and even if the prosaic is surpassed by poetry in Greek culture this is not without a loss of attention to the detail Autonomous Literature: The Manifesto and the Novel

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of the world, which thereby inhibits the further development of philosophy and science. Equally, the unadulterated prose of life leads to stasis, as he suggests in regard to Chinese culture [PH: 106, 111, 123]. So it is necessary to see the relation between prose and poetry in terms of a dialectic in which neither side excels without passing through the other. It is precisely such a model that appears to implicitly guide Hegel’s aesthetics in which the transition he envisages is from the prose of the world to the prose of thought by way of a passage through poetry. Th is transition again recalls the dialectic of self-consciousness in the Phänomenologie, where immersion in the details of the everyday has to be sublated by the emergence of a consciousness that can perceive these details as such, so that it can then discover its relation to the world as well as to itself. It is thus a mark of immanence that consciousness passes from the prose of the world through the poetry of Spirit back to a reformulated prose of thought, which is essentially the same as the earlier form of prose except that, rather than its parts only being externally and contingently related (parataxis), there is an inner necessity to its relations arising from the realization of its idea as a material medium (syntax), thereby reestablishing the relation of world and self that was previously only tacit.21 The apparently tautological movement from prose to prose is thus shown to be properly speculative, just as Horkheimer and Adorno were to write about language going from tautology back to language through divinity [DA: 31/10]. Thus prose presents a uniquely demanding challenge in the history of literature, for its essence lies with the fact that it does not follow any intrinsic rules. Instead, early prose writers seized upon the unfettered nature of prose to develop a form of writing that combined different genres and voices, such that this heterogeneity would itself become the generic description of prose. In this way the prose text is able to operate as a space of contestation, as it follows no set of traditions and thus can combine popular with technical language, anonymity and analysis, parody and theory. Equally, by doing so, it is also able to contest its own authority, thereby provoking a sense of ambiguity that persistently needs to be analyzed. Thus the apparent simplicity of prose is no straightforward imitation of ordinary language but an elaborate charade that, as Novalis’s Monolog showed, is at the basis of its ability to mislead and to impersonate. In a recent and subtler variation (which reads like a more prosaic version of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life), Edouard Levé’s Autoportrait operates with a similar sense of unsettling self-examination in which sentences neither add to nor subtract from each other but persist alongside them equally, leaving any attempt to locate its truth syntactically uncertain, as each sentence has the same weight, but allowing for another alternative sense of form to arise. It is precisely 56

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because prose seems to be clear that it is most obscure, for this apparent clarity masks its lack of source and authority, thereby enabling such matters of authority to be explored both directly and indirectly. It is thus that the development of methodological and rhetorical rules became significant, if this formlessness were to be constrained into scientific, philosophical, or political usages. But it is the nature of prose to demonstrate the artificiality of such rules, to endlessly expose their lack of ground and contingent origin, which is why its problematic nature is so often ignored or disavowed. However, it is for these same reasons that the formlessness of prose became central to the development of modernist literature, and, consequently, the material forms of prose reveal how its material forms (and deforms) itself immanently and negatively, dialectically. But, as the development of modernist literature has also shown, the nature and status of any experience of such literary forms are uncertain given the possibility that they are autonomous, for if this is an experience of material language, then it has implications that are not just sociocultural but also involve questions of ontology.

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2

The Obscurities of Artistic Innovation

In the summer of 1964 Blanchot wrote the following words: Such a way of seeing expresses a deliberate choice. One decides to consider certain traits as less important, but others as the only authentic ones: the taste for religion as accidental, the desire for revolt as essential; the concern with the past as episodic, the refusal of tradition, the appeal to the new, the consciousness of being modern as determinant; nationalist penchants as a momentary trait, the pure subjectivity that has no fatherland as a decisive trait. And if finally all these traits together are recognised as equally necessary, as they are opposed to one another, then what becomes the dominant tone is not the ideological meaning of any of them in particular, but their opposition, the necessity of their contradiction, the scission, the fact of being divided. [EI: 516/352] He is writing about the atmosphere in Germany toward the end of the eighteenth century—in particular, the demands that were felt by a group of writers and thinkers in Jena and Berlin in the years after 1795, a group who would gather around a journal called the Athenäum and who would later be discussed under the name of Frühromantik, early Romanticism. However, he is also writing about his own situation, about the demands felt by a group of writers and thinkers he had attempted to gather together around a journal called the Revue internationale, a journal that at the moment he was writing was about to launch its first and only issue. The 58

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failure of this project had been apparent for more than a year, and so the launching of its first issue, which only came about through the generosity of an Italian journal, Il Menabò, was an unavoidable confirmation of the tensions and weaknesses that had led to its failure. It is unsurprising then that Blanchot should take the opportunity to look back to the earliest precursor for such a venture, for the Athenäum was just as ambitious in its poetic, philosophical, and political aims, and although it lasted longer than the Revue it still collapsed after six issues. But as this passage indicates, Blanchot was keenly aware of the reasons for this failure, as it corresponded to an inability to consider the necessity of contradiction involved in making decisions in the face of the changing times, and as a result it was a loss that he felt personally. But what is remarkable about this passage is its tone, which adopts the style of the manifesto in its deliberate phrasing of choices in relation to history. There is a necessity broached here that requires a response, a decisive response that would initiate a reorientation of the subject in relation to time, to the world, and to itself: what is past must be resisted in order to reclaim the future; what is present must be confronted in order to reveal the traces of the self. This is an excessive demand that claims everything for itself while rejecting everything; it wants to remain new while refusing the past, to assert itself against the flow of time and thus remain forever contemporary. It is a demand that, as Leslie Hill explains, “addresses us in the present most radically, and in that very gesture addresses us from some other place or time which does not belong to the contemporary, but creates a fissure or caesura in temporality itself,” with the consequence that “the present is understood, here and now, as that which is without presence. . . . In that sense, the present would be more like the future, the future not as deferred presence but as the outside, that absolute alterity which is chance.”1 Hence, the force of such an opening lies with the fact that it is as fragile as it is bold, for with such ambitions the possibility of failure is ever present, as its demands can never be fulfilled, since they demand that their own demands remain pressing and are to be actualized as such. The extreme rhetorical positioning that Blanchot is drawing upon here is grounded in an understanding of literature as a reflexive medium, for it is through this reflexivity, as the Jena Romantics discovered, that literature “suddenly becomes conscious of itself, manifests itself and, in this manifestation, has no other task or trait than to declare itself. In sum, literature announces that it is taking power” [EI: 520/354]. For Blanchot, this coincidence of the literary and the political that announced itself in the pages of the Athenäum came from the way that its writers seized upon the French Revolution not just as a sociopolitical event, The Obscurities of Artistic Innovation

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but as a new form of expression, as “language made History, which signifies itself through the events that are its declarations . . . these do not constitute historical facts, but a new language: that speaks and has remained speaking” [EI: 520–21/355]. The revolutionary act thus appears to the Romantics fundamentally as a mode of creative language (parole), which, in its unfolding of a new sociohistorical situation, is also a form of knowledge (savoir), and as such it is the principle of absolute freedom. When such a radical rethinking of language is applied to literature so that, like the manifesto, it announces nothing but its own manifestation, then it comes to take on the status of an absolute, for it lays claim to “the whole that acts mysteriously and invisibly in everything” [EI: 521–22/355]. It is this claim that moves the work of the Romantics onto such a decisive level, for it implies that in this rethinking of literature “the absolute subject of all revelation comes into play, the ‘I’ in its freedom, which adheres to no condition, recognises itself in nothing in particular and is in its element—its ether—in the whole where it is free” [EI: 522/356]. From this perspective the excess of the Romantics’ ambitions becomes apparent, for in the absolute selfmanifestation of literature the world itself is seemingly founded, as all past and future history is subsumed into its manifestation. But it is thus that literature brings about its own dissolution by finding in this totalization nothing but its own interminable end, its endless self-manifestation, which would exhaust it were it not for the fact that this is also its self-manifestation. In this subtle disagreement Romanticism finds its optimal site, as Novalis had discovered in his Monolog, for this discrepancy paradoxically becomes the narrow margin where it can affirm itself: neither in the world, nor outside the world, master of everything, but on the condition that everything contain nothing, to be pure consciousness without content, a pure speech that can say nothing. A situation in which failure and success are in strict reciprocity, fortune and misfortune indiscernible. Right from the outset, poetry has, in becoming everything, also lost everything, thereby acceding to that strange era of its own tautology where it will inexhaustibly exhaust its difference by repeating that its essence is to poeticise, just as the essence of speech is to speak. [EI: 522–23/356] When literature encounters itself as that which endlessly says itself, as its own tautology, there arises the force of contradiction that Blanchot pointed out earlier, since this tautology is not perfect, but instead reveals the narrow penumbra of language’s noncoincidence with itself. For in manifesting nothing but its own manifestation language does not dissolve into emptiness but remains on the brink as that which is nothing but its own 60

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manifestation, its own speaking, and this slender possibility only arises out of the extremity of its self-contradiction. A chance then opens up of avoiding the idealist ambitions of Romanticism and of uncovering its “non-Romantic essence,” and thus not succumbing to its totalizing dissolution. The task then becomes one of stepping back from the absolute so as to make of literature a different kind of manifesto, one whose declarations are suspended in the apparent tautology of their manifestation and yet that hold onto their critical interrogations, so “that to write is to make a work of speech, but that this work is worklessness,” for in this suspension of the work “to speak poetically is to make possible a non-transitive speech whose task is not to say things (to disappear in what it signifies), but to say (itself ) in letting (itself ) say, without however making itself the new object of this language without object” [EI: 524/357]. Blanchot has moved very quickly here, and the density of his argument has often caught readers out, for he is not acceding to the Romantic model of writing but rather to the demand that lies behind it, which is more radical and more critical. In doing so he indicates why the manifesto-like quality of Romantic writing is important but also why it does not go far enough, and thus why it is necessary to return to the Romantics to uncover a more radical form of manifesto that exceeds the mode of selfmanifesting declaration, not by rejecting it but by pursuing its demands more rigorously. To understand what is at issue here it is helpful to examine a significant misreading of this legacy of the Romantics, which exemplifies a particular view of the relation of thought and language. In a critique of Schlegel’s poetics J. M. Bernstein turns to two modern figures, Blanchot and de Man, to explicate the significance of Schlegel’s thought, as he feels that they have provided “the two most forceful defences of Jena romanticism,” to the extent that they “identify their own thinking with what is accomplished in [its] concepts” of Romantic irony (de Man) and the Romantic fragment (Blanchot) [PAS: 160]. Bernstein’s starting point is the aesthetics of transcendental idealism, which he believes undergoes an anti-aesthetic transformation in the work of Schlegel, under the influence, he claims, of Lessing’s Laokoon. The significance of this claim is that it lays the grounds for what Bernstein sees as an anti-aesthetic approach to language, which according to his reading of de Man and Blanchot persists to this day and must be countered by an approach that resists “the doctrine of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign” by grounding aesthetics in the material and the sensuous, which is part of his larger project of rereading Adorno through Hegel and thereby rescuing his aesthetics as a rational theory of modernism. Th is argument is useful for my own purposes, because in crystalizing a common misreading of aesthetics and The Obscurities of Artistic Innovation

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language as oppositional, for which it sets up de Man and Blanchot as straw men, the weakness of its position actually demonstrates the critical proximity between these terms for any understanding of the relation between post-Kantian aesthetics and literature. In his conclusion, Bernstein projects his interpretation of Schlegel onto de Man and Blanchot in order to demonstrate his claim that their thought follows that of early Romanticism. Thus, he believes that Blanchot, for example, has fallen prey to two flaws that were inherent in the Romantic position: first, a translation of the problem of literature into a problem of knowledge; and second, and concomitantly, a relinquishment of the aesthetically sensible nature of the literary: The difficulty, of course, is that the aim of romantic discourse, as exemplified in the romantic fragment, is emphatically to express the essence of language, indeed the essence of human freedom, as the essence of poetry. Hence, even in the unworking of the romantic fragment, precisely in its not being a work, there emerges a reflexivity and essentialism that cannot be anything else but knowledge—without that emergence there is nothing to experience in the fragment. Eschewing aesthetic semblance, the romantic fragment becomes philosophical idea. Both de Man and Blanchot, in wanting to get to the non-meaning that is the condition of meaning, call it text machine, call it event, must displace, forever, the fragile aesthetic object and replace it with, however mediated and detoured, philosophical knowing, the knowing of non-knowledge. But this is metaphysics in the bad old sense, since it is a pure knowledge of the absence of meaning, dependent on no particular objects for its presence or absence. Th is is why it is an ideology of finitude: it is the knowledge of the finitude of meaning without finite beings, the unworking of works but without there being any works, no significant stone that might reveal silent stone. There is in all this something too knowing and comforting, as if the loss of meaning would be tolerable after all if we could so possess it, have it, so surely, authentically, stoically, and beautifully. [PAS: 167–68] By emphasizing the radical worklessness of the fragment it becomes, in Bernstein’s eyes, not just an idea, insofar as it is separated from the materiality of language, but also philosophical, insofar as it conveys a knowledge of absence, of the meaningless conditions of meaning, and is thus a knowledge of this nonknowledge. This pre-Kantian move comes about, he claims, because the status of the literary in Blanchot’s reading of the Athenäum has

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become abstracted from the sensible aspect of literature, insofar as the arbitrary nature of its linguistic signs separates it from the materiality of its medium and leads it to aspire to a pure poetry of thought. Such a reading is necessary for his argument, as it sets up an opposition between the supposed immateriality of literary works and the materiality of other artworks, which then enables him to develop a case for the specific nonconceptual knowledge of the plastic arts. It is surprising to find Bernstein proposing such an opposition, as it adopts a conventional and almost Cartesian division of labor between the linguistic and the material, which nevertheless coincides with the traditional disregard in which certain forms of literary analysis are held by supposedly more concrete critical theorists. It is telling then that his own pursuit of such material knowledge should operate through studies of painting and sculpture (just as Adorno had done in regard to music, although Adorno was in no way disinclined to examine the materiality of literature, as well), by finding in the trajectory of disenchantment from realism to abstraction in modern art a nonconceptual mode of knowing that attaches to this attenuation of the sensible. But what makes Bernstein’s work of considerable interest is how close he comes to depicting the possibilities of a literary materialism, even if he fails to grasp the existence of such a possibility within the works of de Man and Blanchot. For this same trajectory of disenchantment takes place in the legacy of Romantic literary theory up to and including its transformations in the writings of Blanchot and de Man, which finds in the abstractions of modern literary works a concomitant form of nonconceptual knowledge. In Blanchot’s writings this disenchanted experience is signaled in the thought of the early Romantics by the notion of an autonomous literature and, despite its increasing abstraction following Mallarmé, the effects of this notion yields not an anaesthetic movement, and even less an antiaesthetic one, but an experience of the literary as a displaced and displacing image that forms the material singularity of its works. Thus, in spite of himself, Bernstein has raised a significant point, for it is over these issues of its relation to critical philosophy that Blanchot’s works can be most usefully addressed, for the question of the sensible nature of the literary experience and its concomitant “knowledge” is what makes the implications of his writings so far-reaching.2 Bernstein has missed this point because he has simply assimilated Blanchot’s (and de Man’s) works to a thought of pure poetry that, unrestrained by any materiality, is able to exult in the freedom of arbitrary linguistic signs. Whether this argument can be sustained in terms of Schlegel’s work, as he claims, is highly doubtful, since it omits the satirical basis of

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irony and the sensual basis for the fragment, which together form the idea of poetry, under the influence not of Lessing but of Fichte’s complex notion of self-reflection, but it is even less certain that Blanchot or de Man can be identified with this reading. For Blanchot it is the indeterminacy of the literary image that is at issue, which bears a meaning that persists but fails to be representational, so that the work remains alongside its worklessness. Such a concrete indeterminacy is described by Bernstein, following Adorno, as a semblance (Schein) of meaning, an appearance that presents its own possibility of appearance: Nothing supports the possibility in general of the materiality of meaning other than aesthetic meaning, the compellingness of works themselves. The finitude of meaning in its aesthetic appearing is its being bound to works that are necessarily and forever subject to denial, collapse, loss. Authentic finitude of meaning requires the possibility of the death of meaning; but there can be no death without works, items that can in their significance pass away; significant stone cracks, crumbles, becomes chips then dust; or, even more commonly, the claim of the work fades as semblance dissolves, the construction of meaning disrupting the meaning constructed. . . . In modernism, however, the insistence upon material non-meaning has been the means through which meaning and materiality might be soldered together: significant stone reveals mere stone as silent stone. Since significant stone is semblance, then only semblance holds in place the difference between silent and mere stone, enchanted and disenchanted nature. [PAS: 166–67] The fact that Bernstein is willing to grant this material nonmeaning to plastic arts and not to literature suggests that either the materiality of literature in modernist writing has escaped him or that he believes Blanchot’s position is indistinguishable from the idealism of a pure poetry of thought (or both). But on this second point Blanchot is as critical as Bernstein, for what interests him, as has been noted, is “the non-Romantic essence of Romanticism,” that which inheres in the Romantic project but diverges from its aims and disrupts its universality: what is important is to introduce into writing, through the fragment, the plurality that in each of us is virtual, in all of us real and that responds to “the unceasing and self-creating alteration of diff erent or opposed thoughts” [Athenäum, fragment 121]. Discontinuous form: the only one befitting romantic irony, since it alone can make coincide discourse and silence, the playful and the serious, the declarative, even 64

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oracular exigency, and the indecision of an unstable and divided thought, finally, the obligation for the mind to be systematic and the horror of system. In conclusion, Blanchot finds that Schlegel retreats from this non-Romantic essence, from “the night of language,” the penumbra of its noncoincidence with itself, for in his writings the fragment often seems a means for complacently abandoning oneself to the self, rather than an attempt to elaborate a more rigorous mode of writing. To write fragmentarily is simply to welcome one’s own disorder, to close up upon one’s self in a contented isolation and thus to refuse the opening that the fragmentary exigency represents, which does not exclude totality, but surpasses it. Blanchot then proceeds to itemize the points of disagreement between his own sense of fragmentary writing, which emphasizes the unpredictability of its material relations, and Schlegel’s, which aspires to the aphorism, “the closure of a perfect sentence.” First, Schlegel considers “the fragment as a concentrated text, having its centre in itself and not in the field that other fragments constitute with it.” Second, Schlegel neglects “the interval (wait and pause) that separates the fragments and makes of this separation the rhythmic principle of the work in its structure.” Third, he forgets “that this manner of writing tends not to make a view of the whole more difficult or the relations of unity more lax, but makes possible new relations that except themselves from unity, as they exceed the whole” [EI: 526–27/358–59]. Evidently Blanchot feels the need to make these points explicit because of the proximity between his own thoughts and those of the Romantics, which makes misreadings like that of Bernstein’s possible, but also because of the proximity between the Romantic ideals for literature and their nonRomantic essence. Given this proximity, it should not be overlooked that when Blanchot included this article in L’entretien infini he chose to situate it between pieces on Adorno and Brecht. If it is possible to differentiate Blanchot’s position from Schlegel’s, then what of the question of literary modernism that Bernstein seems to avoid? It would seem that in the plastic arts he has found a medium whose materiality is unavoidable, while literature remains uncomfortably close to linguistic idealization, but is this not to fall prey to the most conventional distinction between the arts, to believe however remotely in the possibility of literature being immaterial? Although he does not go so far as to adopt Lukács’s antipathy to literary modernism, Bernstein does display a skepticism that is very severe, insisting that any autonomy that the literary The Obscurities of Artistic Innovation

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work might possess cannot be metaphysical without being a reification of language, and instead can only be a sociohistorical (elitist) autonomy. Consequently, when he does turn to literary modernism he fails to address the question of linguistic materiality and instead views it solely from the perspective of a cultural dialectics of form.3 This perspective would be unthinkable for any other artform, but his wariness toward linguistic idealism seems to warrant it for Bernstein. However, the materiality of literature is not so easily dismissed. There are several ways of looking at this relation, but typically literature has been differentiated from the plastic arts over the issue of reproducibility: for example, while there are innumerable reproductions of Picasso’s Guernica, these are always identifiable as reproductions from which the original qualitatively differs; the same cannot be said for a work of literature, for while the manuscript of Das Schloss may differ from the innumerable printed versions, these differences are immaterial, as one published version of the novel is equivalent to any other and, to a large degree, to the original (I will return to this point later). However, the development of digital reading devices has indicated a greater significance to printed texts, for the screen of an e-reader can display a page from a novel and a page from a newspaper without any material differentiation, whereas, although my copy of The Castle is only a cheap paperback, it has a material specificity due to the fact that its pages are solely its pages, and as I turn them the whole three-dimensional array of the text-block remains consistently specific from reading to reading, which inevitably becomes associated with the import of the text itself: this is the version I read, not any other, and its material form (its weight and feel in my hands; the thickness of pages between my fingers that changes as the reading progresses; the specificity of its typeface and layout, to which I have to adapt, rather than the reverse; the quality of the paper and binding and their changes as they age; the ability to flick back and forth easily by holding open multiple bookmarks simultaneously; the traces left by previous readers that indicate that it has its own history) is a nonnegligible part of that. The same could not be said for an electronic platform. This materiality is the equivalent dimension for literature as it is experienced, as the singular three-dimensional appearance of Picasso’s Guernica is for its encounter, as it is by way of it that it is apprehended. This is not to reify the aesthetic experience of reading anymore than it is to reify the materiality of language; rather it is to recognize the status of what Adorno refers to as literature’s specificity, which is its conceptual relation, which as he insists is in no way thinkable without reference to its nonconceptual basis [ND: 24/12].4 After all, when I read The Castle I read a book, 66

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not immaterial linguistic signs, any more than an idealized narrative, and it is the breadth of this experience that informs my reading. Admittedly, this materiality may have a minimal impact on the narrative, but it is precisely the existence of digital readers that indicates that the experience of literature is not reducible to a mass of qualitatively indistinguishable and materially interchangeable electronic text, and thus that the singular materiality of the book is nonnegligible. And this is without mentioning the much stronger notion of the aporetic and prosaic materiality of the letter as understood by de Man, which is not irrelevant to this discussion but is not necessary at this point either. The status of the material medium of reading can also be usefully contrasted with painting when we realize that the encounter with Guernica is an encounter with the actual work that Picasso made; the images and shapes are formed by perceivable brushstrokes that form a material continuity from the artist’s studio to the gallery: we see the same work that Picasso painted and then exhibited in 1937. Nothing like the same continuity exists in literature; instead, there is an irremovable schism between the writer’s manuscript and the published version, which is not just a copy but a reformatted version, but it is to the latter that we refer when we discuss The Castle; it is to its words that we are drawn; the actual writing of Kafka’s manuscript is an entirely different entity that is largely of interest only to scholars. Kafka’s case is perhaps more extreme than that of other writers, but it should not blind us to the fact that literature is experienced by way of its mass-produced forms, which are nevertheless no less unique in the manner in which they bear meaning. In fact, in a revisiting of Benjamin’s thoughts on reproducibility, it can be seen that there is a critical significance to the mass-produced form of literature, since it removes us from the risk of reifying the artist’s brushstrokes as some kind of inspired original presence, for the cheap paperback allows for an extended and nuanced personal relation to a literary work whose understanding will be intrinsically tied to its particular material form. Of course, such a relation is not given, for the disposable nature of paperbacks contributes to a less than profound literary experience as they are consumed and thrown away, an experience that electronic readers will also inevitably cultivate, as they have even less material form to inhibit such casual relations. But this does not prohibit the possibility of personal meaning inhering in mass-produced forms, whether paperbacks or postcard reproductions of Guernica, which will find their meaning guided by their own particular materiality.

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Blanchot on the New Music In the course of a series of remarks on the relation of writing to history Blanchot suddenly stops to ask why the act of writing always seems to imply certain words like turning point or crisis, while at the same time revoking them. This can only be explained, he suggests, if writing is itself understood as conveying a change of epoch (époque) and thus as being its “experience” (without experience, that is, Erfahrung rather than Erlebnis, what is endured rather than what is achieved) so that, despite the revocation of this change that writing bears in its persistence, it still occurs, as it has always already taken place in a time from which the belated present of writing is excluded. Hence, there is no scope in writing for an affirmation of an immutable history without progress or regress, for it cannot renounce its own passage, the transition that exposes “the multiple demands whose pressure is inscribed in the form of an epoch”— a form that is both of the times and of the change in times, of its irreversibility, which then comes to bear on literature in an emphatic, irrevocable manner: To write in ignorance and rejection of the philosophical horizon, a horizon punctuated, gathered together or dispersed by the words that delimit it, is necessarily to write with facile complacency (the literature of elegance and good taste). Hölderlin, Mallarmé, so many others, do not allow us this. [ED: 159–60/102–3] For what has occurred in the works of Hölderlin and Mallarmé is the irreversible transformation of literature as it has had to take account of its philosophical horizons under the pressure of the times: the anomalies of its nature and status that, once raised, are questions it cannot turn away from. With these writers in particular, writing came up against its radically groundless nature, the paradox of its absolute autonomy as a thing in the world, which, as the empirico-transcendental condition of thinking and language, lays bare the rootlessness of the human while also offering up its own endless possibilities, its infinite space, as some form of counterpart. This is the opening of the epoch of modernism, which is less a temporal or cultural form than an exposure to an ontological destitution, what Hölderlin called the dürftiger Zeit, in which beginning and end no longer rhyme.5 But, as Blanchot pointed out, this opening is of an epoch that presents itself as both radically changed and as always already there, whence the ever-present sense of crisis, of being at a turning point, at both the end and the beginning [EI: 394/264]. Thus the pressures on literature, as on other artforms, are double, for they entail the necessity of drawing out what there is of literature, given such destitution, and the necessity to uncover the 68

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situation and possibilities now remaining to the human; and the two are necessarily linked, since each leads into the other. In the absence of cultural conventions there remains of literature only its material forms, but this does not mean that the writer has to relinquish his duties or that these are now easier; rather there is a much closer integration between the possibilities of the material and of the writer, since each are submitted to the pressures of the epoch and can only respond by way of the other. Literature no longer appears as a tradition of strict forms to which the writer must adhere, nor is it a pure materiality that can be fashioned in any way, since both these approaches fail to respond to the demands of the epoch, which is to address first that which literature is in itself, in all its singular strangeness. But literature as such does not exist, for there are only the particular forms that arise as concrete responses to its moment, thus there is little in Hölderlin and Mallarmé to compare save the rigor of their practice, and it is the question of “what can be written now” that motivates this practice, given their situation and what the language that was available to them was capable of, and the necessity of having to respond to these twin demands without complacency. It is as such that artforms that respond to these demands are often seen to be as obscure and as challenging as the times, as if they were in some kind of diabolical accord with the disintegration of tradition, propagating a senselessness that bourgeois culture needs to protect itself from. But the breakdown of forms that seems so barbaric needs to be understood by examining what is at stake in each transformation, if we are to recognize the extent to which this breakdown is constitutive of literature in each epoch and symptomatic of its times. Realizing the degree to which these problems facing literature are not problems restricted to literature but derive from the times, Blanchot turns to Adorno’s Philosophie der neuen Musik for a way of specifying the material and historical pressures on any ars nova. The issue of the times began to concern Blanchot in a more pressing fashion in the late 1950s, especially after the return to power of de Gaulle in 1958. Not only did this spur his thinking into addressing more explicitly political issues, like the building of the Berlin Wall and the increasing violence of the Algerian occupation, but also more wide-ranging concerns with the implications of modern technology, such as manned spaceflight and the development of nuclear weapons. All of this made more urgent the necessity of thinking through the status and situation of literature in relation to these changing times by reexamining the question of its form. As a result, Blanchot had started to explore a fragmentary mode of writing beginning with the early drafts of L’attente l’oubli, which he then sought to extend through his work on the Revue internationale. This project for a critical The Obscurities of Artistic Innovation

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review was an attempt to respond to the disorientation of the times by bringing together writers and thinkers from different countries to discuss literary, political, and cultural issues. The difficulties of realizing such an ambitious project led to its failure, but the chief difficulty, aside from the logistical problems of trying to coordinate such an unwieldy group, was over the status of fragmentary writing itself. It is of considerable interest then that, at the very moment that this difficulty was proving intractable, Blanchot found an alternative approach to this challenge in a thinker whose writings on the demands faced by the formation of a new music addressed many of the same issues he was currently concerned with, but one that despite its resonance with his own thought was never pursued any further.6 Blanchot’s response to Adorno is mediated by Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, but he starts his review by carefully delineating the differences between the two writers, for in Mann’s novel the development of serial music “is proposed as a symbolic symptom of the Nazi perversion,” while for Adorno the music of the Second Viennese School is the most trenchant critique of the amoral kitsch of the Third Reich [EI: 506/345]. Blanchot’s interest in this disparity comes from the fact that the violent eruption of new artforms can pass so easily from one end of the political spectrum to the other, and Mann’s novel makes this apparent by modeling the story of the Schoenberg-like figure of Adrian Leverkühn on the life of Nietzsche. In doing so, Mann is drawing out the lines of political vulnerability that he believes are to be found in artistic visionaries, which leaves them open to corruption and abuse, but he places this flaw at a very basic level by suggesting that the violence needed for creative innovation is of a kind with that ultimately revealed in political brutality, as Blanchot glosses in relation to serial music: “this invention, obtained through the personal madness of a man and the general madness of the times, is not a fortuitous error, but represents the proper madness of an art that has reached its end [parvenu à son terme]” [EI: 507/346]. What is being suggested here is that the innovative work of art operates out of a suspension of all rules akin to that which Carl Schmitt saw in the state of exception and Bataille saw in sovereignty. But, as Blanchot points out, Mann’s novel falls into a simplistic understanding of such innovative artistic practices, despite the ambiguity of its narrative structure, since it sees the radical reorganization of musical form in Schoenberg’s works solely as a barbaric rejection of artistry and a concomitant commitment to a ruthlessly sterile formalism. This only exposes Mann’s cultural conservatism, in which new arts are seen as politically and socially tainted by virtue of their being new, which then places him on the opposite end of the political spectrum to Schoenberg and closer to those figures who would condemn “degenerate” or “reaction70

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ary” art. But we cannot understand why Schoenberg makes such a successful figure for Mann’s Leverkühn until we understand what motivates the rejection of his works, and, as Blanchot explains, this means recognizing that there is a legitimacy to the fears of the conservatives, for the new arts are profoundly foreign to culture and thus cannot be embraced easily or happily. But understanding what constitutes this foreignness and how it might be manifested is not straightforward. We might speak of the rejection of artistic conventions and the pursuit of harsh or dissonant forms that do not exhibit any sense of harmony or natural order, but this only draws our attention to the undisclosed meaning of such conventions that, while recognized as traditional, assume the mantle of the natural state of things. This then indicates how our sense of the natural and historical have become confused, in that historical conventions are treated as the form in which the natural as such emerges, as if these traditional forms were the actual state of musical sounds in their purity. Supposed “natural” sounds are then treated historically as those that only exist in precultural settings and thus demonstrate an uncivilized barbarity that requires the form of convention for them to appear as “genuinely” natural. The harmony that such critiques avow is thus an ideal that deliberately obscures its historical origins as a means of reinforcing its status and authority and in doing so projects an image that is entirely illusory, for there is no sense of harmony without its various historical reconfigurations. In projecting this ideal, a schism is drawn between history and the present, since the former is deemed to be outside time and thus cannot be affected by anything temporal, anything contemporary, although it is only by way of the formal innovations that are ongoing in history that a sense of harmony can even arise. But, as Mann’s characterization of Leverkühn showed, the “excessive” pursuit of form is itself seen as unnatural, as it indicates the arrogant hubris of a refusal to be bound by the “natural” order, which underpins the diabolical suggestions drawn from the Faust legend. Thus there is in these condemnations a disavowal of the integral relation between harmony and innovation, culture and hubris, eternal forms and temporal dissonance, a disavowal that serves a political as well as a cultural order. It can be seen from this background why Adorno would insist that Philosophie der neuen Musik was “a detailed excursus” to the project he undertook with Horkheimer on the dialectic of enlightenment, in which enlightenment reverts to mythology (the idealistic image of harmony) just as myth is shown to bear enlightenment already within itself (the Faustian barbarity of formal innovation) [PNM: 11/5]. Within such a complex it becomes all the more important to ascertain the basis upon which these innovations are made and disavowed. The Obscurities of Artistic Innovation

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As Blanchot summarizes this argument, the composer works to disavow the idea of a natural aesthetics by destroying “the illusion that music would possess through its nature a value of beauty independent of historical decisions and musical experience itself,” which means in regard to the composer’s technique that “it is necessary that it momentarily predominates in order to ‘break the blind constraint of sonorous material’ or even to suspend the already organised meaning of the musical object [chose]” [EI: 508/347; PNM: 68/55]. Here lies the necessity for a kind of formalism, or formal experimentation, in order to counter the idea that tones and intervals carry their own “natural” meaning. Blanchot then goes on to paraphrase Adorno’s argument more extensively by stating that when the composer renounces the continuity or fluid development of a unified work, this is not in order to deny coherence or to oppose the model of a work as an organized whole, but is rather because “he places himself beyond aesthetic totality.” In this way the composer can analyze the whole that is given in the sociohistorical constitution of the material, and thus the very idea of the “whole,” into ever more subtle divisions so that the composition occurs through this process of “discrimination and dissociation” [EI: 509/347]. This critical reconstruction of the work involves a complex examination of the nature of development as a mode of the relation between the historical and material aspects of the work. For example, when the notion of variation is considered it is not the case that the work necessarily unfolds through successive variations upon its theme that incrementally enrich it, for this is to subsume the differentiation that occurs in variation to the organic image of development as that of a coherent whole. Instead, variation, in Adorno’s words, becomes dynamic, for by holding on to its initial material (what Schoenberg in his Harmonielehre called the “model”), rather than simply building on it, the identity of this material is only to be found in its variations through which it is insistently “reflected as non-identity.” That is, the material is each time transformed such that it is nothing in itself, as it “is” only in relation to its variations, which means that it is not indifferent to time (as in the steady development of organic works) for in being transformed it is always reflected anew, but as the material it still remains identical to itself, which means that it is not dominated by time, as there is always something in it that remains undeveloped [PNM: 58/46–47]. For Blanchot, this means that the whole that is virtually present in the work as its latent import only makes itself apparent by giving itself up to the material in its experimentation, in which “the obstinate return of the identical seeks to engender an unceasing renewal” [EI: 509/347]. The complexity of Adorno’s notion of aesthetic material (Stoff ) is evident here, as it is not simply the material or transcendental conditions of 72

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the work, for it is neither fully immanent nor transcendent to the work, nor is it mere materiality, since it only exists in relation to the possibility of the work as a whole in the context of its history and its occasion as that which is not fully subsumed into it. While this sense is close to what he will later call the nonidentical, understanding its meaning as aesthetic material indicates that the materiality of a work has a complexity and expressiveness that bear the empirico-transcendental tensions of its existence: its compulsion to appear but also its resistance. With this analysis of new music in mind Blanchot turns to the notion of the fragmentary work (and it is worth recalling that this discussion precedes his reading of Schlegel), which he claims would pursue a similar logic of innovation through “a new form of writing that would render the finished work problematic,” as it would explore the infinite space of the work with the idea “that the relations of this space will not necessarily satisfy the concepts of unity, totality, or continuity” [EI: 510/348]. Since, as was found with new music, the work is not constructed around the notion of a harmonious center, for the very idea of a center is repelled from the work, leaving its space rigorously infinite, which means that it does not adhere to any sense of hierarchy or development in its contents but only to a variation understood, as Adorno indicated, as an “indefinitely reiterated affirmation within difference itself.” It is thus that we can appreciate the enigmatic temporality of such works as their contemporaneity, for in relation to the history of the art they only arise at the moment when composition is thought to be finished, which leaves the work fragmentary in the additional sense that it only bears the promise of meaning, if it bears any at all, and does not by its existence refuse the order of meaning entirely. It is this sense of art arising after culture that Blanchot identifies as its foreignness to culture, for it is too late and therefore offers a future without reconciliation, a utopia, if any, that only responds to the infinite space of the work in its contestation. Fragmentary works, like new music, seek to counter any sense of language bearing a natural knowledge or meaning, for this is the illusion perpetuated by a humanistic culture that would seek to affirm the status quo by finding in artworks only those images that accede to its notion of a culture of progress, unity, and continuity in order precisely to refuse the reality that does not bear this image, that does not accede to the goal of accomplished harmony. Consequently, such innovative works are not innocuous, as Mann recognized, but the pain they bear is not only cultural but also the “insensible” pain of thought “seeking to escape the power of unity,” of a space that is infinite because it does not return to itself in any unity but endlessly deviates, falling away into an exteriority without answers since it The Obscurities of Artistic Innovation

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endlessly problematizes itself, a spacing of thought that Blanchot would find in literature [EI: 513/350]. Considering that at first glance Blanchot and Adorno might not appear to have much in common, it is compelling that Blanchot has found so much of Adorno’s work in Philosophie der neuen Musik amenable to his own thinking. Although he does not discuss the book in depth, he has clearly absorbed enough of Adorno’s argument to be able to see how it might contribute to his own understanding of the contemporary situation of artworks. This is significant for his overall project in L’entretien infini, which explores this problem from several different perspectives, but not from such a materialist point of view. It is telling that it is through Adorno’s analysis of music that Blanchot finds a way of approaching the contemporary situation of literature, since it is by way of the complex materiality of artworks that such a comparison is possible at all, a comparison that, as has been shown, leads to a stronger inflection of his own sense of the space of literature as that which exceeds and contests the transcendental conditions of thought. For Adorno suggested that musical composition was speculative in that it brought the aesthetic material of music to thought and, conversely, exposed thinking to the disunity of material space, which in turn provides an experience that is an inherent critique of the times, as well as ensuring against the possibility of such a thought becoming violently detached from the mundane and so becoming speculative in a more dangerously messianic mode. It is thus important to appreciate some of the background of Adorno’s work, for although the basic outline of his critique in Philosophie der neuen Musik follows that of the argument in Dialektik der Aufklärung, the detail of his understanding of aesthetic material has its origins in his earlier works on Schoenberg. Adorno’s Notion of Aesthetic Material “Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik” is the most important of Adorno’s early articles on music and presents a compilation of his thinking on the subject to date (1932), and in many ways all of his subsequent thinking about not just music but also aesthetics more generally derives from this work.7 As such, it is an essential complement to the other two essays that date from this period of his work, “Die Aktualität der Philosophie” and “Die Idee der Naturgeschichte,” although as these were first published posthumously their significance was only apparent much later. As is well known, Adorno’s profile as a scholar was primarily that of a music theorist and sociologist until the late 1950s, when he began to publish more explicitly philosophical studies. So, if we are to understand the basis and the 74

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development of his thinking of aesthetics, then it is to these early writings on music that we should turn, and in doing so it is immediately apparent how the issues of history and materiality, theory and practice, epistemology and ontology are all already at work in his examination of music. In a way that is reminiscent of Adorno’s other works, “Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik” starts with a provocative series of statements that condense the argument of its following pages: Whenever music resounds today, it draws in the most determinate [bestimmtesten] lines the contradictions and flaws [Brüche] that cut through contemporary society and at the same time it is separated by the deepest flaw from this society, which produced these flaws itself but without being able to absorb more of music than its refuse [Abhub] and ruins. [MS5: 729/391] Considering how Adorno’s thoughts will develop, it is essential to view his statements in this article as grounded in the analysis of music but not limited to it—that is, the relations sketched out among music, society, and history are extended in his later writings to all artworks. Given this, we can see how the analysis of music proceeds from an unresolved dialectic of tensions in which it bears the flaws and contradictions of society within itself, but is at the same time cut off from society by virtue of these flaws; equally, there is no scope for reconciliation here, as society cannot accept that which it has rejected or recoup the negativity of such an exclusion except by way of the remnants that are left behind. The situation of music is sketched out through this network of tensions, which only exposes its position negatively by determining what it is not: it is of society but is separated from it; not part of society but still representative of it. The traces of Adorno’s readings of Lukács and Benjamin, and behind them Weber and Bloch, are apparent in this conjugation of themes on the way that social products become indicative of social tensions, thereby recapitulating the history of these tensions into what appear to be natural products, leading to their position both within and without the social framework as the memento mori of society’s own unacknowledged fragmentation. But Adorno has, in drawing these themes together, given them a stringency that is his own and is, moreover, grounded primarily in his analyses of music, thereby revealing the specific manner in which reification and materiality operate as divergent tensions within the artwork. Nevertheless, this stringency is relaxed somewhat as the argument proceeds, as Adorno finds that there are particular ways in which certain musical forms offer a form of reconciliation, however remote or indirect, which thus remains true to the thesis that empirical analysis exceeds the scope of theoretical postulation. The The Obscurities of Artistic Innovation

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key figure in this argument is Schoenberg, for in his works Adorno finds the most extreme model of the tension between materiality and reification, thereby reposing and unfolding the problem from which the article begins. For my own purposes, the analysis of music in its modernity bears directly on the analysis of literature in its modernity, since the pressures of commoditization in both production and reception are as relevant to the understanding of literary artworks as they are to musical ones. It is the sense of “artwork” that is central here, as the artwork for Adorno is that which resists the instrumentalization of culture as strongly as it indicates it, and the difficulty of such an artistic practice is considerable: The role of music in the social process is exclusively that of a commodity; its value is that of the market. It no longer serves immediate needs and uses, but adjusts itself with all other goods to the compulsion of exchange of abstract units and subordinates its use-value, wherever it still exists, to the exchange-compulsion. . . . As the capitalist process has drawn musical production and consumption into itself without remainder the alienation between music and humanity has become complete. [MS5: 729/391] Music, as an artwork, is able to present this double face of resistance and representation as it follows the same processes of objectification and rationalization that underlie the development of enlightened culture in general. It is for this reason that there is no scope to believe in any immediate pre-Enlightenment “culture” that might be immune from such pressures, whether in music or in language, for it is only with the development of an objectified relation to the artwork that such a work can appear as an artwork and thereby both represent the flaws of the society from which it arises and resist them. This appearance is, however, just that; it is only the semblance of a resistance or critique, for in being rejected from the sphere of commodity-exchange, music is exiled from the position of direct engagement and must find other, less direct, ways to express its conflicts: The same power of reification that constituted music as art cannot be re-converted to immediacy without returning art to a stage before the division of labour—this same power of reification has today taken music from humanity and left it with its mere semblance; music, however, insofar as it did not submit to the command of commodity-production, was robbed of its social responsibilities, banished into a vacuum and its contents [Gehalte] removed. [MS5: 730/392] 76

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Th is banishment will also affect critics or artists in their own relations to the artwork, for they cannot respond to the work without being drawn into its conflicted tensions of reification and isolation, but equally without also finding the same remote or indirect possibilities of speaking from this situation, for it is from this position that “every consideration of the social situation of music must proceed if it is not to fall into the deceptions that today dominate the discussion.” In saying as much Adorno is positioning himself as far from Benjamin as he is from Lukács, for it is only from the extremes of this dialectical tension between reification and isolation that Adorno sees the possibility of artistic expression, while Lukács would proceed from the point of reducing this tension and Benjamin would in contrast reduce the possibility of expression. But it is by radicalizing the dialectic of this tension that Adorno can hold onto the insights of both earlier critics while extending the possibilities of their thought to take account of the difficulties of modernist artworks, and in doing so he is also laying out the groundwork of the dialectic of enlightenment that he would pursue later with Horkheimer. The nature of the deceptions that Adorno speaks of here are very specific, for on the one hand they “conceal the actual situation and also act as [vermittelnden] an apology for the sake of economically intimidated music,” but on the other hand, these deceptions nevertheless indicate “that music itself, under the superior power of the music industry’s monopoly capitalism, achieved consciousness of its own reification and its alienation from humanity” [MS5: 730/392]. Th is is not to justify or even valorize capital as the basis for enlightened art, but to indicate how Hegel’s model of self-consciousness based in the master-slave dialectic can be applied to the situation of art in society, thereby indicating that while art achieves consciousness of its position by struggling against its own alienation, capital instead continues within the sphere of expanding rationalization, which, furthermore, also indicates that the movement of objectification underlying rationalization bears both possibilities within itself and is thus never given. Therefore, as artists or critics we are presented with an enigma, for music or language presents itself as a cipher that conceals the basis of its alienation even from itself, leading us to construe its situation otherwise, but as a cipher it also offers the possibility that if it can be read, then it can reveal a very particular knowledge about its situation. Thus these artworks are anything but dumb in their vacuum; rather their every appearance is a strangled expression of the truth of their situation if we can but find the means of hearing or reading them. But as this expression is even concealed from the artworks themselves, then the very basis of the deception as one of sociohistorical origin is not apparent, and so the flaw seems to lie with The Obscurities of Artistic Innovation

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a failure of artworks to make themselves accountable in a way that society can understand, rather than vice versa. It is thus that there begins to appear a coincidence between the content and the basis of the expression that artworks provide—that is, that which they speak about only arises from that which they are in themselves, as it is by way of their own material forms that they can express something of the nature of their situation in the world. But the basis of this material formation is not limited to the artworks alone but extends to society at large, which is thus the manner in which it enables and is enabled by changes in that society, such that the status of artworks is not just the concern of artists or critics. It is not for music to stare in helpless horror at society: it fulfils its social function more precisely when it brings social problems to presentation through its own material and according to its own formal laws, problems that it contains within itself in the innermost cells of its technique. The task of music as art thus operates in a certain analogy to that of social theory. [MS5: 731/393] Consequently, music (but also artforms more generally) is not there to represent society as it is or to pursue its own immanent practice regardless of its context, and so it can no more be considered a purely spiritual endeavor than it can be seen as a purely social artefact, which is to say that it cannot be treated as a work that “can anticipate in images any desires for social change independently of their empirical realisation” [MS5: 731/393]. A form of this dialectical relation of distance and intimacy can be found in a work like Georges Perec’s La disparition, which uses the distance found in formal innovations (the constraint of avoiding words that contain the letter e) to speak of the embedded sociohistorical issues of its context, but Perec found that in doing so he was inevitably speaking in a coded form that both expressed the pain of alienation and articulated the hope of something that would go beyond this. Perec was able to find this tension by grounding the construction of the work in the formal innovations of its material, language, such that the work as a whole speaks of and through the sedimented possibilities of language, possibilities ordinarily passed over in the assumption that the language of the novel is not materially marked by its sociohistorical background but is given in a form that is conventionally “natural.” It is thus that Adorno can state that artworks of this kind must have the character of cognition (Erkenntnischarakter), an epistemological aspect that is made apparent in the way that the formation of its material holds a certain form of knowledge:

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Through its material, music must purely form the problems that this material—that is itself never purely natural material, but rather socially-historically produced— provides; the solutions that are thereby found stand equal to theories: social postulates are held in them, the relation of which to praxis might admittedly be extremely mediated and difficult and on no account can it be realised without difficulty, but in the last instance these decide whether and how the entrance into social reality is possible. [MS5: 732/393] One mode of such entrance is of course that of criticism, as the reading of artworks is an attempt to respond to the demands of their theoretical postulates to not remain theoretical. But there are obstacles to such a critical reading, and Adorno perceives two ways in which this task can be shortcircuited by opposing views of the manifestation of this social function, views that follow the divergent responses of Lukács and Benjamin as either that of incomprehensible, esoteric, and thus reactionary artworks that must be rejected or that “of a romantic notion [Vorstellung] of primitive musical immediacy that also grounds the opinion that the empirical consciousness of contemporary society . . . could be taken as the positive measure of a music no longer alienated, but rather belonging to free men” [MS5: 732/394]. This last point is all the more surprising given that Benjamin’s views on the emancipatory potential of modern mass media were not given form until a few years later. Instead of these responses, Adorno insists that music must develop within itself all those elements whose objective is the overcoming of class domination and thereby enter into a dialectical relation to praxis so that it can both make and receive demands from it, and it must do so even where its development takes place in social isolation, as he then elaborates by recalling his contemporaneous critique of Kierkegaard as well as hinting at what will be the response by Schoenberg: [If] the most advanced compositional production of the present, solely under the compulsion of the immanent unfolding of its problems, puts basic bourgeois categories like the creative personality and expression of its soul, the world of private feelings and its transfigured inwardness, out of action and sets in their place highly rational and transparent principles of construction, then this music, bound to the bourgeois production process, could not consequently be viewed as “classless” and the authentic music of the future, but rather as that which fulfils its dialectical cognitive function most exactly. [MS5: 733/394]

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Thus, however dimly or indirectly, it is by virtue of the resistance that such music arouses, rather than any putative utopian transformation, that its dialectical function is perceived as a critical force. Given this general outline of the social situation of music, Adorno is then able to identify the ways in which contemporary music has responded to this dialectical function, either by refusing any dialectical intervention and accommodating itself entirely to the demands of the market or by entirely rejecting the demands of the market and siding instead with music. In making this distinction, Adorno means to undercut any possibility of assuming a natural separation between “serious” and “light” music, since, as he points out, there are just as many examples of supposedly serious music operating entirely within the demands of the market, as the classical canon demonstrates, as there are examples of supposedly light music actualizing an implicit critique of society through their hybridity or vulgar concerns. As such, both light and serious music are equally subject to alienation and so should be seen as halves of a whole that could never be reconstructed through their addition [MS5: 734/395].8 Consequently, the way that music refuses the demands of the market can be explicated according to four different models: first, there is that type of music that, “without consciousness of its social location or indifferent towards it, crystallises its problems and solutions merely immanently” [MS5: 734/396]. In doing so this type of music represents the contemporary flaws of society indirectly by way of its own monadic dissonance, the model for this approach clearly being that of Schoenberg and to a lesser extent Berg and Webern. The second type “recognises the fact of alienation as its own isolation and as ‘individualism’ and raises this to the level of consciousness,” but it does so in terms that remain immanent to its aesthetic form and as such fails to take account of music’s relation to actual society and so falls prey to believing that past forms are immune to alienation, without realizing that such forms cannot be reconstituted in the musical material of an entirely changed social situation. Adorno calls this an “objectivist” approach, as it appears to believe in an objective society that it pursues in terms of neoclassical or folk models, which he finds in the music of Stravinsky and to some degree in Bartók. The third approach is more socially aware than this objectivist type but is less concerned with finding positive solutions to the alienation it recognizes, instead simply presenting it in its illusory reality with no attempt to camouflage it in an aesthetic totality, and thereby creates works without any formal immanence. This type Adorno calls “surrealist,” following its similarities to literary modes of formal disruption, and sees its current exponents in the works of Weill and Brecht. The fourth type opts for a more direct attempt to break through alienation from within 80

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itself, but in doing so only reveals more powerfully its dependence on the market, except in the more interesting cases such as the proletarian choral works of Eisler and the Gemeinschaftsmusik of Hindemith [MS5: 734–35/396–97]. The actual divisions that Adorno makes in this typology are less significant than the way that it is developed, as it is apparent that there are three dimensions along which these models are developed; these concern the work’s relation to society, history, and to its own materiality, from which its form arises. This means that what Adorno has proposed here is a materialist theory of form, where the generative tensions implicit in the musical material (tones) are inflected by their sociohistorical context such that they may emerge in forms that are particularly significant aesthetically, politically, and epistemologically if they are responded to critically. Schoenberg’s works achieve their strength because of the way that they actualize the tensions apparent in each of these dimensions. The material at issue here is central, for it is neither purely natural nor historical, but operates across both spheres in what would appear to be an early form of negative dialectics, in that the natural and historical dimensions of the material interact dialectically, but in doing so reveal negatively what remains unabsorbed by this process. The determinate negation of the natural by the historical leaves a penumbra of material that can then bring its own dialectical pressure to bear on the historical, and the combined operation of the two is what leads to the form of the aesthetic material. So, while the actual types that Adorno delineates in this schema may only serve a provisional historical purpose, their development indicates how the pressures of this material dialectic are variously formulated, which then shows that the persistence of these tensions within the aesthetic material is such that they are always reemerging in different forms. This suggests a more profound understanding of the materialist nature of this theory of form, since the form arises out of the tensions of an inherently sociohistorical material, not from an idealism of Spirit or romantic inspiration, and so its expression is one in which the sedimented contents in the material give voice to the suffering inherent in its cultural and natural-history, which only arises through the artist’s response to the material in its contemporary context. Thus, although it remains secular, there is an element of nonimmanence in the formation of the material, for it brings to bear on the moment material forms that have been excluded from the world, both past and present, and thereby indicates how things might be otherwise. Again this suggests that Adorno is attempting to balance and exceed the opposing positions of Lukács and Benjamin by holding to a materialist critique of the present that can yet yield a speculative moment in the The Obscurities of Artistic Innovation

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opening up of aesthetic material to a form of utopian space, however remote or indirect. To understand how this process is possible in more concrete terms, Adorno turns to the key figure in this typology: Schoenberg. The particular significance of Schoenberg’s works comes from their supposed difficulty or elitism, but Adorno points out that it is because of Schoenberg’s position as an archetypal bourgeois individual that he is able to develop music that turns against his social situation (just as he will claim much later in reference to Hegel’s position as a bourgeois philosopher). For in place of the expressive music associated with the creativity of the private individual, Schoenberg pursues a music that does not directly communicate to the listener and bears no immediate social function, but does so through the dialectical clarification (Aufklärung) of its material. In fact, Adorno goes further, as he claims that it is “solely by following through on its own consequences” that bourgeois individualism can be overhauled (aufgehoben) and an alternative musical form found that can take its place. Thus, it is no surprise that the music that arises, through its thoroughly rational organization, finds itself utterly incompatible with society and thereby arouses widespread critical rejection. But what this rational organization implies is that consciousness (“perhaps for the first time in the history of music,” he adds) has fully taken hold of the musical material [MS5: 736/397–98]. In effect, Adorno is making a point that he had taken up from Kracauer and that would become clearer in his work with Horkheimer: that Enlightenment thinking fails only by not being rational enough, which is not to say that he is calling for a greater instrumentalization of thought, as the failings of reason come from its subsidence into the mythology of reification and exchange, of believing in its power and status, whereas a more rigorously rational pursuit of reason’s own possibilities would inevitably lead it to turn back to the object in its materiality, since it is only by the permeation of material by organization that it can emerge in itself. It is thus that he can claim that Schoenberg is taking the basis of individualism and radicalizing it to the point of placing it on equal terms with material objects. This paradoxical approach derives directly from his understanding of the dialectical relation of the natural and the historical, for it is only by way of their mutual determinate negation that form can emerge (which demonstrates for Adorno how Schoenberg’s music has not only passed beyond the Kantian antinomy of nature and freedom but also their putative resolution in the Hegelian dialectic, thereby indicating an avenue for his own thinking). For, as he goes on to point out, the breakthrough of consciousness in Schoenberg’s music is not the idealistic movement of Spirit but a dialecti82

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cal movement that “proceeds from questioning how it lies within the material itself” [MS5: 737/398]. For Schoenberg is attempting to respond to the problem of how to deliver a pure expression of the psyche in material that has reached the highest stage of technical development, as he perceives the musical forms inherited from Wagner and Brahms to be. To do so, Adorno states, it is necessary for the psyche to abandon all connections and obligations to social structures in order to permit the unrestrained expression of its own suffering, which society seeks to suppress, and key among these obligations are the demands for symmetry and ornamentation in musical forms, both structurally and harmonically. Thus, Schoenberg pursues a model of dissonance and, instead of asserting his expressive intentions over the material in an authoritarian manner, every gesture with which he intervenes in the material configuration is at the same time the precise answer to questions directed to him by the material in the form of its own material problems. Every subjective-expressive achievement of Schoenberg is at the same time a resolution of objective-material contradictions. [MS5: 738/399] Furthermore, these contradictions in the musical material are the site in which the contradictions in society have become sedimented, such that the manner in which order is imposed by drawing these contradictions out of the material is such that the material, in being subjected to this power of expression, extinguishes the subjectivity of expression as it becomes apparent that the expression of suffering is one with the alienation endured by the material (this echoes Benjamin’s understanding of the expressionless in his essay on Goethe, but takes a more formal approach to the material). This process of rebalancing the relation between subject and object Adorno finds in Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method of composition, for with the abandonment of symmetry and the strict regulation of repetition each tone is in a position of equal weight in relation to the whole, as there is no overall structure determining order or hierarchy, center or periphery, and as a result “alienation, whether of subjective formation or objective material, is sublated” (this formal principle would be key to Adorno’s own writings [MM: 78/71; NL: 28/NL1: 19; AT: 541/364]). This equalization raises an important coda for Adorno’s analysis, since it indicates that the rigor of Schoenberg’s works may indicate an enmity to art (Kunstfeindschaft), when art is considered along the lines of a privileged and self-sufficient sphere of work, for the way that Schoenberg pursues a thoroughly historical rationalization of the work is one that compels it to appear (herbeizwingen) from out of any hermetic retreat, although Adorno remains doubtful about whether such a complete repositioning of the work is actually possible. The Obscurities of Artistic Innovation

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The consequence of this analysis is very interesting, since Adorno states that it is at this point that the limits of Schoenberg’s works become apparent, as well as the limits of musical talent as such, insofar as these limits cannot be crossed by music alone [MS5: 739/400]. In relation to this aporia Adorno turns to the works of Berg, whom he says has taken up residence on this borderline, and although this is not clearly spelled out in the 1932 article, there is the suggestion that, while Berg’s works are less dialectically rigorous than Schoenberg’s, they make up for this with a greater but no less severe sociohistorical sensitivity and a more minute transformation of the form of musical material, which embeds the principle of form, the transition, into the smallest parts of the material. As such, the borderline that Adorno refers to is that of the limits of sense, for in Berg’s music it becomes imperceptible whether its parts are formal or material, since, by virtue of their existence as transitions, they can be seen as either, which presents a difficulty in determining the exact process of its construction and its status in relation to its natural-history, as it begins to appear as if it had generated itself autonomously. As a result, Adorno believes that this ambiguous microstructure may be the way that the suffering inherent in the material can be made indeterminately present as the expressionless, rather than flattening it out as was the risk in the excessive formality of Schoenberg’s approach. This formality in Schoenberg’s approach to composition, which emphasizes a clarification of the material at the expense of its social or communicative possibilities and does so to a degree that places its subjective and objective components in an equal weight such that the work almost loses the quality of being an artwork at all, insofar as it avoids presenting any “artistic” forms, has a distinctive place in the development of new music, but an equivalent mode of innovation can also be found in literature. The obvious parallel would be Beckett’s later works, whose abstraction from narrative pursues a similar sense of writing that is not concerned with communication but with the exploration of the possibilities of its linguistic material. This being the case, the limitations of Schoenberg’s approach become significant in relation to the literary possibilities of this kind of formal innovation. As will be discussed in Chapter 8, it is only in works like Beckett’s Comment c’est that the analysis of linguistic material succeeds in avoiding this complete abstraction by virtue of the way that it integrates its formal approach into the material of the work. In noting these reservations, Adorno thus indicates the necessity for such formalism to be accompanied by a sensitivity to the nature of its transitions, which he finds exemplified in Berg’s works. For the nature of the transition in Berg’s compositions is delicate and subtle, rather than the 84

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harsh juxtapositions used by Schoenberg, and in this way the music makes apparent how its transitions express both change and loss and hold this moment in its evanescence, resisting the affi rmation of either position. Th is contrast is made clear in an article published in English in 1931: Berg’s harmony frees itself wholly from the hidden constraint of tonic and dominant. But something essential was adumbrated in this compulsion; it might be called Berg’s principle of the infinitesimal; the principle of the smallest transition. Schönberg from the outset, on the basis of incessantly changing and contrasting figures, develops a principle of construction which is dominant even throughout the continual motive transformations and transitions of the Chamber Symphony [op. 9]. With Berg, however, the principle of transition, of imperceptible transition, takes precedence from the start, and the residue of harmony based on tonal cadences, which his music contains to this day, is nothing but an indication of this principle. The units of which his music is built up are (it might be said) infinitely small, and as such are interchanged at will regardless of their differences. Thus Berg’s music may be compared to something that unfolds like a plant. Its scheme is that of the organism, while with Schönberg the organic substance is fi xed dialectically from the outset by the structural motive. This organic essence in Berg’s music is what unites him with the nineteenth century and Romanticism. His problem is stated in such a way that it is gradually elucidated and architectonically grasped, without eliminating the primitive essence which appears in his work originally as dark, amorphous, dream-like and growing unperceived.9 The use of “organic” here is open to confusion, as Adorno was deeply critical of the notion of the organic form as a standard of artistic wholeness and integration, but in relation to Berg there is something else at stake, which is a relation not just to Romanticism but also to Kant. For this is a sense of the organic as that of the inherent impulse of the material to its own development, but one that is not teleological but rather extravagant, deviating from itself under its own hidden impulses. As such, this principle of organic development is akin to Adorno’s own notion of the priority of the object insofar as it indicates a submission by the artist to the inner tendencies of the material, but it also emphasizes the peculiarly organic nature of transition that is key to Berg’s compositions. For the form of the work appears to arise from its material as if from nothing, and yet it does so in such a way that it is also barely distinguishable from nothing: it seems to hover at the point between establishing and dissolving itself, proceeding The Obscurities of Artistic Innovation

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through a “half-tone step that extends just beyond the mere tone, yet without finding a melodic profile of its own; still this side of the plasticity of intervals and therefore ever ready to dissolve into the amorphous.”10 As Adorno remarked in 1961, in a way that recalls his comments on the salvaging of the symphony in Wozzeck, this evanescent suspension of the work’s status as a work reconfigures its relation to nature as well as to the subject, and thereby indicates how it is precisely this relation to its natural-history that constitutes the autonomy of the artwork: Through the greatest mastery of its material, the thoroughly articulated artwork is, by way of this mastery, at the furthest remove [am weitesten entläuft] from mere organic existence, on the other hand it is also at the closest point to the organic; only now are we able to appreciate fully the truth of the construction of Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft from a doctrine of art and of living organisms, which are as antagonistic to each other as they are similar.11 Thus Berg’s use of transition reveals a sense of the work that is autonomous while remaining far from any notion of the coherent and integrated whole, for this is a sense of autonomy deriving from the inner tendencies of the material, which compels it to appear in its singular natural-history, and in its enigmatic slightness it is more like a gesture than a work, so that it is not certain that we can even recognize it, let alone interpret it. Such a sense of the work is closer to some of Kafka’s short pieces or to Blanchot’s notion of the récit, as the next chapters will show. In some ways the contrast between Berg and Schoenberg holds a similar position for Adorno as the contrast that Benjamin found between Goethe and Schlegel in his early writings. Since the aesthetic intensity of Berg’s works is matched by the philosophical intensity of Schoenberg’s works, which is to say that despite their limits both are needed within the framework of Adorno’s understanding of music in order to take account of both its conceptual and aesthetic aspects. Of course, this also demonstrates the difficulty of realizing both these aspects within the same work, which will take on a central role in relation to the aesthetic material of literary works, which Adorno will attempt to understand by way of the notion of linguisticality, while Blanchot will pursue a more indirect approach informed by Paulhan’s understanding of equivocation. Adorno would continue to produce essays on Schoenberg, both before and after the publication of Philosophie der neuen Musik, and one of the most emphatic would be a piece he contributed to a Festschrift for Schoenberg’s sixtieth birthday in 1934 called “Der dialektische Komponist.” The challenge presented by Schoenberg’s works was one that continued to 86

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engage Adorno, because, much like Mallarmé’s works for Blanchot, Schoenberg’s music presented a mode of unsurpassed theoretical engagement with aesthetic problems for Adorno, a point he was happy to make for the Festschrift: The resistance to Schoenberg has its most visible ground in the fact that every work from his hand and certainly every phase in the history of his music presented new enigmas, which could not be mastered with knowledge of what went before, or even of his own previous productions. . . . Although each work by Schoenberg follows the previous one in a compulsory way, they by no means grow out of each other. They emerge from each other not in the smallest transitions, but in overturning [Umschlag]. [MS4: 198–99/203–4] Consequently, it is not just the rigor of his approach to musical problems that issues a challenge to other composers, but also the way that he continually reformulates this approach so as to find new and more revealing ways of responding to these problems. It is as such that he provides an exemplary image of how the composer should orient his work toward the centrality of its historical and material problems. In doing so, Schoenberg indicates how these problems are reasserted in their singular importance by being reformulated, for the models that he constructs, whether vocal or instrumental, simple or complex, dissonant or harmonious, do not answer the questions that the material leaves behind, as it is brought forth in the composition, through an orderly progression of works but with “catastrophes,” which destroy (vernichtet) the material and its questions, utterly wiping it away by fully extinguishing it in the release of “truly new music.” According to Adorno this “rhythm of extremes” inhabits every one of Schoenberg’s works, down to the innermost cells of their composition, just as he stated earlier that social problems are to be found in the innermost cells of the composer’s technique. It is from this Hegelian insight that Adorno can develop his reading of Schoenberg’s method as dialectical, which in turn comes to inform the way that his own thinking will develop, for Schoenberg’s works are constructed down to their smallest details out of contrasts, which only become integrated by the force of their extremes, at which point they prove to be “profoundly identical.”12 Adorno is referring in particular here to the seventh of Schoenberg’s Lieder op. 6, “Lockung” (Temptation), where he says that the opening bars for piano could be considered as a monad in relation to Schoenberg’s works as a whole insofar as they present the style and the movements between styles that characterize his works, for they emerge as something between an outbreak and a halt [MS4: 199/204]. Such a description could, as with many of the observations The Obscurities of Artistic Innovation

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Adorno makes about Schoenberg, be applied to Adorno’s own writings, as this form of abruptly monadic opening statement is one of his most recognizable tropes. In itself this suggests a remarkable cross-fertilization, as it would appear that the style and form of Adorno’s thinking, down to the very mode of his writing, has been directly affected by the mode of Schoenberg’s compositions, thereby indicating an entirely different material and aesthetic approach to the philosophical understanding of music. Schoenberg is not to be thought of here as simply being provocative or capricious in his pursuit of novel forms, nor is he slavishly following the demands of the musical material, as he “no longer behaves like a creator any more than he obeys pre-given rules.” Instead, following a line from Stefan George, Adorno claims that it is the greatest strictness in relation to the material that offers the greatest musical freedom. This in turn indicates how he finds a use of dialectics in Schoenberg that is closer to his own negative sense than to any traditional Hegelian understanding, for the formation of the material in each composition does not provide solutions but only reposes its questions from out of the ruins of its own destruction. The contradiction of strictness and freedom is not sublated in the form, but becomes the force of its production so that it does not tend toward harmony but repeatedly reinstates the image of its tension in an attempt to find what endures outside of it, what might persist beyond the suffering embedded in the material. The contradictions that are uncovered here are genuine contradictions for thinking, insofar as they are the antinomies between the power of thought and the demands of the material, which is to say, between subject and object. In saying this, Adorno is quick to point out that these two terms do not indicate rigidly separated modes of being, for they engender and are engendered by each other historically [MS4: 200–201/205]. For neither the material nor the formal intentions exist outside history in some putative ideal or natural form, but are continually reformulated such that their demands are each time new and each time indicative of the marks of that historical process. In this way the supposed artistic isolation of a composer like Schoenberg is revealed as an illusion, for by way of these contradictions in the material the composer directly engages with the antinomies of sociohistorical existence, just as the apparent difficulty and barbarity of his works are nothing more than those of their contemporary moment. It is precisely this materialist way of reading epistemological problems that Adorno had learned from Kracauer in his early studies of Kant and that introduces a greater concretion to Benjamin’s understanding of the position of the expressionless in the work of art [NL: 388/NL2: 58]. 88

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The possibility for such a dialectical relation comes about only because the musical material has, in Adorno’s words, become autonomous and thus has become separated from the natural and the historical so that it can represent them. As the remark on Kant indicated previously, it is because of the way that the work of art is neither fully natural nor fully historical that it can bring each of these aspects to expression, and as a result the composer is engaged with the re-presentation of this content, however buried, in his relation with the musical material. But for Adorno the importance of Schoenberg’s works comes from the fact that in them this dialectic of natural-history has itself achieved self-consciousness, as it has found the site of its own demonstration in the technique, for it is by way of the dialectical movement of the technique that its subject and object are brought into a mutually engendering coordination, which thereby demonstrates the actuality of the dialectic itself. Schoenberg’s significance comes not just from what he has done but also, and more profoundly, from how he has done it: how he has developed an approach to musical problems that brings them onto a new level of tangibility and thereby brings out their necessary intractability, their material autonomy, and thus the concomitant necessity of the dialectical approach as the only means of responding to this intractability as it is. Understanding how to respond to the object is thus a problem of reading, of knowing how to submit oneself to its precedence (Vorrang) so that it can be read in itself, but this is not a mode of reading that would conceptually translate its material forms into immaterial meaning, but one that enables this preponderance to continue to be felt in its sensible opacity (the slightness of its gesture and the equivocation of its extremes as the modes of this autonomy). This is an approach that seeks to find in reading a material affinity to the work, which can proceed to draw the object out in its materiality, since it operates in the same way itself (akin to what de Man called “material vision”). This would not be any kind of passive reception any more than it would be a form of active comprehension; rather this would be a moment of critical interruption, whose consequences, although real, will prove strictly unknowable, for although they bear a cognitive character they are actualized within a material that, as with the contemporaneity of the manifesto, remains historically displaced.

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3

Dead Transcendence Blanchot, Paulhan, Kafka

Blanchot’s first critical collection, Faux pas, was published in 1943 and largely consists of articles written over the previous two years. The climate of French philosophy at this time was heavily influenced by Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger, but what is interesting is the manner in which Blanchot’s writings develop within the purview of these influences without directly following any of them. Significantly, this independence arises because Blanchot approaches philosophy by way of literature rather than treating philosophical problems directly, and so issues that he may find in the works of these philosophers are refracted through the lens of literature, which in turn casts a strange light back upon those philosophical problems. To pinpoint this idiosyncratic transformation I will focus on the issue of transcendence, which was much discussed at the time when Faux pas was being written and which draws out the relation between philosophy and nonphilosophy. What is compelling about Blanchot’s response to this problem is the way that he transforms it by reading it in terms of literature, but doing so does not reduce its philosophical or metaphysical complexity; instead, literature seems to make the issue of transcendence more profound by problematizing the nature of the limit that is seemingly being overstepped. Blanchot’s earliest thoughts on this issue are to be found in three major essays from the years 1941–45, and at each stage in this development his writings draw out different aspects of the relation of language to its limits that demonstrate the peculiarity of this relation. But what repeatedly 93

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arises from these examinations is the evasive nature of the limits of language, which persist and yet remain intangible, creating a pressure that destabilizes any attempt to establish definitive meaning, thereby propelling language into an ambivalence without end. It is helpful in this regard to take up a term that Jean Wahl coined and that was later used by Levinas—that is, “transdescendence,” which begins to concretize some of the disturbing implications of a step beyond finitude that recoils on itself, leading to a descent into the enigma of what there is. The anguish that arises from this experience becomes pivotal for how Blanchot understands the demands that affect the writer involved in such a descent of language, which focus on the necessity and yet impossibility of trying to respond to this enigma. As such this chapter will show how the autonomy of the work materially reflects this isolation of writing, which then develops into a concrete expression of the indeterminate through the indeterminate. In doing so the literary begins to question the positions of philosophy and ontology by problematizing the nature of finitude and transcendence, as well as becoming a critique of phenomenology, in terms of its faith in accessing the truth of appearance and the harmony of being in the world that this entails. Blanchot’s first major piece of criticism, his review of Paulhan’s Les fleurs de Tarbes, ou la terreur dans les lettres, initially appeared as a series of articles in the Journal des débats in October, November, and December of 1941. The following year these articles were gathered into a single volume and published under the title of Comment la littérature est-elle possible? Blanchot then went on to include a reduced version of this text in Faux pas in 1943. The focus of this key work is signaled in the first sentence of the review: “We read the book that Jean Paulhan has just devoted to literature and language, Les fleurs de Tarbes, with a strange feeling.” “Strange” is an odd word to associate with reading, for ordinarily reading is the most straightforward and unproblematic activity, but, as he has indicated, the origin of this feeling comes from the ambiguity of reading a book devoted to literature and language. Th is is the crux of Paulhan’s argument: that there is an uncanny and undecidable ambiguity in language that prevents us from being able to determine the (literary) status of a text definitively, something that is echoed in the doubling of the title, which holds the rhetorical trope of using a parable as an example and the seemingly explicit mode of direct presentation. Much has been written about the turbid atmosphere of French cultural and political thinking in the 1930s, and Paulhan’s book is a powerful, if indirect, commentary on these debates. But the significance it held for Blanchot arises from his own ambiguous pursuit of language in the same 94

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period, a point he remarked upon some thirty years later in noting the difference between his practice of writing fiction at night and political journalism during the day, with the “certainty that in writing he was putting precisely this certainty between parentheses, including the certainty of himself as a subject of writing.”1 If it is possible to see this suspension of certainty as a comment not only on the self-relation of the literary but also on its relation to the political—how writing might suspend the meaning of language, and perhaps preeminently the meaning of political language, and the effects that this might have—then it is just as significant to consider the necessity behind Blanchot’s way of writing in this manner: why and how he was able to conduct himself, at least up to a certain point, along two fronts with seemingly opposing aims—whether indeed his nationalist polemics and literary investigations arose out of a concerted effort to pursue the nature and relation of language, which only becomes more involved as he turns to criticism. For, if his critical writings were in part an attempt to understand what was under way within his own literary works, then they must also take into account the relation of the literary to the political, which his writing was increasingly placing between parentheses. In doing so it becomes possible to see that the development of Blanchot’s writings in the 1930s is less divided than it may appear and that his early critical works draw together the demands of the political and the poetic, not to sublate them in criticism, but to persistently interrogate their possibility as aspects of the demands that language places on our relations to the world. This indicates the indirection of Blanchot’s writing, for although he abandoned direct political engagement after 1937 and devoted himself wholly to the literary (until the late 1950s), it is not possible to see his writings from then on as abstracted from worldly concerns, since the nature of the literary bears ambiguously on the relation of language, something Les fleurs de Tarbes directly addresses. As was mentioned in the introduction of this study, Paulhan’s book examines the role of criticism in the history of modern French literature in its attempts to divide writing into two camps: the classical and the revolutionary, or, as he terms it, Rhetoric and Terror. Echoing Kojève’s reading of Hegel, Paulhan emphasizes the way that Terror operates as a mode of rigorous creative purity that seeks to eradicate all conventional forms of literary expression.2 Hence the opposition of Terror to Rhetoric, which is that school of literature that remains shackled to clichés and traditional styles; but Paulhan’s aim is not only to isolate this terrorist strand but also to expose its contradictions and shortcomings. However, as Blanchot remarks, it is precisely here that our reading becomes troubled. I will quote Dead Transcendence: Blanchot, Paulhan, Kafka

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the passage at length to show how Blanchot’s reading and writing negotiate this strangeness: We enter unwarily into the analyses he formulates, not really sensing the perils towards which the charming, precise sentences, their tight construction a guarantee of safety and order, are precipitated. Everything about it is clear, ingenious, straightforward. Just as the words follow on effortlessly from one another, so a series of sound reasons is elaborated, which seems intended to dispel equivocations and to ensure that any writer is able to proceed with his writing. We calmly witness the disempowering of a certain critical conception, whose defeat, it seems, we can scarcely regret, since it was by nature hostile to conventions and rules. However, an initial feeling of uneasiness begins to emerge. The movement of the thought we would like to follow, all the while remaining marvellously coherent and regular, reveals at the same time a number of discontinuities and allusions, whose meaning is somewhat threatening. Where is this author, who appeared to be quietly carrying out his police duty with exquisite artfulness, taking us? Is he not talking about something other than what he was supposed to be saying? Could there be, hidden within his refutations and arguments, a kind of infernal machine which, invisible today, will one day explode, overwhelming literature and rendering its use impossible? This is the anxiety that Jean Paulhan is able to produce. We read his book unsuspectingly, but when we reach the end, we suddenly see that he has put into question not only a certain critical conception, not only all of literature, but also the mind, its powers and means, and we look back in horror at the abyss we have just crossed—but have we really gone over it?— and which a succession of veils had skilfully hidden from us as we crossed over. [HLP: 49] Blanchot begins by pointing out the unremarkable nature of Paulhan’s writing: the sentences proceed in a clear and precise manner, and in doing so the argument develops soundly, dispelling equivocations. There is a sense of order and security to the work, but in describing it a sense of unease arises; a wariness that was not initially present becomes more and more apparent as Blanchot starts to generalize the point of Paulhan’s argument. Then, as Kafka would say, the “disaster” (Unglück) happens, for attendant upon this rising unease we start to see gaps in the argument, and in describing them they seem to become abyssal; the order and security we had first observed dissolves, and instead we find ourselves before an alien and forbidding uncertainty.3 It is not that we have been launched into an inco96

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herent and eccentric text, for, as Blanchot insists, the careful ordering of sentences is still present, but now we find this disturbing, for we are aware of its lack of foundation and so we become plagued by doubts: are we being deceived? Are we being led to a point of instability? What prevents this disruption affecting everything? Once the radical groundlessness of the argument has been exposed, it is uncontainable, and the illusion of security that had obscured it cannot be replaced. And this is still the first paragraph of the review; without holding back, Blanchot has propelled us directly into the heart of the anxiety that literature carries with it. This double-sided strategy of generalization and radicalization is characteristic of many of Blanchot’s critical writings, but as this paragraph has shown, it is conducted in the most inconspicuous manner.4 Blanchot’s language could hardly be simpler, and yet the effect of its seeming transparency is all the more startling as a result, such that when we are told of this anxiety that haunts literature we already have before us an instance of its disclosure. But Blanchot’s aim is not to be sensational, for this issue has arisen out of Paulhan’s attempt to say something profound about the nature of literature and its relation to ordinary language. And in turning from political journalism to fiction himself there could hardly be a more pressing concern for Blanchot, so what is at stake in this unsettling ambiguity? For Paulhan, the struggle of Terror in literature is the struggle for purity, originality, and control: a writer should not follow received styles and conventions but should rigorously oppose them so as to impose the pure voice of his own thoughts. But this struggle would appear doomed, for conventional or “commonplace” language cannot be removed so easily, as it is inherently ambiguous, since in encountering a text that uses commonplaces (and all necessarily do), it is not possible to know whether they are being used critically or uncritically, and so the problem for the terrorist writer lies in the issue of how, and how far, he should attempt to control the text. But for the reader these attempts only increase the ambiguity of language, for he now stumbles over every word, unsure if it is meant to be a cliché or an innovation and, consequently, finds himself anxious and uncertain about the nature of the text as a whole. But if the writer attempts to respond to this problem by reducing the ambiguity of commonplaces, by agreeing to designate them in advance and thereby making them more common, then, as Paulhan concludes, we are faced with a further ambiguity, for is the text then a reinvented Rhetoric or perfected Terror? But if this is the conclusion, then how is “literature” possible? If the pure expression of literary revolution inevitably leads to reinvented cliché, then what are the conditions upon which literature is possible? As Blanchot makes clear, this Kantian turn that Paulhan has uncovered opens the question of Dead Transcendence: Blanchot, Paulhan, Kafka

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literature up to “the most extreme human darkness,” for the ambiguity of language touches upon the nature and limits of our existence, which is what confronts any attempt to understand the nature of writing [HLP: 53]. This, however, is only the “first book,” as Blanchot calls it, “the apparent book,” for beneath what we have read, is there not another reading that our unease has remarked? Indeed it is through this anxiety that we are able to attest to a hidden element to Paulhan’s work, since the initial development of the argument, as we have seen, leaves nothing remarkable apart from a certain unease as to the status of Paulhan’s own position: what kind of text is Les fleurs de Tarbes, which appears to end by disavowing itself ? So, as Blanchot now writes, we return to the beginning and this time attempt to read more critically, and in doing so we find that Terror is not so easily discussed, for it conceals an apparently unbridgeable division between those writers who want to eradicate commonplaces and thereby assert themselves over language, making of it the transparent expression of thought, and those who wish to remove themselves from common language entirely and discover the mode in which language communicates itself. Despite this division, both of these methods lead the writer to become more troubled by language rather than less; whereas he may have begun by espousing the goal of asserting the pure creativity of thought over language, or submitting thought to the pure communication of language, he ends up becoming ever more strongly involved with language the more he tries to extricate himself from it. What began as a distrust or even hatred of language quickly becomes an obsession, leading the writer to the point of being unable to say anything without coming up against an unavoidable ambiguity where any attempt to control the use of language seems perpetually at risk of undermining itself: it is in this sense that there is a “terror” in literature (from the Latin terrere meaning “to tremble”). Six years later, in his politically charged essay on the possibility of literature as action, this Terror will return as Blanchot finds its undermining of meaning at the source of the “two slopes” of literature, for each approach— expression or communication, prose or poetry—inevitably drifts toward its other, because each is divided within itself, and so each tends toward an impasse [PF: 321/332]. Hence, within his review of Paulhan, Blanchot can conclude by noting how this oscillating or trembling ambiguity opens onto an impossibility that is the basic characteristic of literature as such, but if this is the case, the central question again arises: how is literature possible if all modes lead to its ruin? Blanchot’s answer is, in short, that it is out of this ruin that there is literature; the illusory point of departure that leads literature either by eradication or avoidance of commonplaces to an aporia is precisely the faux pas 98

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by which literature occurs. This is not a reassuring conclusion, for it severely curtails the writer’s activities by grounding his work in the failure of his intentions, something that has hovered on the edge of Paulhan’s own text. But to say that the possibility of literature lies in its impossibility— insofar as the genuinely original text only arises from its lack of originality, the purity of its creativity from impurity and impotence—means that this terrible ambiguity within literature is not only the mark of its paradoxical essence but also the undecidable response of the reader, who is never able to ascertain the status of what he is reading. Thus the difficulties of reading that Blanchot has introduced us to have led to the difficulties of writing as Paulhan has described, in which the essential ambiguity of language leads to a fundamental anxiety in both the writer, who now does not know how to write, and the reader, who now does not know how to read, but what does this relation between ambiguity and anxiety reveal? Transdescendence of the Writer According to Kevin Hart, taking up a line from L’ écriture du désastre, transcendence persists for Blanchot “only in a negative form”— that is, as transdescendence [ED: 143/91].5 This would seem to be confirmed by an earlier line that Hart does not mention where transcendence is glossed as transdescendence: “according to Levinas’s designation, the other [autre] replaces the Same, as the Same substitutes itself for the Other [Autre], it is henceforth in me— a me without me [un moi sans moi]—that the traits of transcendence (of a transdescendence) mark themselves,” a point unfortunately lost in Ann Smock’s translation, which reads “transdescendence” simply as “transcendence” [ED: 37/19]. Moreover, the transition from the first version of this fragment in “Discours sur la patience” to its later inclusion in L’ écriture du désastre involves the notable omission of a question mark placed after “transdescendence” “(of a transdescendence?),” suggesting that it has become a more certain point of paraphrase: transcendence— that is, transdescendence.6 However, this would appear to be the only occasion when Blanchot uses Wahl’s terminology, and the fact that it is in the context of a discussion of Levinas, who had adopted Wahl’s terms, may explain this. Indeed, Blanchot reiterates this point more explicitly a few years later by stating that in Levinas’s understanding of transcendence there is a reference to Wahl’s ideas about the transcendence of transcendence, which Wahl had thought was the only way for there to be a transcendence that was not reduced to either abstraction or vacuity and that would entail transcendence transcending itself by turning back to immanence, which, as Dead Transcendence: Blanchot, Paulhan, Kafka

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Blanchot notes, is the basis for Levinas’s ideas about “transcendence within immanence.” 7 It is this reversion that Wahl called “transdescendence,” which is a chthonic rather than an ethereal transcendence (which Wahl termed “transascendence,” by way of contrast); that is, it returns to immanence rather than departing from it and, in doing so, hollows it out from within, opening up an abyssal transcendence that descends infinitely inside it.8 As will be seen, this material reconfiguration of transcendence is central to the repositioning of the literary work in Blanchot’s thought, much as it was for Schlegel. Blanchot makes use of many phrases to indicate such a transformation of transcendence, most pointedly perhaps with his use of “dead transcendence” in 1945 in his first discussion of Kafka, but Hart’s point holds because of the consistently atheistic reading of transcendence that Blanchot pursues; however, what is intriguing is the possible relation of Blanchot’s ideas to Wahl’s more specific rendering of the problem. Wahl’s ideas on transcendence arose from a lecture he gave in December 1937  in which he was concerned with the possibility of adapting Kierkegaard’s thinking to a nonreligious context, thus converting the step beyond of transcendence into something that returned it to the world. This problem is quite evident in Blanchot’s early writings, as Faux pas begins with several essays on the nature and limits of mystical language, albeit ones that are filtered through the lens of his discussions with Bataille. This suggests that Blanchot was focusing on these issues before and without Levinas’s influence—Levinas first uses transdescendence in 1948 in “La réalité et son ombre,” and between 1940 and 1945 he had been a prisoner of war.9 Not only does this show an independent philosophical perspective developing in Blanchot’s earliest works, which will remain consistent over the rest of his career, but also indicates the significance of certain Kierkegaardian themes to his thinking, specifically his insistence that the writer has a “privileged” relation to anxiety or anguish (angoisse), which is the steppingstone to a reconfigured transcendence. It is anguish that leads to the transformation of transcendence, as Wahl had claimed, but as Blanchot then adds, in a formulation on which the philosophical significance of his work stands, it is by way of writing that there is anguish, thereby exposing the fact that it is by way of writing that the borders of the finite become ambiguous, something that Derrida’s more extensive studies will pursue much later on. To explore the development of this philosophical innovation, I will read through the opening essay of Faux pas, which indicates how the problems of transcendence are focused to an extraordinary degree by the study of writing, while also drawing out the manner in which transcendence itself is reformed and the essential role that writing plays in this. When Faux 100

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pas was published in November 1943, Blanchot grouped his essays into separate “digressions” on poetry, the novel, and other topics, but the first section that preceded these digressions consisted of more theoretical or philosophical articles thematically joined under the title of “De l’angoisse au langage.”10 The essay that opened this section, and thus introduced the collection, was left untitled but has become known by this somewhat programmatic title, and in it Blanchot took up the aporetic relation of the writer to language that was left hanging at the end of his reading of Paulhan and situated it within the major critical debates of the time. Thus, there is in this opening essay a decisive rejection of the Sartrean reading of existence in favor of a version much closer to Bataille’s, but one that also carries on his own concerns with the nature of literature that had surfaced in his reading of Paulhan. In doing so, Blanchot returns directly to the problem at the end of Comment la littérature est-elle possible? by addressing the traditional and parodic image of the writer driven to anguish by the failure of language who yet writes “I am alone.” Retrospectively, the distance from Levinas’s thought could hardly be more marked than it is in this opening, for it is not only with a concern with solitude that Blanchot begins, but also with the solitude of the writer, the one whose concern with language only makes this solitude more inescapable. While this starting place indicates Blanchot’s engagement with the contemporary Kierkegaardian vogue, it also shows the singular way in which his own interests have transformed the notion of anguish into something peculiarly linguistic, which carries profound ontological implications. For the point at which Blanchot begins is that of the impossibility of locating the writer’s presence: in writing “I am alone,” the writer appears to be claiming a position outside the world that his words seem to tacitly deny. But this expression does not simply remove him from his isolation, since by way of his writing he is placed in contact with that which only intensifies his solitude while decreasing its meaning, hence he remains “outside,” but the site of this “outside” is now indeterminable, for although he is not “here,” neither is he “there.” This might seem absurdly comical were it not for the fact that it is the writer’s existence as a human and as a user of language that is caught in this double bind, which is why it is the site of anguish. To be alone would be to be extracted from society, but the writer who writes “I am alone” cannot be so easily defined, as language inevitably places him back within the borders of the cultural while at the same time rendering those borders indeterminate. It is this dislocation that the writer’s anguish reflects, for if he is within the borders of the social at the same time as being without, then he is neither, and so he finds himself without a firm location or relation. The solitude that he feels is of this Dead Transcendence: Blanchot, Paulhan, Kafka

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singular dislocation, which only becomes more unbearable the more he seeks to shake it off. This is no longer the angst of Kierkegaard or Heidegger, but something altogether stranger and more profound, something Blanchot had begun to explore in his discussions with Bataille about the possibilities of an atheological mysticism, an experience of nonexperience, which Bataille sought in many areas of nonknowledge, but particularly for Blanchot in the occurrence of certain “slipping words” like “alone” that appear to contest themselves [Exp: 28/16]. That is, they appear and contest that appearance in the same moment, thereby slipping between meaning and nonsense, presence and absence, and as Blanchot notes in the first paragraph of Faux pas, these “aporias of language are rarely taken seriously” [FP: 9/1]. Blanchot’s interest in the possibility of a mystical atheism is an important aspect of his early thought, as is shown in a number of pieces in Faux pas, but it differs from Bataille’s thinking over the implications of such mystical writing for the nature and status of a language that takes place neither here nor beyond, neither within nor without. Equally, this dislocation begins to resemble Wahl’s idea of a secularized transcendence that would transcend itself in immanence, a movement that Blanchot explicitly refers to in an article on Eckhart that follows the two opening pieces on Kierkegaard [FP: 38/27].11 Returning to the problem of the solitary writer, one of the reasons that the aporias of his language are disregarded is that their depth is ignored, for if we believe that the ambivalence of his language is simply part of his more or less respected craft, then it becomes easy to dismiss either his experience or his writing: if we admire the artistry of his language, then its ambivalence is just part of its capacity to transform misery into beauty, or, alternatively, if we regard the elusiveness of his language as evidence of its distance from truth, then his attempted expressions of solitude are merely further confirmations of this falsehood. If the apparent contradiction between experience and expression is even noticed, then too often it is displaced into one of these two responses as a direct result of the inability to appreciate how a writer relates to his language. Language does not simply allow a writer to describe or express his ideas and experiences, as it is not a tool that is separable from his life; rather, language “is” the writer’s experience. In emphasizing this point Blanchot is demonstrating how intimately language is tied to existence and, consequently, how difficult it is to explicate its anguish either philosophically or ontologically. This is indicated by the fact that whether the writer writes well or poorly, the statement concerning his solitude is still inadequate, and this only increases his isolation, because the “writer is not free to be alone without expressing that he 102

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is.” This deceptively simple phrase conveys an enormous amount, for it suggests that the writer raises to an acute degree the instability of an existence that is always accompanied by its expression; as it never is without also saying as much, just as it never speaks without also being. But the correlation of language and being, which is ontology, is never given, let alone perfect, as it is always contesting itself by way of the disjunction and difference between language and being. This is the freedom without freedom of the writer’s existence, the play of its disconnection that uncovers the straits of its anguish and its chance. This is the point that appears to complicate the possibility of Levinas’s thought, since solitude is that which can never be excluded even if it can also never arise “as such,” for writing conveys its own isolation just as it places this under extraordinary conditions of uncertainty, which means that the relation to the other is always complicated to an impossible degree by this uncertainty. For while the writer is in thrall to writing, he is subject to an extreme ontotheological destitution, which means that although he is not free to be alone, this does not mean that there is an other that can guarantee his writing instead, and so the expression that is drawn from him is pronounced under an emphatically starless sky. Indeed, for Blanchot, it is solely by way of this disastrous writing that the writer can respond to his anguish, for in doing so he “coincides best with the nothingness without expression that he has become” [FP: 10/2]. That is, it is only in its failure to transcend its situation that writing converges on the impossible isolation that the writer has entered, an isolation that provokes and inhibits writing by way of the silence that overwhelms it. In lines that directly recall Beckett’s conversations with Georges Duthuit, which appeared six years later, but which also echo the form of apophatic language, Blanchot summarizes this opening section by stating that the “writer finds himself in this more and more comical condition of having nothing to write, of having no means to write it and of being constrained by an extreme necessity of always writing it.”12 This condition also resonates with Mallarmé’s desire for a poetry of “Nothingness,” but crucially the necessity of having to write nothing does not sublate it into a concept, since, as Blanchot insists in a manner closer to Bataille, “nothing” must be taken “in the simplest way” as that which “annihilates” the will [FP: 11/3]. That writing can lead to this extraordinary situation seems hard to accept, as being a writer appears to indicate an occupation rather than a fundamental aspect of human existence, and so the anguish that arises in writing seems out of place. But any attempt to shrug off the nothing that assails the writer in his solitude will fail, as it cannot be removed, since what writing is concerned with is not something that can be separated from his life; Dead Transcendence: Blanchot, Paulhan, Kafka

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instead, in its “annihilation” it subjects him to “a death without end [terme]”—that is, a finitude without finitude [FP: 12/3]. Moreover, attempting to detach the anguish from its source only increases it, which only leads the writer to become even more profoundly “riveted” (rivé) to his writing, as Blanchot writes, borrowing a word from Levinas [FP: 12/4].13 Being “riveted” was the term Levinas used to explicate Heidegger’s theme of Geworfenheit—the facticity of always finding ourselves “thrown” into a situation that constitutes, but exceeds, our existence, which for Levinas meant that we are bound to existence and so cannot escape it. Blanchot is less concerned with trying to evade this essential bond, as Levinas was, than with examining what we are riveted to, which for him is the “death without end” that is the writer’s relation to writing, and this would seem to be one of the earliest of the many paradoxical and apophatic formulations to thread through his critical writings. This endless death was already developed in Thomas l’Obscur, but here it is explicitly rendered as an aspect of the writer’s relation to language, which suggests that what takes place in this relation is profoundly disturbing not just to the ontological approaches of Hegel and Heidegger (as it reveals a death without end, a finitude without finitude) but also to Levinas’s thought, for even if the meaning of ontology is radically altered as its nature and limits are reconfigured, it cannot simply be evaded. For what writing exposes is that human existence has an end that does not end: we can never be done with it, nor it with us; it can never be appropriated or sublated, nor is it subject to any relation to the other, divine or otherwise; writing simply reveals an ending without end, a dead end that never fully appears or disappears but permeates language with a never-ending destabilization of meaning. The place of language becomes uncertain, for it appears to be neither within the terms of ontology nor without— since we cannot speak of it “as it is,” as it avoids finite determination— and it is to this disruption of being and language that the writer’s anguish opens him. It is this strange convergence of anguish and writing that focuses Blanchot’s interest, for not only does the writer who is concerned with language inevitably find himself drawn to anguish, as Paulhan had discovered, but anguish itself appears to exist in some way for the writer. So the writer would seem to exist because of anguish just as anguish would seem to exist because of the writer, as if each arose from the same tear in the universe, or each converged on the other in its tearing of the universe. This strange correlation, which was earlier found in the struggle between innovation and convention in writing, also arises between poetry and mysticism, where language and experience find themselves turning to each other. For Blanchot this ontological reversal is the mark of the primal 104

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scene of writing in which the (speculative) gaze outside reveals only “the sky, the same sky, suddenly open, absolutely black and absolutely empty,” thus exposing its unworkable groundlessness and secular intransigence [ED: 117/72]. This disaster is prefigured in the introduction to Faux pas, where he writes that “anguish, which opens and closes the sky, needs the activity of a man sitting at his table and tracing letters on a piece of paper in order to manifest itself.” This is a significant point, for in the earlier work Blanchot makes it much clearer what he considers to be the essential relation: “The case of the writer is privileged because he/it [il] represents the paradox of anguish in a privileged way” [FP: 12–13/4]. Thus each side is tied to its other in a relation whose ambivalence can never be resolved, which is writing, which is anguish, and so on. It is for this reason that the nothing that the writer seeks to say can never be attained, for as a writer there can never be pure silence; and so, as Blanchot remarks recalling a prominent theme of Bataille’s thought, he works toward a different aim: to write toward a “consumption without goal [but] or result”; and for Bataille (and later for Blanchot) this leads toward “worklessness” (désœuvrement) [FP: 14/5; Exp: 61–62/48–49]. Hence, as Blanchot continues, making plain the mystical implications of this thinking, the writer is led by way of this consumption “to a real sacrifice of himself.” But while this understanding of writing carries the kenosis of conventional models of inspiration, no voice speaks through the writer, other than the incessant murmuring of the nothing in its finitude without end, which is what ensues for the one inspired by language, for the Sprachbegeisterter, as Novalis wrote. So if there is a hint of mysticism in Blanchot, it is only by way of the atheistic resonances of someone as radical as Kafka, for such a disastrous writing will only be found in a work that contests itself to an extreme so that the work that is made “signifies that there is no work made,” a work “in which perfect success and complete failure must appear at the same time,” which exists only as long as that existence is also cast into nothingness [FP: 14/5]. The writing of such a work is an almost impossible burden, for it requires the writer to exclude his writing from any system of exchange where the effort required to produce the work is recouped in some form by the results that the work produces. Even if the writer attempts to reduce his writing to no more than an empty gesture, this always risks being turned into a gesture of emptiness: a pure product of art in its purity. For any attempt by the writer is haunted by the horizon of possibility that can determine his meager attempts as a project of meagerness. Thus Blanchot talks of writing only ever being “provisionally possible in the impossibility that weighs it down. And this continues to be the case until this possibility gives Dead Transcendence: Blanchot, Paulhan, Kafka

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itself as real in destroying the share of impossibility that was its condition” [FP: 17/8]. If it is by way of this window of impossibility that any writing that would respond to anguish arises, then such writing reveals itself to be that which occupies the nonplace of death and nothingness in a manner irreducible to the ontological determinations of Heidegger and Hegel. For this nonplace is absolute to an extent that we cannot term it an exteriority or an alterity, for it is simply “not” to an infinite degree. This dislocation that anguish has exposed comes from the demands that it places on language to speak from it without speaking of it. So the power of language remains inescapable, for as soon as the writer seeks to reduce the expressibility of language to allow the inexpressibility of anguish to appear, he finds this inexpressibility itself becoming an expression. (Much later Blanchot would ascribe this movement to the “weakness of the negative,” by which it can never assert or dissolve itself fully, and that thus provides the basis of its persistence, its ambivalent and unending reversals [EI: 225/149].) Language appears incapable of not signifying, since it never “is” without also announcing this fact (which only dissimulates its appearance), and a few years later, in “La littérature et le droit à la mort,” Blanchot will pursue this double bind more fully and will go even further in showing the nondialectical nature of its movement (this essay will be discussed in Chapter 7). But this point is hinted at in the introduction to Faux pas, as Blanchot indicates that it is not necessary to seek bold solutions to the problems of expression and production, for the destabilizing effects of ambiguity haunt the most rigorous expositions of reason. Thus it is not simply the case that emptiness continually finds itself being transformed into a gesture, for every purposeful gesture is also open to being transformed into emptiness. This is the ambiguity of ambiguity, which means that we are not at liberty to decide, and thereby resolve, this ambiguous situation in one way or the other, for the presence of ambiguity in the text is itself ambiguous, as Blanchot’s reading of Paulhan had shown, and so any decision taken is contaminated by undecidability. But this is no idle confusion, for it bears upon the anguished writer as a torment, since it holds out the possibility of meaning under conditions of impossibility, conditions that, as we will see in the next section, bear on his very existence. Hence, our attempts to devise methods to approach this ruination of the work fail by necessity, but the reason for this is also the mark of a more profound discovery: while Blanchot had found through Paulhan that language can reverse its meaning within even the most simple sentences, this ambiguity is now to be viewed as the essential mode of worklessness in language. Thus, rather than trying to develop a project in which anguish can come to language, we instead find that anguish is already within language 106

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in the form of ambiguity, but this does not make ambiguity into a solution, because as ambiguity it no more reveals anything than conceals it. It is a case not of a simple oscillation between different meanings but of a much more profound uncertainty about the very presence of meaning as such, which cannot be assuaged by indicating the absence or concealment of meaning, for this indication is itself concealed in uncertainty. The ambiguity of anguish does not refer to a secret whose revelation we are only temporarily unable to apprehend, as this would presuppose that there is something to be revealed; rather and much more radically, anguish “has nothing to reveal and is itself indifferent to its own revelation” [FP: 21/11]. Again the question of possibility arises, for under the pressure of this demand to respond to such an all-consuming but ever-vanishing anguish the writer is led into the most complex negotiations with language, which lead back to the problem of literary innovation. At the end of his introduction to Faux pas Blanchot returns to the argument of the Paulhan review by restating the relation between common and revolutionary language and concludes that no form of literary invention can accede to the ambiguity of language unless it realizes the necessity of chance within the falling cadence of words. That is, the relation between innovation and rules, in which innovation is the movement from familiar to novel rules, carries with it the chance that gives each new rule the same arbitrary outcome as a retrieval of old rules, and thus the necessary choice of rules is itself under the rule of chance, which places it beyond the naïve randomness that might appear in such practices as automatic writing: “It is then that one can say that everything that is written has for the one who writes it the greatest possible meaning, but also this meaning that it is a meaning bound to chance, that it is non-meaning” [FP: 26/16]. From this point of imperfection, writing finds itself filled with anguish because it cannot accede to the demands of anguish; and out of this ruin there is, in Bataille’s terms that Blanchot takes up, “communication,” as anguish has led writing to bearing its own (anguish’s) expression as the meaning of its solitude, which remains after writing has been unable to express any other meaning. The “cadence” that I have just mentioned is a very specific notion that refers to that movement in which there is a falling of words toward the end of a phrase or sentence, and it comes from the Latin cadere, “to fall,” which is also the root of “accident,” “chance,” “decay,” and “cadaver.” The aspect of this range of meanings that I want to focus on here is the relation between falling and the end, for there is an ambiguity between the occurrence of falling as a consequence of reaching a limit, or as the means of reaching that limit: does the sentence end because the falling of words has taken place, or do the words fall because the end has been reached? Dead Transcendence: Blanchot, Paulhan, Kafka

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This relation is essentially ambiguous, and it indicates something peculiar about the nature of limits, which has been noted earlier in terms of the failing of words. For when language turns upon itself, it comes up against a limit that leads words to fail, but in this failing the limits of language themselves come to speak of language in its failing. Equally, this reversal itself befalls language by accident; there is an imperceptible change of course, a chance event, and suddenly words are failing us, as if in a mute gesture of language’s own weakness. Negating Transcendence The pressure that this cadence brings to the relation of language and existence has only begun to arise within Blanchot’s essay introducing Faux pas, but we can see something of what is indicated when the curious figure of the writer stricken by language, isolated in anguish, comes to resemble the very image of the prematurely interred or the unquiet dead: alone in his room, buried and silent, beset with the feverish demands of responding to the nothingness that surrounds and permeates language, he has fallen along with language. The aporetic relation of language that provoked this failing now reveals itself as that which precipitates an encounter with the limits of our existence; just as the anguish at the basis of existence called forth the ambiguity of language, so too does this ambiguity now expose our mortality, in its finitude without finitude, as the disastrous failure of the end. Writing occurs at this limit, as the very turning of its ambiguity upon itself, which is the basis of its relation beyond (mystical, political, or otherwise). In Blanchot’s first article on Kafka from November 1945, which was later used as the opening essay for his second collection, La part du feu, he focuses on this relation that writing has to its outside by looking at the nature of Kafka’s stories and the problem of how to read them when their status is so uncertain: Are they narratives, allegories, or meditations? How and of what are they attempting to speak? For Blanchot this uncertainty comes from the fragmentary nature of Kafka’s writings, which seem to inhibit interpretation by appearing both incomplete and excessive, as if they were both saying too much and too little. This fragmentation arises from the negativity that destabilizes writing, for at any moment the story can appear both meaningful and meaningless, its narrative both fulfilled and undermined, thus it is not possible to define the work or its meaning, as the means of determining it lie neither inside nor outside. Blanchot fi nds that the key to these writings is that they are impossible attempts to achieve the impossible: to give linguistic form to that which gives rise to language, 108

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to the source of their own emergence. That is, they are not to be understood in terms of their relation to other works, ideas, or themes, but rather as texts that seek to reinscribe the enigma of their own appearance; they are parables of themselves before that of anything else. The basis of this impossible attempt lies in the transition Kafka makes when he moves from the first to the third person, from writing as “I” to “he,” for it is only in moving away from himself that this origin can be expressed [PF: 29/21]. But this chance for language to express is also the hollow of a narrative that resonates with the impossibility of expressing its own background. For this opening exposes “a negative structure,” a distance, interior or parallel to the work that suspends every assertion it seeks to make, in such a way that “having reached the end, the assertion is both entirely developed and entirely withdrawn; we do not know if we are seizing the back or the front, if we are in the presence of the building or the pit into which the building has disappeared” [PF: 31/23].14 This ambiguity leads to anguish, for at each stage the writing appears, undecidably, as a step (pas) or as an obstacle (pas) to meaning, and that this reversibility hangs over it is the strongest evidence that it is involved in some form of transcendence, which as Wahl noted can never be affirmed without negating itself, and vice versa. The significance of this ambiguity lies in its implications, for the reversibility of transcendence cannot be avoided or defeated, which, as Blanchot discovers, has a disastrous impact on our ability to relate to the ambiguity of death; in Kafka’s fragments on the hunter Gracchus this ambiguity becomes acute. As Blanchot recalls, although Gracchus fell to his death, his passage to the far side was subject to an accidental deviation, the “disaster,” so that even now he “has not succeeded in reaching the beyond.” Instead, he is stranded in the impossibility of death in which he is neither dead nor not dead, but suspended in a death without end in which he is “dying,” in the intransitive, which becomes the form of the narrative, its mode of expression, as we shall see in the next chapter. Blanchot calls this “a dead transcendence”—that is, a transcendence that is not, that is dead, and a death that is not, that is transcendent: a step/not beyond (pas au-delà) [PF: 15/7, 88/83]. This step has the double issue that death is impossible even as it is unavoidable—that is to say, death “does not end our possibility of dying; it is real as an end to life and illusory as an end to death.” As Blanchot insists, contra Sartre, it is through literature that we are exposed to this double ambiguity that is the origin of our anguish, for anguish “does not come only from this nothingness above which, we are told, human reality would emerge to fall back there, it comes from the fear that even this refuge might be taken away from us, that there might not be Dead Transcendence: Blanchot, Paulhan, Kafka

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nothing, that nothing might be more being” [PF: 16/8]. The ambiguity of literature, in which each meaning can reverse itself, is the mark of dead transcendence, which indicates that existence cannot be finished, it is interminable, indeterminate; “we do not know if we are excluded from it (and this is why we search vainly in it for something solid to hold onto) or forever imprisoned in it (and we turn ourselves desperately toward the outside). This existence is an exile in the strongest sense: we are not there, we are elsewhere and we will never stop being there” [PF: 17/9]. Thus the ambiguous autonomy of the writer’s solitude is here echoed in more ontological terms that further emphasize the nonabsolute status of its autonomy, its imbrication with its inverse, from which it can never release itself but that reinforces the singularity of its situation as the reflection of the ambivalence of material isolation. As noted, Blanchot’s readings have not only put in question the nature of negativity as conceived by Hegel and the nature of death as conceived by Heidegger, but they have also cast doubt upon Levinas’s thoughts on the possibility of an escape from ontology. In all these cases the outside that is being posited is shown to be far less easy to assert, as its affirmation inevitably slips into negation, due to the ambiguity that it never loses. Of equal significance is the manner in which Blanchot has begun to articulate the relation between the ambiguity of language, which was present in the earlier reading of Paulhan, and the ontico-ontological ambiguity of death, insofar as each ambiguity uncovers the unstable nature of finitude, which in turn puts in question our understanding of transcendence. As a result, the transcendence of this faux pas is only quasi-transcendent—that is, it only appears as if it were transcendent, as an image, and so any transdescendence that occurs is only as an image of descent toward the “underside” of being. Thus the encounter with finitude reveals this passage là-bas to be a repeated experience of groundlessness, an experience of nonexperience that appears as an image in the inscription of writing, which develops no work as it configures no beyond that persists outside its image, but only recurs as an endless series of singular inscriptions of transdescendence. Although the philosophical sophistication of Blanchot’s readings is profound, the basis of this sophistication, its literary articulation, places its “philosophical” designation in doubt. Th is suggests something critical about the relation of literature and ontology, for literature contests the basis of what we call “ontology” by way of the particular attention that it pays to the nature of the word, which is not logos conceived in any traditional sense. What Blanchot has uncovered is the fact that the language of ontological articulation can never rid itself of its literary ambiguity; that it 110

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both presents and represents itself, that it is both present and not present, positing and negating, which inevitably affects the nature of the articulation that it offers to being and language. For this ambiguity destabilizes any notion of a secure or fixed ground of experience and instead introduces a nothingness at its heart that can neither be assuaged nor avoided. Despite this, there is a strong suspicion that, although Blanchot may have modified phenomenology substantially, he would still seem to be thinking from a position that remains broadly faithful to it in its focus on issues of experience and appearance. To understand how this similarity is only apparent involves understanding the materiality of appearance in Blanchot’s thought, as it constitutes an indirect if persistent critique of phenomenology. In one of the clearest studies of this issue, Marlène Zarader has shown how Blanchot’s thought of the “outside” rigorously if tacitly brings into question the basic dimensions of phenomenological thought: the intentional relations of the subject to the world that surrounds it, which constitute both the subjectivity of the subject and the horizon of its world, insofar as it is according to these relations that the things of the world give themselves to the subject. This is not a model of ordinary experience, but one purified of everything but its essential elements; it is not actual objects that give themselves to the subject but rather their essences, which are in turn not given to the subject as such but to its transcendental ego. Experience is thus a form of eidetic vision, stripped of all worldly (historico-material) contingencies, allowing the pure subject to apprehend the pure object as it is given to it—that is, according to the way that it is given to it through its intentional relations, which represent (to the subject) whatever has been intended (as objects). As such, Husserl hoped to establish an approach to experience that would not be grounded in any preconditions about subject or object but would instead unveil that experience as being of the things themselves. Although Blanchot does not explicitly reject this model, or even engage with it directly, his thought places each aspect of it in doubt: the world-forming horizon is suspended by the interruption of a formless exteriority that cannot be represented and objectified; the grounding nature of intentionality is put in question by the notion of a nonintentional relation without relation; and both these developments affect the constitution of subjectivity by exposing it to a loss that cannot be converted into selfhood.15 In a Heideggerian vein (although he goes much further than Heidegger in realizing the actual ramifications of these inversions), Blanchot transforms the dimensions of phenomenology through an emphasis on the nonappearance of nothingness, which leads to its constitutive absencing from all relations. Dead Transcendence: Blanchot, Paulhan, Kafka

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As a result, it has been suggested that Blanchot’s rethinking of phenomenology pursues a method akin to that of negative theology, in that his thinking of appearance is apophatic, and as such might be comparable to the work of Jean-Luc Marion, who explicitly reconceives phenomenology from the perspective of negative theology. The basis for such a comparison would lie, as Hart has pointed out, in the way that Blanchot’s understanding of literature seems to resemble Marion’s understanding of the icon. It is helpful to consider this comparison more closely, as it casts light on the depth of Blanchot’s distance from phenomenology and its theological resonances. As Marion explicates it, the icon redirects our gaze away from its visible appearance and toward the invisible to which it refers (and he makes clear that texts as well as images can perform this role), but in doing so it does not bring the invisible to visibility but rather makes the distance of the invisible from the visible apparent. Thus, the visible aspect of the icon is subordinated to the manifestation of this distance, leaving its appearance open to the ambiguity of multiple interpretations. Consequently, the role of the icon in referring to the invisible is not to direct the gaze to an essence, but to allow the viewer to encounter the gaze of the invisible. This means that the icon is the point at which these gazes cross, invisibly, and in doing so the viewer’s gaze is overwhelmed by the excess of the invisible, which imposes itself with an obligation to respond. For Marion, this indicates how theology dissolves the classical Husserlian version of phenomenology in which the intentionality of the subject lies at the basis of its constitution as a subject, for with the icon the subjectivity of the viewer is not constituted by his intention but is dissolved in the encounter with that which exceeds his gaze. However, this raises a key point, for although it would seem that the icon is not inherently theological—because it is strictly impossible to decide what it refers to, since the encounter with the invisible is with that which exceeds thought in the sense that it cannot be grasped conceptually, which is what enables Hart to assert that it can instead refer to the outside—this is undermined by the persistent suggestion that the encounter with the icon is an encounter with that which not only gazes back at the viewer but also calls for a response.16 Hart’s claim that literature is an “icon of the Outside” rests on the belief that it entails a similar radicalization of the phenomenological relation, in which the writer or reader is exposed to a dissolution of selfhood in an encounter with an emphatically atheistic outside. Although there are clearly similarities here, nevertheless, I find this formulation to be too strong for three reasons. First, it neglects the ambivalent negativity of literature, which is never solely dedicated to the outside in Blanchot’s thought as it is always stretched across the two slopes of its possibility and impossibility. Second, 112

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it risks allowing a thought of the outside to be separated from the actual texts to which it is materially specific, for it is false to believe that the outside is something “beyond” literature, to which it somehow gives immediate access; rather it is its singular and aporetic experience. Third, the manner in which the icon is commonly understood to be the point at which the viewer’s gaze encounters the gaze of the other makes it difficult to disentangle it from a theological framework, however much it might be claimed that this is not necessarily the case; in practice, the idea of an atheist icon is unsustainable because of the way that atheism reconstrues the very nature of transcendence. It is because Blanchot’s understanding of literature forces a rethinking of these notions of transcendence, thinking, images, and spatiality (as is shown in these chapters) that it bears such critical weight. Although such a comparison is useful insofar as it brings out the theological resonances of Blanchot’s thought, which are considerable and not without significance, it is ultimately untenable for the same reasons that Blanchot’s relation to phenomenology cannot be sustained, for while he seems to use a similar language of appearance and experience to Marion, this is done with a persistent degree of qualification that places its theological resonances in an unassuageable doubt [cf. EI 377–79/252–53]. One cannot underestimate the force and extent of what might be called Blanchot’s skepticism here, which continually places terms like experience under pressure until their conditions of possibility are also shown to be conditions of impossibility. This could be termed Paulhan’s lesson, since it is the fundamental understanding of language that marks Blanchot’s thinking from the 1940s onward and that will draw him toward a dialectical mode of thought, albeit one that is mediated through the extreme ambivalences of the experience of literature. For it is this experience that (un) grounds the dialectic for Blanchot, just as it focuses the rupture of nothingness in Heideggerian terms, but it only does so to the extent that it makes such an experience of the dialectic or of nothingness irresolvable, since, as an experience constituted by a lack of horizon, intentional relation, or content, it is more like a nonexperience, an encounter with that which resists comprehension and remains opaque to appearance, and is rigorously neutral in regard to any ethicoreligious claim that its gaze may bear. These terms indicate that Blanchot’s thought is concerned less with the (onto)theology of appearance than with its materiality, when this is understood as that which is (there) but is not (given).

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4

An Image of Thought in Thomas l’Obscur

While it is clear that Blanchot approaches philosophical issues by way of literature, it is important to remember that this is coupled to its reverse, which is just as significant: that he approaches literature by way of philosophy. This does not make him into a quasi- or pseudo-philosopher, for his concern is always centered on the literary, but what this coupling draws out is the way that Blanchot persistently pursues questions about the nature and status of literature, for which he draws upon an extensive philosophical awareness. Developing this understanding enables us to come to terms with the extremely focused mode of reading and writing that Blanchot has become known for, which leads him to ask what seems to be the same questions and raise what seems to be the same issues, whatever fictional or critical work he is engaged in. The repetitive nature of Blanchot’s writings has sometimes been seen as a failing, but what has to be borne in mind is that this repetition is the result of the necessarily persistent need to bring literature back to addressing questions about its nature and status, for these are the questions by which it persists, and that despite this repetition he is singularly sensitive to what escapes these questions; what remains of the literary beyond the purview of philosophy.1 While Blanchot’s philosophical awareness has never been in doubt, this coupling uncovers its corollary; for if literature is approached by way of philosophy, then this has implications for philosophy, since its encounter with literature brings about a difference in the way that philosophy proceeds—that is, a difference in thinking. 114

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In order to examine this approach and its implications, I will turn to a particularly significant moment in Blanchot’s writings when he develops an image of thought transformed by its encounter with literature, which indicates how the philosophical approach to literature leads to its reconfiguration, to another image of thought, a thought of literature. The episode I refer to comes from Blanchot’s fi rst book, which examines to a quite unprecedented degree the form of the philosophical novel but does so in such a way that, as was seen in the introduction, it operates in something like a Gothic key. But rather than rendering terror philosophical (as is found in the works of Lovecraft), we find that philosophy is here rendered terrifying, as it were, by pushing its epistemological and ontological concerns to literal extremes. So instead of being a novel that features philosophical themes or addresses philosophical questions, Thomas l’Obscur is immersed in philosophy as its milieu, such that it operates by persistently contesting the dimensions and movements of its own development. In this way, issues about the relation between language and presentation are more thoroughly interrogated than if they were being raised more analytically, to the extent that it is often difficult to know what it is that we are reading and how we should approach it. As a result, the consequences of this interrogation become more keenly felt, as it now becomes a question of what the experience of this novel can be when it directly challenges our ability to think through our relation to it. To understand the nature of this challenge I will suggest that Blanchot’s approach to literature brings together the philosophical and ontological dimensions of the encounter of thought and writing in an image of thought (or idea) that through its quasitranscendence reveals what is at stake in this encounter for the relation of philosophy and ontology. The difficulties of responding to such an image will then be addressed in the last part of this chapter through Klossowski’s Le bain de Diane (1956), which examines this encounter of thought and writing in terms of the simulacrum, the repetition of which exposes how this literary image (or idea) bears an impersonal “life.” Thomas l’Obscur was published in September 1941, and over the next few years the passage that I will be reading was at the center of an intense debate that started eighteen months later when Bataille cited part of this passage in the most laudatory terms in his L’expérience intérieure [Exp: 119– 20/101–2]. When Sartre reviewed Bataille’s book in the autumn of 1943, he highlighted the images and style of this passage as signs of what he felt was wrong with Bataille’s thinking (evidently taking its inclusion in Bataille’s work as an unremarkable citation that meant that it could be unproblematically attributed to Bataille’s own thought, rather than to Blanchot’s) [S1: 183–86]. Bataille responded early in 1945 in Sur Nietzsche An Image of Thought in Thomas l’Obscur

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by citing that part of the review where Sartre had referred to this section in which he had cited Blanchot (thereby re-citing Thomas l’Obscur) in order to indicate the disparities between philosophical and nonphilosophical language [SN: 196–99/180–83]. A year later Levinas published “Il y a,” which also referred to this passage from Blanchot’s novel, although without citing it or referring to the work of Bataille or Sartre, and the following year he included this article in his De l’existence à l’existant.2 Bataille reviewed Levinas’s book at the beginning of 1948, and in doing so he again cited this same passage from Thomas l’Obscur, although in more detail, and took the opportunity to respond once more to some of the points Sartre had made in his review of L’expérience intérieure.3 Finally, in 1950 Blanchot republished Thomas l’Obscur in a new and greatly reduced version, which, as he insisted in a note prefaced to the new version, “adds nothing” to the first version, although it “subtracts much” [TN: 7/53]. It is apparent that this repeatedly cited passage proved especially significant because it raised philosophical issues that Bataille, Sartre, and Levinas, in particular, found impossible to ignore. Perhaps even more than contemporary works by Camus and Sartre, it was Blanchot’s novel that gave rise to a singular challenge to thought, since it is clear that Thomas l’Obscur proved most provocative to those readers who responded to it philosophically. To aid its reading I will break the passage into two sections. Thomas has entered an underground vault that appears to be both cavernous and claustrophobic, and after recovering from this initial disorientation he takes another look around. It is from this point that the passage picks up: Manifestly the night was more sombre and more painful than he could have expected. The darkness seemed to immerse everything; there was no hope of piercing its shadows, but one touched its reality in a connection whose intimacy was overwhelming. The first observation that Thomas made was that he could still use his body, in particular his eyes; it was not that he saw something, but that which he gazed on disdained his gaze without letting him turn away. This was eventually enough to make him enter into a relation with a nocturnal mass that he vaguely perceived as being himself and in which he was bathed. Naturally he only formulated this remark as a hypothesis, as a view that was convenient but to which he didn’t attach any credit. Only the necessity of unravelling these entirely novel circumstances obliged him to cling to it and even to venture other no less risky conclusions. As he had no means of mea suring the time, he probably passed some hours before he accepted this way of looking, but for him it was as if fear had immediately swept over him and it 116

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was with a sense of shame that he raised his head to receive the idea that he had entertained, to know that outside him could be found something identical to his own thought, that at his base an aborted organism had momentarily taken the place of his soul. The first point to raise comes from the fact that the subterranean darkness is referred to as “the night,” thereby bringing its specific local darkness into relation with the broader contours of the night. But this point is balanced by the overpowering situation of the darkness, its “placeness”, which cannot be penetrated even though it bears an overwhelming intimacy. So, although Thomas submerges himself in the subterranean element, this cannot reduce his distance from it. Hence, when he attempts to direct his perception toward his environment this proves unsuccessful, as his eyes do not see as much as reach out like blind feelers, providing a sense that there is something there but not communicating what this might be. That is, his eyes no longer see in the sense that they convey visual information about his environment, yet they continue to “see” insofar as they place him in contact with the night, which in turn suggests that it is precisely their lack of vision that (paradoxically) indicates a lack of anything visible. As a result, this nonvision becomes the means by which he comes into relation with this nocturnal mass, whose only qualities are those of an oppressive but evasive affect: it is nothing but an inversion of the sensing body that attracts but also repels vision and movement. The extent of this inversion becomes excessive as Thomas realizes that what he is in contact with in this oppressiveness is himself, or rather, he realizes that what he is sensing is his “self,” but that it is outside him in the form of the mute and opaque pressure of the night. Or, that there is something outside him that is identical to his thought, which does not mean that it is the evacuated form of his own thought, but that in its resemblance it brings about a displacement of his thought, leaving him subject to this absence and host to that which displaces. But even this discovery does not bring about a revulsion that would bring Thomas back to his senses, for he is caught in the grip of this nocturnal mass: In any other circumstance such a dream would have vividly repulsed him, and even here it was not pleasant to bear. Nevertheless his sickness didn’t come with much likelihood that it would be—for, after all, the situation authorised many extravagances—but, by way of believing himself to be in contact with an intelligence that his gaze or his hand could touch, he was overtaken by a feeling of fright that he didn’t succeed in overcoming. The night soon appeared to him more sombre, more terrible than any other night, as if it had really issued An Image of Thought in Thomas l’Obscur

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from a wound of thought that itself no longer thought, of thought taken ironically as object by something other than thought. It was the night itself. The images that made up its darkness inundated him, and his body transformed into a demonic mind sought to represent them to itself. He saw nothing and, far from being distressed, he made this absence of vision the culminating point of his gaze. Useless for seeing, his eye took on extraordinary proportions, developing itself inordinately and, stretching itself out to the horizon, let the night penetrate into its centre in order to create an iris for itself. Through this void it was thus his gaze and the object of his gaze that mingled together. Not only did this eye that saw nothing apprehend something, but it apprehended the cause of its vision. It saw as an object that which made it unable to see. Its own gaze entered into it under the form of an image at the tragic moment when this gaze was considered as the death of every image. [TP: 32–33; cf. TN: 16–18/60] The night now appears as though it had issued from the wound of thought that it seemed to have given rise to, as if thought in being displaced gave rise to its own other, which would then subject its vacancy to this nocturnal grip (in an ironic and abyssal parody of self-reflection).4 Sartre, in particular, objected to this displacement of thought in the night, stating that either thought was simply encountering its own limits and thus remained thought, since it can only discover the interior of its limits as any exteriority would be transformed by virtue of the fact that it was being thought, or this figure of the night was a hypostatization of nothing as something, in which case it could be thought like any other thing [S1: 183–84].5 However, these objections fail to grasp the significance of Blanchot’s image of the night, since Thomas does not encounter the night as a simple absence of light, for its absence is unlimited and so never ends but rather appears as a perpetual absencing, nor is it the night as nothingness as such, for it never appears “as such.” Instead, what Thomas encounters is the other night, which is never fully present or absent but insists as the oppressiveness of this endless limit that cannot be removed or converted, and it is thus that it haunts Thomas as the obscure image of his double. This image leads to a disruption of vision in which the eye is not confronted with darkness as the simple absence of vision, but rather with the appearing of this absence that the gaze now “perceives.” Th is in turn leads to an evacuation of thought, as it is also made subject to this absencing that cannot be thought or ignored, which then leads to an utter displacement in which

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there is only the hollowness of the absence of thought, which yet insists and thus is there, as Levinas would later focus on in his own way. It is useful to try to specify the nature of the site that Thomas has entered, for it is not any kind of terrestrial space, nor is it one that could be encompassed by any geometry; instead, it is more like an echo of his own bodily space. Much like the way that he interacts with the sea in the first chapter of the book, when Thomas immerses himself in the subterranean night it is as his surroundings or Umwelt, but, in an inversion of the conventional spatial relation, this space seems to have materialized just as he disappears from it, as if it were his environment without him, his own hollowed-out surroundings that he now somehow encounters. But can this negative space be described as material? Perhaps, if we recall that it does not appear insofar as it lacks form and yet persists as an opaque resistance, not a presence but a pressure or density, an inhibitory mass that nevertheless lacks substance, dimension, or position. It is there in place of Thomas, but in that case how does he apprehend it, how does it manifest itself to him? Not by way of the senses, for there is nothing to be sensible of; rather it would seem that there is an imaginary awareness of the night, by way of its images to which he is made subject. It is no accident that it is the night that brings about this displacement for Thomas, for the night is characterized by a profound ambiguity, as it appears to have both no depth and nothing but depth, so the nature of the space in which this encounter takes place is uncertain, as its site cannot be determined. But in drawing out this image, Blanchot is also bringing out the ambiguity that characterizes literature, whose referential depth also cannot be determined, since it both refers beyond itself, and thus is transparent, and refers to itself, and thus is opaque. However, Blanchot is not simply representing this literary ambiguity by way of the night but compounding it by coupling it to the already ambiguous image of the night, so that in this doubling the ambiguity becomes abyssal. For when we read this passage, which conveys the displacement of Thomas’s thought and translates this displacement into our experience of reading it—as we do not know at what depth we should be reading it or to what it is referring, since it is not possible to say whether the night is an image of literature, or vice versa—the night of literature has, as Sartre, Bataille, and Levinas each realized, started to take its undetermined effect on us.6 The implications of this reading/encounter are examined further through the transformation of Thomas’s vision. For in seeking to represent these images of the subterranean night, he sees nothing more than the absence of his own vision; that is, his gaze encounters its own emptiness by way of

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these images of darkness that it now obscurely conveys. His blindness is not a bodily failing but a folding-in of the night, as if in re-presenting the night his gaze were to draw it into itself, incorporating its darkness such that his eye would become subject to it and thus expand to its monstrous dimensions. The emptiness of seeing comes to involve the emptiness of what is seen, which on the one hand demonstrates their inner community or provenance (their affinity, Adorno might say), but on the other hand brings this shared vision to bear on itself, not to render it a positive reality, but to confront it with its own impossibility (its lack of reconciliation): Thomas’s eye sees its own annihilation in the form of an image of its own gaze, a gaze now delivered over to these images of darkness. It is as if the night was that which syncopates (in Jean-Luc Nancy’s terms) the gaze: the limit that exposes vision to its possibility and impossibility, the breach by which it is and is not. Significantly, it is in the context of Nancy’s discussions of the sublime that the thought of syncopation appears most fully, for it concerns what happens when we are faced by the awful immensity of that which confounds our senses.7 As Kant describes it, our gaze comes up against a limit when it encounters something immeasurably large or powerful, but while the imagination is repelled by this excess that it is unable to comprehend, in doing so it negatively indicates that which lies beyond this limit. Thus, although this excess confounds our finite senses, for Kant it also leads to the discovery of the idea of the infinite as a whole in the faculty of reason, which enables the excess to be given form so that it can be comprehended and judged sublime, thereby indicating the supersensible destination (Bestimmung, or determination) of the subject [CPJ: §26, 138]. In Blanchot’s text this pathway is disrupted, as the syncope of the gaze in the face of the night does not lead to the discovery of the idea of totality that would enable this experience to be comprehended, and in the absence of this orga nizing idea Thomas’s thought is exposed to the displacement of his imagination, for while the endless absencing of presentation in the night leads his imagination to recoil in its failure to comprehend the expanse, this recoil also subjects his thought to the indeterminable immensity, rather than the reverse, as if Blanchot were rewriting the Analytic of the Sublime by drawing it, as it were, into the chthonic depths of literature, just as the supersensible destination of the sublime feeling is itself reversed. In this way the restricted economy of exchange—in which the failure of the senses to comprehend is compensated with the discovery of an idea of reason, thereby reestablishing cognitive harmony—is dissolved in a general economy, to use Bataille’s terms, of uncontainable loss and instability. 120

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Despite this distinction, Blanchot’s account nevertheless remains within the tradition of Kant’s thought, since it treats Thomas’s experience as an encounter with the ambiguous border of finitude as it relates to the conditions of experience and to the conditions of the thought of this experience. For at the heart of this experience is an encounter with a space that is figured as a distance, or, more precisely, as a vastness, an unending and obscurely material expanse, for just as Thomas’s experience is of a certain undefined site, so Kant’s own descriptions of sublime experiences focus on situations or scenes of immensity. And the significance of these descriptions of immeasurable extension (in size or force) is that the Analytic of the Sublime thereby shows itself to be concerned not only with the limits of aesthetic experience but also with the limits of philosophy and the possibility of its self-determination in relation to literature as a mode of undelimited presentation. As a result, Blanchot’s novel finds itself more closely linked to Kantian thought, despite its revisions, than to later and ostensibly closer thinkers like Hegel or Heidegger and, by appreciating how these revisions come about, it is possible to gain a greater understanding of how and why the “space” of literature will assume such an importance for Blanchot as a preeminently philosophical response to the post-Kantian problem of the work of art.8 This disruption of sublime judgment cannot be passed over by claiming that although Thomas may have been subjected to this extreme displacement, nevertheless Kant’s argument about the discovery of the idea of the infinite as a whole holds true for the reader of Blanchot’s text, as this does not take account of the way that thought itself is displaced in its encounter with literature, which is what is underway in this passage. Nancy’s discussion of the syncope revolves around the double nature of this encounter at the limits of sense, for the disjunction of reason and imagination in the feeling of the sublime already implicates the necessity for philosophy to articulate itself in relation to literature. This leads to a thought of finitude reconfigured to take account of the fact that the encounter with the infinite, whether aesthetic or philosophical, exposes thought to the unlimitedness (Unbegrenztheit) from which the finite seeks to demarcate itself [CPJ: §23, 128]. Thus the thought of the finite—by which thinking seeks to define itself—involves an encounter with that which the finite distinguishes itself from and that thereby renders its existence fragile, as it finds it to be the condition of both the possibility and the impossibility of thought. It is thus that the finite is syncopated by that which exceeds it, in a manner that excludes the possibility of simply recapturing this excess in an idea of the whole, for the very status of this idea is at issue when it does not itself permit of definition. An Image of Thought in Thomas l’Obscur

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Thought is not then able to discover evidence of the transcendent status of reason beneath the limitations of sense, but is instead exposed to the excessiveness of these limits, their limitlessness, which means that there is no transcendent step beyond sense for reason, for in touching on the limits of sensibility thought is touched by their limitlessness and as such cannot reform itself (without denying the essential impossibility of definite delimitation), but instead becomes workless or neutre, evacuating the possibility of a supersensible destination, along with the moral feeling and purposiveness that for Kant would bear witness to this destination. Thus, rather than discovering the presence of the supersensible as an idea of the infinite within him, Thomas’s (and the reader’s) encounter with the night exposes him to the materialization of an indeterminable place as the taking place of a formless materiality, its impersonal “life,” which assails him as an image of his own thought and to which he is subjected and transformed. This is why the feeling is more accurately described as chthonic rather than sublime, as it draws Thomas out of himself and down rather than into himself and up; transdescendence rather than trans(as)cendence, in Wahl’s terms. If the night then appears as if it had “issued from a wound of thought that itself no longer thought, of thought taken ironically as object by something other than thought,” then this is because thought has here come up against the night as its own unlimitedness, which pierces it and leaves it belonging to the outside as a thought of literature, since the other name for this indeterminable night is literature. For, just as the night syncopates the relation between reason and the imagination, writing, in its impersonal, material life, is that which bears the possibility and impossibility of relation between ontology and philosophy. The Idea of Literature as Force of Repulsion To understand the demands of this literary encounter with the unlimited and the implications it has for thinking, we need to ask what literature is for Blanchot. Rather than simply being a practice or art with particular aims, it may be helpful, given the philosophical and ontological stakes of his approach, to consider his understanding of literature as being that of an idea. After what has surfaced thus far, I do not mean that we can find traces of Platonism or Kantianism in the way that Blanchot approaches literature, inasmuch as there might be supposed to be a pure or transcendent notion of literature that exists outside knowledge and experience but that nevertheless helps organize knowledge and toward which all writers should seek to tend. In these approaches the idea is postulated as regulatory because it remains beyond any actual appearances, but, as we have 122

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seen, thought cannot call on such assistance in the night, as the limitlessness of sense draws it into the empirico-transcendental syncopation of its borders rather than releasing it from them. In this way, the usage I am looking for is closer to that developed by Benjamin in the prologue to his Trauerspiel study, where the idea is a cognitive image that emerges from reality as a word-like thing, ein Sprachliches, so that it interacts with the things of the world while existing alongside them due to the anomalous form of its materiality [GS1.1: 216/OGT: 36]. But in order to delimit the more Adamic meaning that Benjamin gives to such an idea, it is necessary to examine the immanent ontological status that literature has for Blanchot, which is to consider it as an idea in the sense that Deleuze gives the term in his rereadings of Plato and Kant.9 An idea, for Deleuze, is a manifold problem of differential relations that provokes thinking, although it is not reducible to any of the solutions that may partially actualize it. As such, an idea is inexhaustible, and yet it is not transcendent, since it “is” only as the nonactualized (virtual) reverse of every apparent solution. Hence, while it can be determined, it is that which remains undetermined and as such shows itself to be infinitely determinable. Thus we can say that Blanchot approaches literature as just such a problem, since he attempts to think both the singular intensity of the literary idea and the particular expressions to which it gives rise. Equally, like Deleuze and many other postphenomenological thinkers, Blanchot starts from a broadly Kantian perspective but inverts much of the nature of this perspective, for in regard to the literary it is not the a priori conditions of possible experience that concern him but the merely virtual conditions of real experience. That is, Blanchot approaches literature with a view to understanding that which brings about the specificity of its appearances yet that, as its genetic conditions, remains immanent to it. Moreover, Blanchot sees these conditions, again much like Deleuze, as contingent rather than necessary, which is to say that they bear no direct causal relation to that which appears, but instead carry the arbitrary nonrelation or declination that comes with a throw of the dice or a change in its rules, the chance that underlies each literary appearance (the implications of which will be emphasized in Klossowski’s work). This association enables us to understand the monotony of Blanchot’s writing in his critical essays (at least until the late 1950s, when he starts to experiment with more fragmentary forms): the fact that his approach and tone never seem to change, that his concerns remain the same regardless of the text that he is addressing. For, although the problem that Blanchot is pursuing expresses itself in endlessly singular variations, it is always the same problem, as it is inexhaustible, and this suggests that the idea that An Image of Thought in Thomas l’Obscur

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underlies the monotony of this approach is not only linked to the generation of problems but also to their survival or “living on” (survivre) in and as writing, by which the literary persists. This inverted Kantianism then implies that treating literature as an idea means affirming it as a form of impersonal life, a neutre force that lives on, since, by virtue of its inexhaustibility, it cannot die, and yet with each of its singular expressions it bears its reverse, for these expressions, as Deleuze noted, “are not outside language, they are the outside of it” (ne sont pas en dehors du langage, elles en sont le dehors).10 But treating literature as an idea also means taking account of the way that thought is bound up with it, for, as Nancy has pointed out in his readings of Kant, the development of critical philosophy, and thus modern philosophy as such, is intrinsically bound to the question of writing, and in particular, the differentiation of a properly philosophical mode of writing from anything that might obscure this and that would thereby suggest a more literary basis. The point Nancy raises is that Kant’s intentions cannot be sustained to any great degree, and thus the development of philosophy is involved in an endless struggle to define and delimit its textual demonstration, such that literature is an inescapable part of thought, as Plato had already discovered. For the notion of Darstellung itself is literary, since whenever thinking attempts to give thought to its own limits, to its presentation, it becomes entangled with the unlimited. This means that the Kantian idea is itself literature, since it is the virtual apparition that arises at the point where thought in reaching its limit of definition overreaches itself and becomes undefined. Hence, thought cannot attempt to determine its projects without entering into the literary, and thereby losing its “self,” just as the reverse is also the case. So when Blanchot proceeds to approach literature by way of thinking, and vice versa, he is pursuing this problem of the mutual articulation and disarticulation of philosophy and literature. It is thus that Kant’s use of persistently inadequate examples to demonstrate the sublime—the descriptions of the pyramids at Giza and St.  Peter’s Basilica in Rome (which do not come from personal experience but are drawn from Savary’s Lettres sur l’Égypte and hearsay) or the repeated “poetic” (dichterisch) presentations of mountains, storms, and oceans—becomes a genuine problem, as it indicates exactly this point where thinking is drawn to touch upon its limits and to give thought to them in their combined impossibility and possibility [CPJ: §26, 135–36].11 In this way both Deleuze and Nancy recall and deepen problems that were latent within Kant’s own thinking, but what becomes apparent through this combination of the Deleuzian and Nancian rereadings is

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that they indicate how deeply Blanchot’s own works were immersed in these issues. For in his approach to literature, Blanchot pursues both a notion of the interminable problem of literature and the literary diversions of thinking. But in doing so he draws out the manner in which these two issues are related in the idea of literature, thereby recalling us to the post-Kantian problem of the mutual and ontological constraint of philosophy and literature. Thus, by approaching literature through philosophy, Blanchot is renewing this double problem by which thinking can only proceed by way of its involvement with writing, which will prevent it from ever being fully defined, and writing, because it proceeds by way of thinking, will be exposed to the implications that this transformed thinking will now bring to writing. As we have seen, Blanchot draws out the consequences of this ontological complication of thought and literature by examining the figure of the writer driven to anguish by writing who finds that it is only in writing that he can respond to this anguish, for “it is in the use of expression that he coincides best with the nothingness without expression that he has become” [FP: 10/2]. Seemingly, it is only by such a response that the writer can in some way alleviate his anguish or, at least, not exacerbate it, but the qualification of this coincidence is peculiar, as if there were a means of making such qualitative assessments, or a position of approximation that could be deemed “best.” But this sentence is not so much qualitative as descriptive, as it only indicates how the writer may respond to the question of why he writes, and, although he is not able to produce an answer to this question, he can, by way of a certain kind of writing, find an approach within which this question can be more readily thought and thereby find a partial response. As such, this sentence enables us to formulate more clearly the issue of what, for Blanchot, writing is for, in the sense of what it is inclined toward, rather than any goal or purpose. Consequently, there is no sense here of the unlimited nothingness that occupies the writer extinguishing thought, or the necessity of thinking, as its demands cannot be evaded. Nor can thought remove or dissolve this nothingness—it can neither be hidden nor sublated—thus the dual exigency facing the writer is to think of that which he is attempting to write while writing of that which he is attempting to think. Hence, thought and writing share the contours of this trajectory as they unfold but also deflect each other, and it is within the contortions of this turning that the writer “coincides best with the nothingness that he has become.” Although this turning is interminable it is not nihilistic, for insofar as it persists there is thought, which thus lives on in the form of a release into the slenderest yet

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most intractable affirmation: that there is survival as long as this turning persists. This is not an affirmation of the survival of anything, which would remain too close to the formal determination or telos of human hope but mere survival, which can only persist for as long as this mutual turning persists and is thus stranger and more obscure and closer to an impersonal life that turns about and fragments itself. The key aspect of this encounter of thought and literature comes from the way that it crosses the philosophical and the ontological and in doing so indicates how their interrelation involves and derives from the delineation of limitation and unlimitedness. This primordial relation to and of the unlimited is, as Thomas and Kant both discovered and as Blanchot suggests in a later piece on Hesiod, constituted by an ambiguous repulsion [CPJ: §27, 141]. For repulsion, as a “force that repeats itself by going back on itself [se répète à rebours],” is both the repetition of force and the force of repetition. So in the mythical relation of Earth and Chaos that Hesiod describes, wherein lies the border between the limited and unlimited, the relation between unity and disunity is understood by way of the doubling inherent to repulsion as a force that turns back on itself. That is, repulsion, as the turning away from Chaos within Chaos, marks the border by which difference or limitation as such emerges through this repetition à rebours, such that repulsion is the means by which the limitless (Chaos) gives form to the limited (Earth) through an internal diversion without beginning or end. However, the duplicity of Chaos—as that which Earth is differentiated from and that which makes possible this differentiation—is such that the mythic narrative of its division is also marked by duplicity and so brings this same repetition and endless deviation to words, and as a result the duplicity of repulsion is recapitulated in the concomitant relation of muthos and logos [Am: 208–13/183–87]. Thus, as with the effects of magnetic repulsion, the encounter with the unlimited is perpetually repelled so that its relation is constituted as an infinite diversion or errancy in which the character of this turning away is one of decline, a down-going or transdescendence, which recurs across Blanchot’s writings in the motifs of weakness, forgetting, weariness, dying, waiting, and writing itself. The importance of these failing movements is that they describe an irregular curvature through which Blanchot comes to understand the relation of philosophy and ontology, where the relation of the one to the other is not continuous with its reverse, as they do not correspond, but is constituted by an infinite turning away, which like Orpheus and Eurydice (or Diana and Actaeon) is given form in narrative through the endless declination of the literary.

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Recapitulation: Bataille and Klossowski Given what has been said about this intertwining of philosophy and literature a very simple but troubling question arises when we are confronted with a text like that of Thomas l’Obscur: how do we respond to such a text when its nature is so unclear? As the passage above has indicated, Blanchot’s writing has an uncertain origin and status, for while it appears fictional it proceeds by way of a theoretical interrogation, and although it suggests a philosophical inquiry this is done through the mode of narrative writing. As a result it is not possible to relate to such a text as either literary or philosophical, since it operates between the two by explicitly examining their interrelation, which is not just a case of how each gives rise to the other but also how each undermines the other. Thus the borderland of Blanchot’s prose is seemingly that of the experience from which the determinations of literature and philosophy emerge, and so it bears their possibilities in an indeterminate form—that is, as aesthetic and conceptual possibilities. While Blanchot has made clear the consequences of this indeterminacy for the writer, for the reader there is a different but equally compelling set of difficulties relating to the problem of response. Although there are points of entry, as has been shown through the examination of the spatial dimensions of the narrative, these remain partial in their approach, so in order to find the broadest way of reading such a text in its uncertainty, by coming to accede to the reflexive demands it makes on reading as such, we must turn to a short piece by Mallarmé, which, although formidably obscure in itself, Blanchot seems to have extrapolated in his depiction of Thomas’s encounter with the night. In Mallarmé’s drama Igitur, the protagonist, following a family ritual, descends into the tomb in order to take his own life at the hour of midnight. The density of Mallarmé’s prose makes it impossible to be clear about exactly what happens next, but it would seem that Igitur does not find the possibility of suicide but its impossibility, for he finds the absence of his life reflected in the substantial nothingness of the night, and with his position assimilated to midnight as the impassable hour the event cannot now take place, as there is only its endless approach in which he, like Thomas, merges with the force of the night as the refusal to eventuate. So, when he comes to roll the dice as the ritual demands, its results are nullified, as there is now no difference between chance and necessity, and having thereby triumphed over the choice between life and death he can lie down on the tomb, wherein he finds a new power of absencing without end, an infinite nothingness, which thus becomes the work of the poet himself (Igitur means “thus”). In a letter from November 1869, Mallarmé wrote that he An Image of Thought in Thomas l’Obscur

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was hoping to defeat impotence through itself in this work, as like kills/ cures like, similia similibus.12 Such an intricate model of reflexivity, where the attempted actions of author and protagonist seem to overlap and cross-refer, demonstrates in microcosm the difficulty of a text like Thomas l’Obscur, for the experience of this interrelation has a profoundly unsettling effect on any attempt to respond to it, as was found by Blanchot’s first readers. In his review of Bataille’s L’expérience intérieure, Sartre recalled a remark from Camus who had said that Bataille’s book was “the exact translation and commentary [la traduction et le commentaire exact] of Thomas l’Obscur” [S1: 183]. For Sartre, this remark only confirmed his suspicions about Bataille’s work: that it somehow converted a literary fantasy into a mystical philosophy, and although the former may have some value as a work of writing, converting it in this way not only exposed the reactionary abstractions of this type of fiction but also revealed itself as philosophically misguided, if not obscurantist. But it does not take much effort to see that there may be some truth to Camus’s remark despite its apparent frivolity, precisely insofar as the comparison of two sui generis texts casts light on the manner in which they each constitute themselves out of similarly indeterminate experiences—that is, it is in their singularity that they can be fruitfully compared. As such, the specification of the relation as that of an “exact translation and commentary” suggests something of the necessity incumbent upon a reading of Thomas l’Obscur. As if Bataille could only respond to Blanchot’s text by rewriting it in a new form and in doing so sought to respond not only to the novel but also to that which it was attempting to respond to itself, the experience of this borderland of indeterminacy, which would mean that the novel could itself be understood, as Bataille later wrote, as the “cry” of the il y a [EPE: 292/168]. Thus there is no form of continuity between the two works, for if Bataille is recapitulating the manner in which the work itself arises, then its form emerges each time as new, as an interruption that obliterates the fact of its emergence in order to rewrite its passage, the passage from the first to the (impersonal) third person, as Blanchot noted, in which a space of ambivalence opens up. In this way the work is preserved from becoming fixed but at the cost of its development; instead, it keeps returning to the moment of its appearance in an attempt to restage it in its singular formation. The work’s appearance is then ongoing, insofar as it instantiates itself with the demand that this instantiation be repeated. It is thus always detached from its own event even though, by presenting its image, it also stages its appearance, which is never fully achieved and thereby leaves its demands unfulfilled. The peculiar temporality of the work in relation to 128

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the event is then recapitulated in the relation of the work to its readers, along with the demand for its rewriting, which is also never complete. The work thus opens up an ongoing temporal breach, concomitant to its spatial materialization, which is its endless present, what Blanchot called the event, its approach, and its site, and thus the narrative of its never consummated moment.13 This is the time into which Igitur falls (like Gracchus), but it is also the contemporaneity of the manifesto with its demand for repetition, for when such demands can never be fulfilled then there is no alternative but to reissue them, just as there is no chance to move on from the moment in which Igitur finds himself, as there is no narrative progression from one moment to the next, so there is only the necessity to repeat it, time and again. The work then finds itself to be autonomous in its singular temporality but also fragmentary in its lack of completion, but as a literary work in particular it is not just this material breach but also its narrative, the event and its image, leaving it undecidable which aspect of its semblance we are confronting, since in its emergence it is already the image of itself (like the cadaver, or the subterranean night that Thomas encounters), its own recapitulation, and so it can only be repeated by something that is its translation and commentary. This slippage between different modes of writing is precisely what made Sartre squeamish, thinking that what he was witnessing in Bataille’s writings was either a sleight of hand or a psychotic delirium. For the demand of literature, the claim that it makes, calls for its recapitulation, as it can only find a response in what is the “same” insofar as this restates the (sensual-cognitive) duplicity of the original in a different mode of the same language. This would be the nature of the exactness that Camus detects: the fact that each text bears an experience that is as sui generis as the other. To explore this point more closely I will examine Klossowski’s notion of simulacra as it was developed in Le bain de Diane, in which objects become images of themselves. Simulation, as Foucault pointed out in his essay on Klossowski, is to be at the same time as oneself but shifted slightly to one side, to be oneself in a different place and thus at an immeasurable distance, outside and yet with, at a point without distance, combining simultaneity with similitude, simulation with dissimulation.14 It could not be said that they ever met, that would have been impossible, and yet the tale is of nothing other than an encounter. She is divine, as beautiful and inaccessible as the moon, and yet she is in this place, and furthermore, she is naked. She is goddess of the hunt and also the eternal maiden, she will never be caught by anyone, and yet she is trapped here in his gaze, he, a mortal and a hunter, and thus her supplicant. For each of them this will never have taken place as there is no site in which the An Image of Thought in Thomas l’Obscur

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divine could appear naked, or in which the human could witness this. He has strayed from the path, seeking relaxation after the trials of the hunt, only to find that she has done the same, but surely the divine has no need for relaxation as it has no body to tire? Nevertheless, drawn by a strange compulsion she has appeared and taken on the form of a woman in order to bathe in this pool away from the paths of men. Each has stepped into another place, a place constituted by an encounter that could never take place, by the gaze that breaches it. She, aided by her nymphs, undresses and descends into the water, her divine body revealed, and he, concealed by the foliage, sees her. This reversal in which the unseen mortal spies the naked form of the divine is the violation of the encounter, its opening, which just as violently seals itself, for she sees him concealed at the poolside. The impossibility of their gazes meeting is suddenly exposed and then destroyed in the shattering brilliance of the water she splashes in his eyes, thereby concealing herself and blinding him. But this momentary recapture of divine right has to be sealed, hence the curse she pronounces: “Now you may tell that you saw me here unclothed, / If you can tell” (Nunc tibi me posito visam velamine narres / Si poteris narrare, licet).15 The offer of speech, the tale of this impossible encounter, is itself impossible, but it is nevertheless offered, just as he was offered the doubly impossible vision itself, but what words could capture this transcendent vision in its nudity? “Here” will never be found in language, what happened will be forever lost as this will never have been a site open to anything but divine words, for in hearing them he turns into a stag and, unable to speak, to respond or to cry out, he flees from the terrible spot. His own hounds tear him to pieces, his muted cries and numbed gaze lost once more. And yet there is this tale, which secretes its impossibility between the vision and the voice as nothing but its image in its shimmering splendor and violation. For Klossowski, the image of the naked Diana is the form the divine takes, “the intermediary demon,” which in its dissimulation bears the opening and the closure of the encounter in a fierce immaculacy that can never be revoked.16 Thus, it is this demonic image that brings both hunter and prey into contingency, into an impossible contact that will never have been and yet will endlessly recur, for the tale itself is nothing other than this image. The strength of Klossowski’s account lies in the way that this recurrence is drawn out as Diana again and again finds herself inexplicably tired and dusty after the hunt and feels compelled to expose her divine body, just as Actaeon also finds himself inexplicably drawn to the same spot as though he had some presentiment of the encounter. Over and over the same act is played out, and each time it will be dissolved in muteness and forgetting as its own impossibility tears it apart, leaving no re130

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mainder except the trace of the gazes as they met, and the words that captured this violation and reflected it, but still it will be drawn onward to its inevitable reenactment, as if its curse would never cease to ring out, commanding and defeating any response and leaving only its obliteration.17 With its oppositions and negations we might see the tale as dialectical were it not for its interminable failure to resolve itself. The demon is the focus of this endless reversal as it holds the incompatibilities of human and animal, male and female, mortal and divine within the image of the tale itself, which like a Möbius strip invisibly slips from one side to the other, revealing the incompossibility of the narration and the vision, alongside the ineluctable necessity of their coupling. By way of this image, the vision and the narration reverts (without transition) to the nonencounter and the loss of speech, even as this loss of speech again reverts by giving evidence (by its mute narration) of the vision and thus the encounter. But is this not the secret desire of Actaeon? To not just possess Diana, but to experience the dissolution that comes with it, and yet also to be able to remain himself such that he can recount this experience? In other words it is a desire for an experience of the loss of experience, indissolubly coupled rather than sublated, and in the image of the tale this is exposed as its interminable reversal. Thus, Klossowski has provided a narrative in which we are presented with the impossibility of narration as it relates its own inversions and undoing; Diana possessed and unpossessed, the impossibility of the combination reflected in the undecidable nature of Klossowski’s work itself, which is equally narrative and tableau, and the narrative of a tableau, and vice versa. Hence, we cannot determine whether the encounter is there to gaze upon, as Actaeon desires, or to recount, as he also desires. Both are equally apparent, as neither can be posited or negated as origin or reenactment; there is only the demonic image, which has no end, and so there is only the endless return of its (non)experience, for if Actaeon knows, then he cannot tell, and if he tells, then he cannot have known. However, the repetition of this aporia is what makes its coupling a necessity, since Actaeon will know and will tell, but never together: the narrative is this experience (that nothing is) beyond language. For Klossowski this null-space of the narrative where Diana and Actaeon see each other is not just its image but also death: the site at which finitude is breached from both its “sides” and that just as quickly withdraws, erasing itself but leaving this mark behind as the mark of death in words: “you may tell . . . If you can.” Trapped in this pronouncement Actaeon waits, seeing Diana, possessing her, being torn apart, changing, crying out, just as she, idly bathing, succumbs to him, changes and cries out, tears herself away, all at once, again and again. The tale has no interior, no story, it is An Image of Thought in Thomas l’Obscur

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all edge, dissimulating itself endlessly, such that in it Diana and Actaeon are repeated as themselves and as other, made and unmade in these images, perpetually returning to this displacement and ceaselessly dividing and recoiling on themselves. Deleuze’s reading of Klossowski sees in this transformation a relation that disrupts the conventional notion of identification in which identity is posited through exclusion by opening it to a form of disjunctive syllogism without ground, as in this relation “the disjunction now signifies that each thing is opened up to the infi nity of predicates through which it passes, on the condition that it lose its identity as concept and as self . . . the disjunction is affirmed for itself without ceasing to be a disjunction.”18 For what does Actaeon know? Nothing, it would seem; over and over like a recidivist he returns to the site repeatedly, compulsively, as he is unable to ever learn or remember. In Klossowski’s retelling this endless recurrence is compressed so that at each point it starts anew, for at the point at which the tale reaches the site of its occurrence the whole sequence becomes virtually apparent, along with its variants. But at this point, which is that which attracts the tale and its participants, its language unravels such that it dissimulates the possibility of concluding it. As it approaches the site of its occurrence . . . language dissolves—that is, there is a division or rupture at the point of the encounter that separates Actaeon from the tale, for he remains on the former side of the above ellipsis, condemned to perpetually reenact the approach to the site, but on the other side of the ellipsis the image of the tale itself dissimulates the encounter in the same movement that causes its language to unravel. After all, what is it that is seen? It is not the goddess herself but simply the form in which she has appeared, a form, moreover, that the demon has plucked from Actaeon’s imagination. But Actaeon himself has no greater substance: grandson of Cadmus, nephew of Semele, and thus cousin of Dionysus, his place is so overdetermined that he is no more than the name for the imperative that the myth bears, which is simply that of the gaze itself, from which and to which the narrative ceaselessly turns, sending out from its breach the endlessly repeated images of Actaeon and Diana. Th is is the significance of what Klossowski calls the simulacrum, which is that image of the event that both compels it to appear and yet dissembles that image in its appearance—uncovering a rift within the image whose unbridgeable inner distance is captured in the proximity of the nonencounter between Diana and Actaeon—which is thus nothing other than the récit itself as the provocation of the undelimited and the site of its approach. This duplicity is also seen by Klossowski in Bataille’s writings, which seem to inhabit this inner rift between compulsion and dissembling.19 For 132

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at the very point at which Bataille’s thought carries him in the drive toward the annihilation of thought in nonknowledge, language unravels but also reemerges, which is the basis of its reappearance on the other side of the ellipsis in the sentence “as it approaches the site of its occurrence . . . language dissolves”—for although language dissolves in the rupture of the encounter, it reemerges as the thought that language is dissolving, which in turn becomes the thought that language is dissolving. But as a result, the transgression that doubly disabled the possibility of the encounter is unraveled in the same manner as its language, for the transgressive impossibility of the event itself becomes undermined by its recurrence, such that there is no transgression, no breaching of any mortal limits. Instead, and by way of this narrative step (pas de récit), there is only suspension and return, which removes the encounter from both limits and their transgression, for from the point of the horizon, as Blanchot pointed out in regard to the mythological thinking of Hesiod, there is neither horizon nor its lack but only recurrence or repulsion. The same ambivalence is found in Thomas’s experience, when he comes up against a double of himself in the image of the night just as his thought is subjected to an unlimitedness that hollows it out, and with the notion that Blanchot treats literature as an idea, I have attempted to think the interrelation of these two aspects. For the idea, as an image of unlimitedness, comprises both the problem that thought encounters at the limits of sense and the deflection philosophy endures at the limits of presentation, which is what Thomas is exposed to in the hollowing of his thought and the encounter with the nocturnal simulacrum of himself. Thus it is by way of this double image that literature bears the philosophico-ontological duplicity of unlimitedness into narrative as the endless turning away of repulsion and, in doing so, persists in the autonomy of a neutral and impersonal life. It is for this reason that the simulacrum that Thomas encounters is later given the name by which the book itself is known: Death, I understood by death the accident that changed Plato into the supreme banality, was a crude metamorphosis beside the indiscernible, incomprehensible nullity that I nevertheless attached to the word Thomas. Was it then a fantasy, this enigma, the work of a word maliciously formed to destroy all words? But if I advanced within myself, hurrying with great labour towards my exact noon, I experienced as a tragic certainty at the centre of the living Thomas the inaccessible proximity of that null-Thomas [Thomas-néant], and the more the shadow of my thought diminished, the more I conceived of myself in this clarity without fault [défaut] as the possible and An Image of Thought in Thomas l’Obscur

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very willing host of this obscure Thomas. In the plenitude of my reality I believed I was touching the unreal. [TP: 302–3; cf. TN: 112–13/115] When Sartre complains about the unrestrained commingling of literature and philosophy in Bataille’s writing and Camus remarks that Bataille’s book is a translation and commentary of Blanchot’s work, the same issue is at stake. For what both Sartre and Camus find so disturbing is precisely this experience in which thinking and writing translate and comment on themselves by way of each other. This imbrication of literature and philosophy arises whenever thinking seeks to give thought to itself or writing seeks to coincide with itself, and although these attempts only lead to disruption and alienation, there is still a generative opening that takes place out of this self-distancing, something that is extensively explored in the work of Beckett, as will be shown. It is this impersonal life that is affirmed in the image-like idea of literature, but as a material image of unlimitedness it exposes thought to a problem that can never coincide with thinking but persists alongside it, provoking and disrupting its emergence. As Blanchot has indicated, it is only in seeking to respond to this image/idea that thought can think itself, and although this means that thought will be disrupted by doing so, it also means that it can then be affirmed as a  thought of literature. This is what literature is for Blanchot, since by bringing thinking to bear upon this image, thought itself becomes exposed to its impersonal life.

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5

Indifferent Reading in Aminadab

What is perhaps most profoundly significant about Blanchot’s writings, both fictional and critical, is that they appear to harbor a mode of ontological thought that arises from outside philosophy. Th is is not just a rethinking of the nature of literature but a way of thinking ontology more generally that proceeds from literature. That is, Blanchot seems to come to an understanding of the nature of things as such through his work on literary things. Consequently, his thought also has implications for ontology as a branch of philosophy, since it arises from the ostensibly nonphilosophical sphere of literature. As has been shown, Blanchot’s first novel developed as an exploration of a certain kind of material space; to extend this analysis in more detail I will now turn to his second novel, Aminadab. Although Aminadab is one of Blanchot’s less widely discussed works, it is particularly important because it pursues, more forcefully and perhaps more effectively than Thomas l’Obscur, a thorough interrogation of the space of literature as an “imaginary” space—that is, a space of images. This is possible because Aminadab bears a consistent narrative, rather than the series of discrete episodes that appear in Thomas l’Obscur, and as a result Blanchot is able for the first time to develop a narrative whose structure and space are fully integrated, and it is this interrelation that is the basis for his more condensed récits after the war, so that the writing of Aminadab is a key moment in his early works. A major impetus for Blanchot’s attempt to write in this uniquely integrated manner was the challenge he saw issued by Mallarmé’s ideas, for whom the peculiar nature and status of 135

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literature, as comprising a space that was absolute, was an issue of the greatest philosophical and ontological significance. Not only did this mean that literature should be treated as a serious mode of philosophical inquiry in itself, but that the nature of literary space was singular in the extreme. What, Blanchot seems to have thought, are the implications of such an extremity, not just for literature but in general? Necessarily, such an extreme singularity would affect how we approach literature and how it relates to us, and from this comes the idea of literature as absolutely indifferent, for, as has been noted, Blanchot also sees the space of literature as having its own existence, a “life” of its own, that will be addressed not just through Hegel’s sentence about the life of the Spirit enduring death and maintaining itself in it (which is central to his 1947– 48 essay “La littérature et le droit à la mort”) but also as a survival, an impersonal living on or “afterlife” (survivre), that surpasses any biological concept of life. It is thus that literature becomes an alien, neutre force, absolute and “workless” (désœuvrée), but through its effects on the imagination it is able to draw us into an uncertain relation to its indifference. The role of the imagination thus becomes critical, for it is by way of the imagination that the literary space of images makes itself known to us in its indifference. As a consequence it is necessary to look at the status of the imagination more closely, and it is very likely that Blanchot’s understanding of it was influenced by Heidegger’s reading of Kant.1 If so, it would seem that two aspects of Heidegger’s version of Kant have become significant for Blanchot: first, the role that the imagination plays in integrating or synthesizing the manifold of sensory intuitions and the concepts of the understanding; and second, the notion of the image as an autonomous appearing, a presencing at a distance, that “looks” at us and that is both apprehended and schematized by the imagination. Key for Heidegger in this regard is the fact that this apparition is not of a pregiven object but is rather the actual mode of the object’s appearance, since the imagination in its schematizing opens the transcendental horizon of appearance as such so that there is nothing “behind” this presencing image; it is not an image of something else but the thing itself. So, in apprehending such an apparition, we are confronted with the factical presencing of “what is” in its finitude, its ungrounded grounding, which can thus only be figured as a measureless absence. In this way the schematizing of the imagination does not only receive the image but also produces it—that is, it brings it forth as an original rather than a derivative image, which becomes aligned for Heidegger with the originary self-affecting opening out of time. In his early critical writings Blanchot has not begun to associate the image explicitly with the 136

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cadaver, as he will in his 1951 paper on the imaginary; instead, the autonomous appearing of the image is considered by way of Mallarmé’s ideas about literary space. For through Mallarmé, Blanchot is able to translate Heidegger’s phenomenological thoughts into questions about literature while conversely finding through literature a way of pursuing these philosophical questions about the appearances of things. As a result, the two aspects Blanchot may have gleaned from Heidegger’s reading of Kant can be seen in his understanding of the imaginary practice of literature—as integral to the possibility of thought’s relation to the world of things—and the fact that its works are marked by an appearance of indeterminate remoteness. Thus the way that the space and the structure of the narrative in Aminadab converge arises from Blanchot’s attempt to develop a critique of literature (as a space of images) by literature. In fact, it is very difficult to read his first two novels as anything other than extended critical investigations, around which his later readings and writings will continue to circle. But although this approach resembles a transcendental critique of literature, the ideas that Blanchot has drawn from Heidegger and Mallarmé mean that it is an approach grounded in an experience of the concrete finitude of thinking and writing. Thus, this literary critique not only draws out the relation between philosophy and literature but also indicates how thinking and writing are not distinct from the sphere of ontology but are inextricably linked to it, such that in their investigations of things and their appearances they become affected by them to the extent (as will be shown in the last part of this chapter) of becoming like them, for this is the manner in which images and imagination come together. It is thus clear how close Blanchot is to the thinking of the early Romantics, but also how far: how literature in its “syncopation” of thought indicates the conditions of both the possibility and the impossibility of appearance. But the way that Blanchot arrives at this perspective is equally important, for although his inquiries begin from familiar concerns with the conditions of possibility of literature and the role of negativity and anxiety in its emergence, he proceeds by pursuing these themes through literature—that is, he reads Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, for example, by way of Paulhan, Mallarmé, and Kafka. In other words, although Blanchot is attempting to understand the ontology of literature—the mode and status of its existence, its conditions of possibility, and the nature and role of the imagination in its coming to be—these terms and procedures are themselves contested by the fact that literature is the very milieu of his inquiry—that in which it finds its beginning and end. So, what he comes to find has significance not only in the areas of aesthetics, ontology, and Indifferent Reading in Aminadab

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epistemology but also for the discipline of philosophy as such, since what he uncovers is an alternative mode of metaphysical thought, of the nature and ground of things, which derives from the space of literature rather than philosophy. For although his writings share the concerns of philosophy, they put in question the form and method of philosophical inquiry by way of their involvement in literature, which instead reveals something that can be more accurately described as an experience. It is this experience that prevents Blanchot’s work from being assimilated to the idea that it is simply a new form of philosophy, in the same way that Kierkegaard or Nietzsche can be said to be pursuing philosophy by other means, as the form of Blanchot’s writings, both critical and fictional, is one in which the writer’s own experience is involved to such an extent that it lacks the ability to make systematic claims or determinations. Understanding what is implied by this experience will be the focus of this chapter, but its effects can be shown in brief by the way that the form of Blanchot’s writings changes over time. As Rainer Stillers has emphasized, the relation between the two versions of Thomas l’Obscur can be seen as a paradigm for the movement of Blanchot’s work as a whole, for it is not the case that the second, much-reduced version of Thomas l’Obscur is simply an abbreviation of the first version.2 Instead, in his preface to the second, “nouvelle” version, Blanchot states that it can be considered as being “entirely the same” as the first version, “if one has reason not to distinguish between the figure and that which is or believes itself to be its centre, each time the complete figure expresses no more than the search for an imaginary centre” [TN: 7/53]—that is, roughly speaking, if there is no distinction between the figure of a narrative and its center, when that figure is understood as a search for the center, then this implies that the center is no longer a point but a (imaginary) search for the (imaginary) center. Thus, by refiguring the center as that which is its search, the distance between the figure of a narrative and its center is collapsed, since the position of the center has been removed, such that what would appear to lie within is itself marked by a relation of exteriority and distance. In a strange inversion of Pascal’s description of God as a circle, Blanchot finds that the experience of the space of literature is one in which the center is nowhere and the circumference everywhere. So, although the second version of Thomas l’Obscur is about a quarter of the size of the first version, which might lead us to think that it would be more focused, Blanchot instead proposes that we see it as the same as the first version insofar as both are structured in such a way that their apparent center or focus is coextensive with the overall figure of the work that purports to seek after this center. And this is

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precisely the relation of convergence between the structure and the space of the narrative that was elaborated in Aminadab.3 The relation outlined here is intrinsic to Blanchot’s understanding of literary space as one in which the search for the imaginary center not only constitutes the space of literature as a space of images but is, in turn, constituted by it. For this space takes place neither here nor there but only at an irreducible remove (écart), somewhat like the immeasurable and unplaceable depth of images in a mirror wherein surface and depth seem both to coincide and not coincide, and it is as such that it is the very milieu of the literary. And this movement, which enabled the first version of Thomas l’Obscur to become transformed into the new version while remaining the same, was first realized in Aminadab, such that it was by way of the writing of Aminadab that the second version of Thomas l’Obscur (and all that it entailed) became a possibility. Consequently, it is this same movement that is being pursued in the transformation from novel to récit, and essay to fragment, which structures Blanchot’s work up until L’attente l’oubli, where the relation between figure and center has become disrupted to the point of no longer being useful as a guide.4 The overall effect of this convergence between the structure and the space of the work is to focus our attention on how writing, in tending toward the space of the image as that which is essential to the literary, constitutes and is constituted by its distance or remove. Mallarmé and the Space of Writing Blanchot’s understanding of literature as a space of images is the key development of his early thinking, which is then summarized in his 1951 article on the two sides of the imaginary. So, to appreciate the significance of this theme, it is necessary to trace its emergence in his writings prior to this date. Although concern with the image is present from the very beginning of Blanchot’s fiction, it only emerges as a theme in his critical writings from 1943 (in part spurred by his disagreements with Sartre’s and Bachelard’s discussions of the imaginary, which would also inspire Levinas’s reflections on the image in “La réalité et son ombre”), particularly in reference to his readings of Mallarmé. The most substantial of these early articles is “Mallarmé et l’art du roman,” which was the last piece to be included in Faux pas. Blanchot begins this essay by returning to Mallarmé’s letter of November 1885 (in which he wrote to Verlaine about his ambitions for the Book) and finds “that it is still entirely new,” as if it were somehow protected and unapproachable. Mallarmé writes:

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apart from the prose pieces and verse. . . . I have always dreamed and attempted something else. . . . What? It’s difficult to say: a book quite simply, in many volumes, a book that would be a book, architectural and premeditated, and not a collection of chance inspirations, however marvelous. . . . I’d go further, I’d say: the Book, persuaded that at bottom there is only one, unwittingly attempted by whoever has written, even Geniuses. The orphic explanation of the Earth, which is the sole duty of the poet and the literary game par excellence: for the rhythm of the book, though impersonal and living, even in its pagination, is juxtaposed with the equations of this dream, or Ode.5 If we reread this letter “naively,” as Blanchot suggests, the purity and necessity of its ambitions leads to a “delicious” unease, for it seems to be “giving in its reserve infinitely more than it promises,” as though the extent of its implications were being masked by the clarity of its presentation—to which he provocatively adds (given the fact of his own authorship) that it is surprising that no novelists have taken up Mallarmé’s idea of the Book for their own writings. After what Mallarmé had written on the feasibility of the project, this failure hardly seems surprising, but, as Blanchot proceeds to point out, it is precisely because Mallarmé’s letter is charged with “such a profound conception of language, such a broad view of the vocation of words, such a universal explication of literature that no genre of creation can find itself excluded from it.” Only if the writer of novels were to separate himself from these profound claims, and thus from his existence as a writer, would he then be able to abdicate himself from the project for the Book [FP: 197–98/165–66]. Quite suddenly, Mallarmé and the novel have been brought together in a claim that is unavoidably ontological, for by taking the project for the Book at face value it becomes an inescapable demand on writing as such. And, as Blanchot again rather innocently remarks by invoking the attitude of Hegelian speculation, despite the strength of this claim, the task for the novelist “will be easy, if he is prepared to break with most of his habits and accept for a moment going, with Mallarmé, to the principles of language.” Language for Mallarmé, as Blanchot had shown in his earlier papers, is not a system of expression or medium of communication, but a force for transformation and creation and the creation of enigmas rather than their solutions.6 The writer must take note of this point, for, as Blanchot states in what will become a signature phrase for him, the “consequences of this thought obliged Mallarmé to go very far,” since language “is that which founds human reality and the universe,” as it is that by which human existence reveals itself to itself, it is thus not transcendent but “the very form 140

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of transcendence” and as such is as impenetrable and as hidden as the universe itself [FP: 199–200/166–67]. The Book would thus take the place of what is, of both existence and the universe, as it would pursue this absolute reality of language to the point of voiding itself, such that it would be a language without expression, a language of silence that would remain an enigma. The brilliance of this night is what lies behind Mallarmé’s obscurity, which also indicates how it is by way of Mallarmé that Blanchot will come to read Hegel and Heidegger. For the radical nature of the negation that this absolute language of poetry brings is such that it destroys those facets of everyday language that concern meaning and replaces them with nothingness, an absence, so that the empty word becomes an image of itself. Such an ambition seems perverse or unhinged, as it would lead to an abandoning of language in favor of the silence of the absolute in which nothing is expressed, and as such it would seem irrational as a project for the novelist. But although there is no reason to fear (or even, alas, to hope, as Blanchot adds) that the world of letters might be depleted by the tragic effects of this ambition, this is not because it is simply an impossible ambition but because its difficulties are intrinsic to it, and so they never decrease [FP: 201/168–69]. And yet it is by way of these difficulties that arise to defeat the novelist that he uncovers the secret heart of the novel, from which he can then take a cue for its existence as absolute, since it is in its resistances and refusals that the work reveals itself most profoundly. The absolute novel is one that exists solely by itself, in the most rigorous, necessary existence possible, but in doing so it exists outside thought, beyond the world of either readers or writers [FP: 203/170]. Although this is not the first time that Blanchot discusses the image, it is here that he does so in association with a space of negation, which is the essential aspect to which he will return, as in his next article on Mallarmé over two years later, “Mallarmé et le langage,” which was renamed “Le mythe de Mallarmé” when it appeared in La part du feu. The myth Blanchot is referring to is one propagated by the work of Valéry, in which Mallarmé is understood primarily to have been a theoretician of poetry and language whose work awaited Valéry’s hand for its ideas to be systematized and clarified. Blanchot seeks to avoid such a scholarly reading by returning to the actuality of Mallarmé’s writings, which reveal the complexity involved in the relation of negativity and language. For while language destroys the material reality of things through its power of abstraction, the value that then appears in the site of this abstraction is itself destroyed by the word’s materiality. This double negation is not a dead end in which the dual powers of language cancel each other out but an instability that, as Blanchot again asserts, “must lead us rather far” [PF: 38/31]. In disposing Indifferent Reading in Aminadab

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of the real presence of things, words do not convert this absence into an ideal meaning, but instead appear in this absence as images of materiality, such that language as the form of transcendence is a material rather than a negative absolute, which is as far from Heidegger’s thinking as it is from Hegel’s. It is precisely in this repeated injunction to go further that Blanchot indicates the essential and enigmatic spatiality of these images, since they do not exist in any geometric space, as their place can only be designated as “further” and their distance as “far.” In fact, these images would seem to be constituted by this strange distance, as distance is not that in which they appear but that which is their appearance. If this is the reality of words, then this has important consequences not just for poetry, but also more generally; for, as Blanchot goes on to say, thought is a function of this reality of words [PF: 39/32]. While this opens the door to a Kantian reading in which reason is a function of imagination, any such account would have to bear in mind that the imagination is always of language for Blanchot: it operates from language and to language, and the words of this language are fundamentally evasive. But as Blanchot wrote at the end of an earlier article on Mallarmé, in which he reviewed a work entitled Mallarmé l’Obscur that was published in the same year as his first book, “Is there a purer torment than this critique of reason by itself and this division during which it experiences itself in the vicinity of that which it cannot touch? It receives the impression, not of being deprived, but of infinitely approaching that which it accepts never to be able to grasp in its own way” [FP: 139/111]. Much of this account recalls the post-Kantian thought of Schlegel and Novalis in its discovery of the constitutive instability of the relation between language and thought, but Blanchot takes this further by finding in this instability “a perspective of parentheses opening themselves one into another to infinity and evading themselves without end,” as each unstable, fugitive image appears and negates rather than affirms itself [PF: 40/33]. Consequently, silence becomes not just the risk of such a language but its very condition, as it is a question of the writer seeking to find a way of turning language toward this endless evasion of presence, which, as Mallarmé insisted, can only be followed by way of words rather than by sheer muteness, which is why it is a question of writing rather than speech. Moreover, this is the way in which language becomes, in the Book, absolute, impersonified, neutre, not the summation of everything, but its reverse, the “hollow” of its totality, an “enigmatic force” that persistently realizes absence through the expression of negation, thereby endlessly withdrawing into itself but never succeeding [PF: 43/36]. Words thus become the traces 142

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of this disappearance without end, but in doing so they become like the material things they had initially removed, such that writing takes the place of what it has displaced and becomes “a qualified space, a living region, a kind of sky” [PF: 45/38]. In the last pages of this article the attempts to adumbrate the nature of this absolute proliferate and circle around references to both its spatiality and its vitality, for language is a “pure power [pouvoir] of contestation and transfiguration” and “an incarnate potentiality [puissance],” which is how Blanchot can then use the image of a living region [PF: 44/37]. It is important to emphasize this point, as he never forgets that language is creative, despite the tendency (that becomes stronger over time) to see this by way of contestation, such that the vitality of language to name and transform is to be understood through its negations and evasions. Thus the power ascribed to poetry is not dropped in the light of this Mallarméan reading but reinstated within the grounds of an inherently resistant language, which provides us with a way of understanding how the seemingly nihilistic tenor of much of Blanchot’s writing does not arise because the night or the outside is the endless negation of everything, for these are instead that by which writing persists and survives. In Bataille’s terms, there is life because there is a part du feu, the fire’s share, that which is withdrawn and by way of which there is that which “is” [SN: 34/xxxiii]. Language may have become a living region after this interrogation, but the nature of its life and its site is unclear. Seemingly, it is the life of language as a power of contestation and transfiguration: the restlessness of its own negativity as it endures this negation and maintains itself in it and the affirmation of this infinite power of the negative as it endlessly reverses itself. But the manner in which Blanchot rereads Hegel through Mallarmé places the possibility of recuperating this negativity under great strain, as he insists on pursuing the radical ambiguity of negativity to its utmost, for in endlessly reversing itself it creates a space of dispersal and vacillation that cannot be gathered into any summation. What emerges under the force of this negativity is the emptiness or weakness of an absencing that can never be complete and is thus a void of never-ending, irrecuperable loss. In a sense, it is this space that is the “life” to which Blanchot is referring, hence his manner of paraphrasing this living region as a qualified space, indicating that spacing itself is a vital movement. But this is still a language apart, removed by an absolute divergence (écart) at the level of presence, which nevertheless traverses our own existence critically. It is thus that it can be seen as the very form of transcendence but also of skepticism (as Levinas would later insist, but which Blanchot would have been aware of from his 1930 mémoire on the Skeptics), as its spacing never offers any transfiguration that is not also suspended in its movement; it only offers Indifferent Reading in Aminadab

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“a kind of sky.” It is this intrinsic ambiguity that brings language into the same situation as that of things and the dead (as he will explore later), which indicate that the spatiotemporal materiality of the image is constituted by a withdrawal without end.7 Blanchot’s interest in pursuing this issue through fiction now becomes easier to understand; for the novel, and later the récit, become the way in which this living region can be brought to experience, particularly in the experiments of writers like Sade, Lautréamont, and Kafka, to which would have to be added his own fictional writings—as I will show in the next section. This raises an important point about the way that Blanchot pursues these issues, for although they will be returned to again and again, this is not so much to refine them conceptually as it is a persistent attempt to approach them. So, as Blanchot proceeds through the 1950s his writings continually turn around the questions of the material spatiotemporal dimensions of the image and its narrative experience, not to determine these questions but to return them to their urgency, even as they withdraw from experience. It is thus that we might begin to ascertain the nature of his distance from philosophy, for which in general ideas are developed by being increasingly defined in terms of their meaning and applicability. By contrast, for Blanchot’s literary critique, it is precisely a question of the critique of literature by literature, which permits of no progressive definition that is not also an insistent dispersal and rupture. Starobinski has a very useful image of this relation, based on his reading of the first chapter of Thomas l’Obscur, at the end of which Thomas, having swum out to sea, returns to the shore and, looking back, sees a figure swimming still further out to the horizon, a figure with whom he feels a strange intimacy [TP: 29; TN: 13/57]: Blanchot the novelist is Thomas moving away [s’ écartant] from the shore, solitarily penetrating “the sacred place”; Blanchot the critic is Thomas, who, having passed through absolute separation [écart] in order to reach solitary coincidence, then discovers the power of spying from the shore on the progress of the distant swimmer in a feeling of the greatest intimacy. Thus divergence [écart] (that leads to a place “where no one else could penetrate”) becomes the very condition of the increased relation with the other whose possibility Thomas discovers on his return to the shore: the “novelistic” experience of solitude becomes the source of a “critical” presence across the distance.8 Although this relation is presented rather too schematically, it still shows how the critical relation derives immanently from the narrative experience. But Blanchot then complicates this reading further when he suggests that 144

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language becomes its own image in literature—that is, it becomes an image of language that issues from its own absence, in the same way that words arise out of the absence of things [EL: 25/34]. Such a language would not speak of images or through them, for in itself it would be without images; instead, it would be their space and so would be an entirely imaginary language, thus indicating the extent of the transformation of thought when these words, “image, imaginary, and imagination, no longer have distinct signification” (just as the récit reconfigures narrative so as to draw together its event, its approach, and its site). For the image, as this spacing from which and into which words appear and disappear, is not just anterior to words but also to itself, since it cannot appear without indicating that which, in its appearance, is excessive to it, thereby giving the lie to its own appearance, antedating and dissembling it in the same movement. It is thus the very movement of dissembling in its immensity, “this horrible inside-outside that is real space,” as Henri Michaux called it, that is the possibility of the image: “the manner in which it meets up with and disappears into itself, the secret unity according to which the image unfolds, immobile, in the immensity of the outside and at the same time holds itself in the most interior intimacy” [EI: 474–75/324, 459].9 Material Vision, Imaginary Space Aminadab was published in September 1942 and is both an examination and demonstration of these thoughts on the nature and space of language.10 Unlike Blanchot’s first novel, Aminadab operates within a seemingly naturalistic environment, which is indicated by the emphatic daylight that opens the narrative, in contrast to the baroque darkness of Thomas l’Obscur. But although the setting appears more familiar, Blanchot makes of the insistent light something that only increases doubt and ambiguity. For example, the narrative begins when Thomas thinks he sees a woman beckon to him from a window on the upper story of a boardinghouse, which he then enters in order to find her. Once in the house he finds himself drawn into one impasse after another as he becomes involved in the lives of the tenants, who distract him from his mission and generally obstruct or mislead him. Thus, as a whole, Aminadab is concerned with the uncertainty of appearances that do not clearly indicate what is present but instead seem to conceal something other than themselves, and this becomes dramatized within the narrative by the persistent crossing of boundaries or thresholds. Numerous examples attest to this theme, particularly in the first part of the novel, for at each point in the development of the narrative Thomas encounters images that must be interpreted, and in doing so they Indifferent Reading in Aminadab

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are transformed into borders that can and cannot be crossed. While this would appear to indicate that the novel is operating as an allegory of its own existence—insofar as it incorporates into its own development the way in which reading and writing proceed, such that it unfolds according to how reading and writing themselves unfold through the success or failure of interpretation—this would only respond to the most immediate level of meaning. For, as Blanchot’s essays on Mallarmé emphasized, it is not simply the case that the opacity of language can be converted into meaning and vice versa; instead, it is important to pursue this ambivalence further to reach what lies behind this alternation of transparency and opacity. As Thomas proceeds through the boardinghouse in Aminadab this question becomes more pressing, for when neither what is shown nor what is not shown is true, then both would seem to be dissembling that which underlies them. At the very beginning of the novel, before he enters the boardinghouse, Thomas is about to go into a shop whose owner has invited him in when he sees a painting in the shop window: although poorly conceived, it catches his eye, for it appears to bear two images, one laid over the other. Looking more closely, he cannot decide whether it is a portrait of a young man or a landscape of a half-ruined town against a mountainous background. While both images have their bearing on the narrative space that he is on the point of entering, neither is more significant than the other; indeed, they overlap as the lines of one image interfere with those of the other, but in the distance beyond them everything is vague [A: 8/1–2]. This would seem to suggest not that there is some underlying meaning that, in being uncovered, could make sense of these images, but rather that there is nothing that lies behind them, and as such these are images of that same nothing. Thus, it is in their very insubstantiality, their insignificance, that these images give onto that which subtends them, which is not to say that they are all equally arbitrary, for it is only those images that attend to this distance that become images of it. This distance is what underlies and undermines the negotiations of the law that preoccupy the inhabitants of the house, for in attempting to apprehend events through their images (by seeking to approach or draw them close) the tenants only become more caught up in them. By contrast, Thomas refuses to interpret these images, and as a result they reveal themselves as images, thereby revealing their absolute indifference—their irreducible distance and material isolation. As such, these images become like the gestures in Kafka’s works in that they are insubstantial, insofar as they are illegible, mere gestures with no more significance than a casual throw of the dice, and of the utmost consequence, insofar as they bear the heaviest burden once they have been no146

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ticed, also like the throw of the dice.11 While Sartre criticized Aminadab for following too closely after Kafka and making “a cliché [poncif ] of the fantastic ‘à la Kafka,’ ” Blanchot’s response in fact follows a much more complicated demand: that of returning the parable-like deviations of Kafka’s writing to itself, layering it such that the relation between the reading and the gestures of the text becomes intensified and strangely inverted. For in this way the sign reveals itself in its blank materiality and can thus be interpreted as such, just as the commentary becomes interminable and thus uninterpretable. Thus the manner in which a text begins to incorporate its own commentary, as Sartre recognized by emphasizing the way that the novel offers a “perpetual translation” and “abundant commentary” on itself (just as Camus had remarked in relation to Bataille’s work), is not a simple flourish on behalf of the self-conscious writer but a rigorous experiment exposing the inner tension between the materiality and the signification of language [S1: 140]. It is of consequence then that Blanchot only started to write “on” Kafka after having worked his way through a fictional response to his works in his first two novels, as if the critical relation could only surface out of the experiential one. The confusion inherent in these ambiguous images is everywhere apparent, for Thomas is persistently coming up against situations that change so that they are not as they first appear, which then leads to doubts about what he is facing. Often these are literal representations, as when he finds a picture that turns out to be a window or, conversely, another picture in which crude symbols are substituted for the actual representations of objects, including a room in which the window is absent, but everything that could have been seen through it is instead painted on the wall [A: 40/29, 16/9]. Alongside these visual images are the stories that Thomas is told about the house, about its history and operations, which are no less ambiguous in their representational depth, indicating that it is not possible to simply pass through the layers of images to the meanings that would seem to lie beyond them, for there is no distance beyond that is not already figured within the images in terms of their instability. There is an implicit critique of the relation of language to transcendence here, for reality is not beyond appearances but is that which extends within them through their dissembling. There is no true world to which we can, through some rigorous exertions of thought and language, escape; instead, there are only the endless iterations of what there is as it unfolds and returns to itself. In this way Blanchot hints at the sense of “life” that he finds in this dissembling, the nonorganic vitality that innervates it, which continues “only out of a perverse stubbornness” rather than as a result of its superabundant expression. This would be a life that carried on simply because it had failed to Indifferent Reading in Aminadab

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end, that did not live in any positive sense but was nevertheless still “bound by a memory to life” [A: 25/15–16]. Thomas uses these notions to describe the features of the face that emerges when he has his portrait painted, but these are not Thomas’s features but rather belong to the painter himself who has transposed them onto Thomas’s portrait, thereby making it unclear of whom or what it is meant to be a picture, which has special significance when it is ostensibly a portrait of Thomas. There is perhaps a suggestion here of how we come to inhabit this life of images and the disturbing transformation that this entails, since it is difficult to come to terms with the nature of an existence that, by virtue of its ambiguous referentiality, would appear to be no more than a sheer material dissembling. In the middle of the novel there is a long story that appears to be a parable of this transformation, for it concerns a period in the history of the house when its inhabitants decide to directly confront the reality of the law. However, Blanchot accentuates the difficulties of treating this episode as a mise en abyme by framing it with the peculiar (and perhaps Promethean or Luciferian) sight of a man swinging a jug that seems to be emitting light—or, rather, it starts with one man swinging a jug and ends with a group of them doing so, at which point Thomas sees the first man again whose jug has now been smashed [A: 84–85/66–67, 143–44/116–17]. Odd as this scene is, it may refer to the French saying made popular by Beaumarchais’s Le mariage de Figaro, “the jug goes so often to the well that it is broken,” but if it does, then it has a deliberate ambiguity. Since in appearing to depict this saying Blanchot is also exemplifying it, for as a saying it also suffers from the risk of being taken for granted, of being emptily dramatized, which leaves it broken and useless, so in presenting this image he is also suspending its meaning, for if we treat this scene visually or verbally, literally or metaphorically, as we say, if we seek its meaning in what we are presented with or in its implications, there is no difference (just as is the case if we consider Lucifer the light-bearer as both the morning star and the evening star, for then its presence makes the passage into and out of the night undecidable, indicating that the ambiguity of sense in literature is not only endless but also materially aporetic). This complexity finds its sources in Blanchot’s reading of Paulhan, whose Les fleurs de Tarbes he had reviewed in the period Aminadab was being written and that concerns exactly this issue of the status of linguistic clichés or commonplaces. As was shown earlier, a troubling anomaly arose for Paulhan, as also for Mallarmé, when literary experimentation addressed itself to the forms of ordinary language, for whether these are swept away or reformulated, they persistently reappear as material refractions of meaning, 148

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suggesting that whether we take language for granted or not, it still holds the possibility of falling apart by exposing its words as shards of illegibility. Thus this image of the jug, as it is presented on either side of the long story that Thomas hears in the middle of the novel, both suspends the meaning of this story, by asking us to question its status, and indicates a transition in which the eruption of a material refraction cannot be ignored. For in passing this point Thomas finds his position compromised more than ever by the fact that he has entered a space in which words and things have become dissociated, appearing instead as things without names and names without things, and this, as he finds out, has profound consequences. The story, as already noted, is about a particular episode in the history of the house in which there was something like a revolution, which had begun, as Blanchot pointedly reminds us, with an incident with a jug of hot water, and which led to a desire among the tenants to change their intolerable situation by wholly redesigning the house [A: 96/76]. This leads to a strange discovery, for the tenants find that they have never fully explored the house, as they have always restricted themselves to their own floors and certain common areas, and as a result they find that the staircase to the upper floors has never been ascended, despite the fact that there is no sign to say that it is prohibited. Struck by the imposition of this limit, a group of ambitious tenants decides to venture up the staircase, but the long period of habituation to their regular pathways has not prepared them for the enormous implications of crossing this “ideal line” [A: 106/84]. Overcome by the profundity of their infraction they begin to see its prohibition generalized to the whole space around them, such that every step becomes a violation (pas), and driven mad by the excess of their crimes they begin to lash out at everything around them, destroying the walls, floors, and each other. However, some of the members of the group manage, in this frenzy, to make their way up to the higher floors: What did they see, what did they do? They could only repeat that it was the same [pareil]. Naturally, the same. How could these forbidden places have been any different for them compared to the places they had just left, since even the latter were already forbidden to them? Beginning already with the first floor, what they saw, with their eyes and their minds, was the tearing apart of appearances that had made life possible up to then. They perceived what we did not see, because we had remained faithful to the rule. Hardly had they set out on the old familiar ways when they found themselves already, and in fact, in this separate world where they had no right to be, Indifferent Reading in Aminadab

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having reached in a single step [pas] the heights from which they could now only fall. This is what is expressed in their terror and their madness. In the unreason that struck them, they behaved like reasonable beings whose eyes, now opened onto nameless things, commanded them to perform unnameable acts that they could not carry out and that they replaced with desperate acts. Their loss itself was the only thing that could console them for what they were losing. [A: 112–13/90] But, as Blanchot would insistently urge, this is not the end—we have to go further; and the remaining members of the group decide on their return to try again, but this time to venture into the basement, for in their ascent of the staircase a terrible cry had been heard that appeared to come from below. However, the other tenants, who are keen to avoid another disaster, decide to delay this second journey by prolonging the repair of the staircase that leads to the basement. But the adventure had taken its toll on the group, for in some obscure way they had changed: they no longer smelled like the other tenants, and they felt strange to the touch; they had become “unrecognizable,” indifferent: Although their features remained the same, they already resembled one another and no longer bore any resemblance to us. A sort of beauty ravaged them. Their eyes, which seemed tired from the light here, had a spark that I looked on with shame. Their cheeks bore new colours that attracted and repelled. They seemed to bathe in life and joy, and yet it was desperation that was expressed in their smallest gestures. [A: 113–14/91] But even more than this, it was the incomprehensible noises that passed for their voices that proved to be too much, and the tenants were now only too eager to get rid of the group. The staircase was quickly completed, but the group had already gone; no one saw them leave; they were simply “no longer present.” This only led to further confusion, as some of the tenants insisted that the group were still there but that they were invisible, while others claimed that they had left for the basement where they remained, while still others believed that they had taken up residence in the street where “by making signs to us, they try to draw us into the curse that they are subjected to,” which is of course how the novel began. But, as Thomas is told, we should not think on this, as we “are damned with such thoughts” [A: 116/93]. Despite the cautious manner in which this story is framed, it is difficult not to read it as a parable of the experience of literature (as well as the 150

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political and literary tensions of Blanchot’s situation as a writer during the Occupation). But its enigmatic quality is such that it cannot be so read without an irreducible remainder: for any reading of it as a parable must also take account of that which cannot be made sense of in this way but is instead an experience of its refusal of sense. For it is not a question of what the story reveals but what it brings about: what is underway in a reading experience that confronts the fact that it is neither fully meaningful nor meaningless. There is good reason to pursue this ambivalence, as there is, within the story itself, a textual flaw that destabilizes it at a critical point. At the very moment when the group of adventurers are about to cross the ideal line and are suddenly overcome with the significance of the step they are taking, there follows a sentence that lacks a key word: “They could not [?] that what they had before them were ideal barriers [Ils ne pouvaient qu’ils n’eussent devant eux des barrières ideales] that they had to break down and that were insurmountable” [A: 112/89]. The missing verb could be one of many within a particular set of classical philosophical-phenomenological terms (believe, understand, remember, see, or, as the English translator has suggested, accept), but if this is not simply an accidental omission, as its highly overdetermined position seems to suggest, then it could be that Blanchot is directing us toward the very literary refraction of interpretation that he has been pursuing. For this would be an intrusion of a simple “could not,” the same pas that would, like the step that confounded the adventurers, leave a sentence that remains incomplete, for the actual movement of transition that would accomplish it is absent, and in the face of this collapse our attempts at interpretation become unraveled. What has been discovered is that, across the ideal line, there lies a space that is irreducibly distant; it cannot be brought closer, nor can we approach it, and the line itself is, as the adventurers discovered, ubiquitous, and once recognized it exerts a fascination that is inescapable. This line passes through every word, dislocating it so that it hovers at a remove that is its literary space: neither with meaning nor without but instead in the simple opacity of its material appearance. But the experience of this destabilization is hardly innocuous, although, after their initial destructive frenzy, the indefinable estrangement that the group undergoes is only what the other tenants notice. So, to understand where this fascination leads we have to turn to a story told toward the end of the novel, which, in even more ambiguous terms, presents another image of the transformation attendant upon this fascination. Thomas eventually reaches the upper floors of the house and meets a woman who appears to be the same one whose enigmatic gesture had drawn him into the house, but this has happened at the cost of his freedom: he Indifferent Reading in Aminadab

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has become enmeshed in the manipulations of the house and finds himself reduced to being a servant. At this point night finally starts to draw in, and the companion who has followed Thomas tells him one more story. This companion, Dom, whose face resembles that of the figure seen in the picture at the very beginning of the novel (they are both described as having a “flattering,” avantageux, appearance), even down to the fact that it has another image painted over it (like Thomas’s own portrait), has until now remained silent, and his motives, in starting to upbraid Thomas about his journey through the house, are not clear. Nevertheless, his story appears to pick up from where the last story left off, for he tells Thomas that he should have avoided trying to ascend through the house, which has only led to his current difficulties, and instead taken what he calls the “true way,” which would have been to descend—to follow the gentle slope that leads to the subterranean regions. There, beneath the lower floors, lies a world utterly different from that of the house, for down there the laws of the house are suspended. The threshold to this region is believed to be guarded by a figure the tenants have called Aminadab, but in reality, Dom explains, there is no border, only a path that slopes down into the darkness, and this darkness is neither complete nor distressing but actually radiates “a sort of clarity” that is “deliciously attractive” [A: 227/186].12 Once you have descended into the maze of underground tunnels, Dom goes on, a strange transformation takes place, for rather than vainly trying to bend to an unknown and unsuitable law and being crushed in the process, as had occurred in the house, the earth below ground seeks to accommodate itself to your form, even to the rhythm of your breath. Then, most remarkably, your vision changes, for in encountering the walls of earth that surround the tunnels, “your gaze . . . makes you think [font penser] of fine crystal plants that have rapidly grown from the mouldy earth on which your eyes have opened.” This is no illusion, for these mineral shapes are real and “are a sign of the elevated form of union that exists between you and the milieu in which your life is fashioned. Just as the night makes one’s eyes sparkle in order to draw truly nocturnal images from them, so does the earth bring them to fruition in the only forms it is allowed to propagate and in which it places all its love” [A: 228–29/187]. Thus the earth would seem to act like a kind of underground sky, drawing images out of itself in the form of the crystal growths that emerge from the walls of the tunnel—that is, these nonorganic forms have been enticed to emerge from the earth by the imagination under the influence of the subterranean darkness. But this is not quite accurate, as these growths are actually coming from the eyes, as if they were a materialization of the gaze, making them appear as though they had 152

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grown from the earth on which the eyes have opened. Consequently, it might seem that life would become more difficult with these arborescent forms emerging from the eyes, but in fact they become the very means of vision: a dense, bushy gaze (regard touff u) that is able to “see” by partaking of the same milieu in which it is immersed. This seems to be very similar to the transformation Thomas undergoes in Thomas l’Obscur, as discussed in the last chapter, where his lack of vision becomes the means by which the subterranean darkness is seen: for the darkness does not impede his gaze but instead becomes its medium, so that his eyes’ failure to see is not a lack but rather the means by which they become involved with the darkness, which then grants him the ability to “see” in the manner of the situation in which he finds himself. This change has been altered in Aminadab to make the gaze more chthonian than nocturnal, but the same reversal is in place, and in fact goes further, as the crystal plants that form the gaze proliferate and begin to sprout from the fingertips, such that the means by which this figure moves or perceives is by way of these growths: they are the medium between its body and the earth and thereby allow for its movement and navigation by being part of the very earth in which it dwells. Thus, when these plants appear to vibrate in response to a distant sound, they are already beginning to make their way toward it, and so the underground dweller also becomes drawn into these same excavations, allowing itself to be guided by the path that its gaze literally opens up before it. Eventually, it comes to a point where the earth caves in and the light of the outside world can be seen, but, as Dom then interjects, you must now stop and think: you have taken the right path, but are you ready to go where it has taken you? You must examine whether, after this excursion underground, you are able to venture forth into the light; ahead of you lies escape, a new life, and behind, the past has become buried for good, but perhaps it would be better to wait, for who knows what will happen up there, as “one does not journey for years under the earth with impunity” [A: 231/189–90]. Characteristically, Thomas declines to choose, saying that it is too late to consider this transformation as an option, and certainly there appears to be something illusory about the path that Dom has offered, something of the false temptation, for throughout the novel it has been the appearance of light that has signaled confusion and deception. Conversely, it is only at the end of the novel as the darkness takes hold that Thomas starts to see clearly, for while the light entices us into thinking that meaning and clarity can be found, that there is a way in which appearances can be defined, in the darkness there is no such deception, as there is no scope for definition. In its tunnels, the underground dweller found a living region Indifferent Reading in Aminadab

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permeated by a kind of material vision, a tactile, nonorganic gaze, which provided its own means of navigation as the enigmatic schematizing force that lined its hollow.13 But at the end there is only the wait and the approach; there can be no firmer conclusion, for as the figures of his two companions, who have increasingly taken to speaking and acting on his behalf, dissolve into the gathering night, Thomas, again refusing to leave, insists on asking a further question, one that is perhaps interminably final: “who are you?” Although the personal register of this question might suggest that the implacable alterity of the darkness could be responded to by way of an ethical relation, this suggestion is too strong, since as the night absorbs the figures of his companions it is no longer either a person or a thing. Instead, Thomas’s question would seem to arise as the barest remains of his inquiry, which in its unanswerability reveals the night in its irreducible distance such that it becomes apparent as an image in its absolute indifference. Thus, at the end of the novel Thomas is forced to confront the fact that he has not achieved anything; the woman whom he has met is not the one who gestured to him at the beginning of the novel, as there was no such invitation, no gesture at all. But this is no more than he has had to face up to throughout the novel, for on each occasion when he has attempted to explain his purpose in entering the house he has encountered confusion and rejection, as he is persistently told there could have been no invitation, for there are no people on the upper floors, since there is literally nothing there, and so there cannot be anything to his mission, as there is nothing going on in the house. Thomas, however, refuses to accept these stories, believing instead that they are missing something, that this nothing is not simply nothing. His refusals seem perverse to the house’s inhabitants, who are only too ready to accept that nothing means nothing and thus see no reason for his unending interrogations. But this attempt by the novel to close in on itself by dissolving its lack of meaning into sheer (nihilistic) lack cannot succeed while Thomas still burrows through its emptiness with his persistent skepticism, for as the saying about the jug showed, neither meaning nor its lack can be adduced as a solution. There is an image that appears early in the novel that focuses this paradox of a space filled with emptiness, for Thomas sees a painting of a room with “a carefully closed alcove” [A: 17/9]. As an image of Blanchot’s novel, and the absolute status of Mallarmé’s Book, this image implies that the doubts that Thomas raises do not lead to the hypostatization of nothing into some thing, but to the awareness that nothing holds its own irreducible place that cannot be removed or effaced, for even if this hollow does not offer any entrance or

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egress, it insists in the space of literature as that which holds it open and prevents it from collapsing in on itself. While this void cannot be encountered, as there is no means of getting to it, the novel is the space in which its effects can be experienced through its reading and writing. Thus Blanchot’s move away from the novel through the 1940s is not because of its flaws but rather as a means of intensifying its effects, for which Aminadab is a transitional stage as it, more than his other novels, moves its space toward that of the récit and initiates the step by which Thomas l’Obscur will itself become transformed. The experience of this novelistic void becomes one in which the itineraries of reading and writing are drawn to this hollow by way of the fact that they involve its emptiness: just as Thomas’s own ceaseless queries arise out of the endless withdrawal of his encounters, so any reading of the book, in coming up against its resistance to meaning, returns to it a version of its own material, impersonal gaze. In terms of the Kantian starting point of this chapter, it is helpful to consider how Blanchot has moved within but also inverted its Idealist revisions, for rather than pursuing a vision of the novel in which it becomes absolute by including its own critique, he has sought to understand how the imaginary nature of the novel renders it absolute by way of its material resistance, which removes it from the sphere of human relation but also makes the questions of reading and writing more intractable. To resolve this, Blanchot does not try to make imagination into a form of irony or intellectual intuition such that, following the early German Romantics, these would be implicated in the form of the novel and thereby involve the subject in its process of totalization, but instead attempts to understand how the imagination becomes involved in the evasive materiality of the images that comprise the literary space in its distance. This places reading and writing in the same movement of ontological dissembling that the space of images shares, thus drawing the human outside its own sphere of relation by rendering the relation (of nonrelation) in reading and writing absolute. Or, rather, what is uncovered in Blanchot’s studies of reading and writing is that these involve an experience that puts in question the very possibility of a preexisting sphere of human relation, since it reveals that the notions of the human and of relation are not given but are in part derived from this experience of material dissembling in both its fragmentation and impersonality.14 If this version of reading is a material gaze, then it can be understood to be so in a very specific sense that is alluded to in one of Blanchot’s first signed articles for the Journal des débats, a piece on Mallarmé that came

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out in April 1941—that is, five months before Thomas l’Obscur had itself appeared. In this essay, in terms that unavoidably recall Thomas’s experience, Mallarmé is described as he “who has perceived, in a moment of terrible anguish, thought stripped bare, when, as Plotinus says, it sees without seeing anything, putting a veil over other objects and gathering itself back into its intimacy where it disappears” [FP: 128/102]. In fact, tracing this reference back to Plotinus’s writings reveals an even more significant association, for the image of an eye that sees without seeing anything is evoked in the course of an attempt to understand how the intellect (nous) can apprehend matter (hylē), which for Plotinus is essentially indeterminate in contradistinction to the intellect. He then proceeds to state, by way of what only appears to be a simile but that is in fact instrumental, that although we can say that the intellect “sees” matter, this is an intellect different from itself, which is not the true intellect, because it resigns itself [tolmēsas] to see that which does not belong to it. It is like the eye that diverges from light in order to see the darkness; it no longer sees, since it has abandoned the light with the aid of which it could not see the darkness; thus without it, it cannot see; it can only not see, and in that consists its vision of darkness, as much as it is possible. In the same way the intellect abandons its interior light, departing from itself and advancing into a domain that is no longer its own; it doesn’t bring with it its own light, and it is affected [epathe] in a manner contrary to its being, in order to see the reality contrary to its own. [Enneads I.8.9.18–26] But the soul “that departs from itself, because it is not the first and perfect soul, is no more than an image [indalma] of this [first] soul, because of everything that it lacks; full of indeterminacy [aoristias] due to this deficiency, it sees the darkness; and it is already material because it sees that which the higher soul does not see (in the way that we say that we even see the darkness)” [I.8.4.29–32]. So, as “the soul cancels all the forms of sensible objects that are like light; that which remains is impossible to determine for it, there, like the eye in darkness, it becomes identical to this darkness that it has like a species of vision” [II.4.10.15–17]. Thus the intellect apprehends the indeterminate by itself becoming indeterminate, by pursuing a “bastard reasoning” (nōthos logismos), which is, as Plotinus states, recalling Plato’s Timaeus (52b), a nonphilosophical, nontheoretical mode of discourse that is illegitimate because it combines (through images) the defined with the undefined, insofar as it has become affected by that which it is attempting to reach [II.4.10.11].15 156

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Matter, as that which is without form or limit, is thus, for Plotinus, to be understood as nonbeing and so, when considered from the point of view of that which does have form and limit, is also to be seen as evil, although in itself it is more akin to the primal passivity of khōra (roughly, place). This last point derives from Aristotle’s definition of matter as hypokeimenon or substrate, from which the connection to khōra and topos is quickly made. This association is of immense significance, for it means that Plotinus can take the relation between hylē and khōra as the basis for using the anomalous nature of one to explicate the other, and this essential identification becomes even more significant when we see how it reasserts itself in Kant’s descriptions of the sublime and then in de Man’s late thoughts on materiality, for these attempts to think through the encounter with the unlimited are corollaries of the discovery that “form is the trace [ikhnos] of the formless” [VI.7.33.30]. As Derrida has remarked, this equation indicates that form, as the very definition of presence, itself takes place, appears, only as the echo or remains of the formless—which as the “form” or image of materiality is thus the inapparent that is not present and has no place, insofar as it is simply the gaping of place; its hollowing out—in which this taking place of materiality is thus the materialization of place, as Blanchot’s early critical and fictional works have demonstrated.16 Although the extent of Blanchot’s knowledge of Plotinus is not known, the similarity between these chapters of the Enneads and Thomas’s experience of attempting to see in the material space of literature is illuminating, since it indicates how Blanchot’s literary critique can remain a form of reasoning even as it becomes transformed by that which it is attempting to reach, and, moreover, that this is the only way that such materiality can be reached. Thus, although it is not possible to make any strong claims about the relation of Blanchot’s writings to neo-Platonism, what it does suggest is that Blanchot’s literary investigations (whether Kantian, Hegelian, Heideggerian, or otherwise) constitute major philosophical inquiries into the anomalous nature of materiality and the experience of limitlessness, both of which literature specifically articulates. This discovery puts philosophy’s relation to literature in much more profound and demanding terms than those that only concern the fictive nature of writing, as it indicates that what is meant by “fictive” is itself profoundly demanding, since what is being explored in fictional language is a concern shared by all areas of creativity but that is perhaps richest in literature because of its ambiguity, and that is the relation between what are called “matter” and “form.” Inevitably, by exploring this relation literature finds itself engaged in an ontological investigation, for what occurs in creative language is of a part with what goes in the world at Indifferent Reading in Aminadab

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large: the appearance of things. “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and “what is a thing?” are essentially literary questions as much as metaphysical ones, which implies that philosophy needs to take account of how literature negotiates these questions just as much as the reverse and precisely because the relation between the two is so often seen in terms of limits and limitlessness, forms and formlessness. However, a more pointed inference also arises from this discovery, for if it is the case that ontology cannot be delimited to a branch of philosophical thought but is ongoing in a certain approach to literature, then, as we have seen, this also leads to a deformation of thinking as it seeks to engage with that which provides its own form and limits—for, in the literary experience, thought finds that it can only approach the material impersonality of literary things by becoming like them, and this, as Blanchot’s writings persistently indicate, is not an experience that thought can undergo with impunity.

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6

The Language-Like Quality of the Artwork

Derrida structures his acceptance speech for the Adorno Prize around a dream that Benjamin had in October 1939, which he subsequently wrote about in a letter to Gretel Adorno. In this dream, Benjamin recalled a conversation in which he said in French, “It was about changing a poem into a fichu.”1 Within the context of the dream Benjamin interprets this last word as meaning “scarf,” Halstuch; in German this word refers to the cravats or neckerchiefs worn by men, whereas the French word refers to a triangular shawl worn by women around the head or shoulders. However, as Derrida points out, fichu is a much more formless and peculiar word than this, as it can also be used as an adjective meaning that which is rotten or condemned in the sense of being “done for” or, colloquially, “fucked” ( foutu), in the exaggerated rhetoric of eschatological or scatological destruction. This meaning is carried over into related expressions, for example, when one says that one is mal fichu (to feel lousy or rough), or simply fichu (to be nasty to someone, in the sense of “he is fichu”: mocking or disrespectful), although conversely it is also possible to say that someone is bien fichu (physically attractive, “well-built”), such that, as Derrida notes, it is possible to be all three at the same time without contradiction. We could then surmise that the underlying meaning of the adjectival sense of fichu refers to whether something or someone is in good shape or in bad shape, with the sexual and functional connotations that this would then have. But fichu on its own generally seems to carry the meaning of mal fichu, with the sense that the condition of being in good shape is unusual enough to carry its 161

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own expression, although we can also say une fichue diff érence, which would mean “a hell of a difference,” suggesting a morphologically qualitative difference such as that between being mal fichu and bien fichu. Of course, we should also examine the noun fiche and the verb ficher, from which fichu would seem to derive; as is more easily recognized, fiche refers to a card, slip, or form with information on it, such as an index card, payslip, or enrollment form. Fiche also refers to the pins on a plug or brooch, which resonates with the meanings of the verb, ficher, to drive in a nail, or to open a file. It is from here that the more violent senses of ficher, to hit or break, in the sense of putting the boot in or to ruin, would also seem to arise, as well as the reflexive variations of se ficher, to mock or ridicule, but also to stick in, screw up, mess somebody around, or fly off the handle. It is evident that there is still a strong sense of constructive and destructive (de)formation in these uses. Alternatively, fichu might arise from a metathesis of couvre-chef (head-cover), the basis of kerchief, and so the meaning of bien fichu could then refer to the sense of being well covered, well turned out, and the meaning of mal fichu would then derive from the opposing sense of being poorly covered, badly turned out. Although the received etymology, in which fichu derives from the past participle of ficher, here meaning “to (loosely) fix or fasten,” which itself comes from the Latin figere, “to attach (by piercing),” provides a sense of how the word may develop into its variant meanings, such etymological readings risk shutting down the differential possibilities of the word by imposing a single line of descent against the current usage of the word, which does not operate with this level of historical awareness, and, although the English slang phrase “to fix someone” appears similar, it also has a narrower range. The significance of these varying meanings lies in the fact that they reside within the same word, for what is the sense of a word when it can carry such different meanings? What is it about fichu that enables it be the word for both shawl and rotten? Within the French usage these terms are combined in the same word, which must somehow bear the similarity of these differing senses, but what then is the nature of this similarity? It might be suggested that there is no sense of similarity in the different meanings and that they just happen to be combined within the same word, which may be the case, but this does not alter the sense of the word as holding different meanings and thus bearing senses that are distributed across different aspects. Although I have indicated possible routes by which the English meanings of the word can be coordinated, these routes coexist within the same word in French, therefore the similarity that arises is one in which the word bears nonidentical meanings within itself and thus differs from itself within the range of this similarity or, conversely, bears this 162

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range of similar meanings only insofar as it differs from itself. As a word, fichu is not identical to itself, but this nonidentity occurs across a range of more or less similar meanings, so what is the nature or sense of this similarity when it is subtended by nonidentity, by difference? Also, what then is the status of fichu as a word, when it is not identical to itself? For as a word, it now appears to be both more and less substantial, more and less communicative or transparent, than we might assume a word should be; it appears to have become somewhat thing-like in its resistance and variability: open to differing perspectives and yet evasive to any attempted summation of these. Thus there is in this process of perceiving resemblances a concomitant process of producing similarities, since language is being used as the means for exploring similarities that it itself harbors, so that the recognition of resemblances thereby becomes the means of manifesting them. Words then demonstrate a mode of material dissembling, a thingly becoming-otherwise that can be inhabited, but that also illustrates the powerful transformative effects of affinity; being like something else means already becoming unlike what one is, if such a state can even be asserted. For the enigmatic status of what “is” is designated by this interrupted process of becoming-otherwise as the form in which it momentarily finds itself. There is thus a double aspect to this process, for the word-thing in resembling another both expresses itself and comes to know an other. A form of knowing is embodied in the similarity, but there is also a resistance to this knowing in the material expression of the thing, and the instability of this dovetailing is the basis of the enigmatic quality of the word. For Adorno, this dialectical process is at the heart of any creative work, whether natural or artificial, for which language affords a means not just of understanding but also of approaching such transformations, since any attempt to understand involves a recapitulation of its becoming-otherwise and also an awareness of the resistance to such dissembling, by which there is a recognition of that which refuses knowledge, that which remains autonomously wrapped up within itself in the work or word, that aspect in which it resembles itself rather than something else. Thus, insofar as the thing expresses and thereby resembles itself, it fails to resemble and thereby comes to know an other, and vice versa, and it is this dialectical tension that not only marks the thing as such but also indicates its failure to be fully one or the other, which means that it bears a sense of vital inadequacy, a suffering that is neither organic nor inorganic. The process whereby concepts are mapped onto reality incorporates an implicit measure in which like is understood by like—that is, the concept is assumed to exhibit a closeness of fit to that which it addresses, and it is The Language-Like Quality of the Artwork

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this closeness that demonstrates its validity. But this manner of approximating thought to facts is rendered imprecise as that which is being addressed lacks the definition of concepts, and so, for the concept to retain its validity, it must attempt to incorporate this lack of definition into its definition (unless it is simply dismissed). This is the sense of the obscurity inherent in concepts that, in matching up to reality, cover it over and thereby obscure it, leaving it uncertain whether what has been obscured was in fact effectively matched to the shape and size of the concept, or whether, in being covered over, some detail was lost. In this way the process of approximation in which concepts are said to be valid when they are like that to which they are addressed, in terms of their mode and manner, must also incorporate an element of dissimilarity—that is, like can only be understood by like if this also takes into account the fact that unlike can only be understood by (un)like. Any sense of similarity and thus validity in thought must thereby involve an essential dissimilarity, an indication of its own limits or lack, for, as Adorno insists, “every definition of concepts requires non-conceptual, deictic elements [Momente]” [ND: 24/12]. The demand that then arises is that this nonconceptual residue should not be subsumed into a dialectical totality but rather the reverse; that the senses of totality and dialectics should themselves be reconfigured by way of this irreducible residue. In literary terms, such deictic elements refer to the textual situation of the piece, which bring the identity and nonidentity of the text into relation as it presents itself while also indicating what it has obscured, thereby giving the work an unstable, paratactic appearance that is nevertheless autonomous. A particularly resonant example can be found in “Der Meridian,” the speech that Paul Celan gave on receiving the Büchner Prize, which is persistently punctuated by the phrase “meine Damen und Herren.” This is not simply a ner vous or ironic gesture but one that is demonstrative of the dialogical nature of his discussion, the fragility and partiality of its contextual specificity, since through its repetition it starts to become more of an obstacle than a passage (pas) to meaning. The mimesis of similarity in language, its attempt to broach a deictic likeness to what is other than language, thus comes to involve and expose the mimesis of self-similarity, its likeness to itself, the intrusion of the word as a material refraction of meaning, as was found in the nontransparency of Blanchot’s language in Aminadab, leading to a textual identity that while autonomous is yet constitutively unstable. In order to understand this relation between the identical and the nonidentical in language, I will examine the complexity of Adorno’s notion of mimesis as it develops from Dialektik der Aufklärung, where it is conceived in terms of the relation between the mythical and rational dimensions of 164

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thought, to its repositioning in Ästhetische Theorie as the basis for the artwork’s interrelation of the cognitive and the material. What is of significance in this development is the role of language as that which mediates this mimetic relation, such that it ultimately becomes its matrix in the form of the “linguisticality” of the artwork, which both allows it to speak and enables an aesthetic response. In doing so, though, the mimetic dimensions of this linguisticality are recapitulated in its response, which inflects this central role of language with a critical instability. Mimetic Identity and the Dialectics of Semblance Adorno’s thoughts on mimesis develop from the sense of adaptation found in archaic responses like playing dead (akin to the mimicry of plants and animals), which acts as a mode of self-preservation by suppressing identifying differences and granting protection through invisibility.2 But such adaptation involves evading one source of fear by embracing another, since playing dead as a defensive strategy is fraught with the risk that it may not remain play, although the more successful the imitation the higher the chances of survival, of prolonging life by taking advantage of death, of surviving. So, while this is an act that appears to suppress the self, it is nevertheless initiated by the self in order to preserve it; however, if there were no initial kinship between the self and nature there could be no ground from which such an adaptation could commence. Hence, this is also an adaptation to that which the human has only extricated itself from with great difficulty, and so it only takes place at the cost of losing what makes it distinctive. Thus, it is because the self is both like and unlike nature that mimesis in this more dynamic sense can occur, as distinguished from the simple mimicry of surrendering to the immobility of the deathlike. For the other side of this mimetic relation concerns what is unveiled by way of this becoming-other, rather than what is simply gained in terms of selfpreservation. This is the manner in which mimesis exposes the self to what is beyond it: the mythic world of nature as the basis of thought and language, which is what Horkheimer and Adorno examined in Dialektik der Aufklärung: In the bright world of Greek religion the murky undividedness of religious principles, which was worshipped in the earliest known stages of humanity as mana, lives on. Primal, undifferentiated, it is everything unknown, alien; it is that which transcends the radius of experience, that of things which is more than their previously known existence. What the primitive thus experiences as supernatural is not a spiritual as opposed to a material substance but the entwining The Language-Like Quality of the Artwork

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[Verschlungenheit] of the natural in contrast to its individual section. The cry of terror with which the unfamiliar is experienced becomes its name. It fixes the transcendence of the unknown in relation to the known and thus of the shudder as holiness. The doubling of nature into appearance and essence, effect and force, which first makes myth possible no less than science, comes from human fear, the expression of which becomes its explanation. [DA: 31/10] The motor of the dialectic of enlightenment is glossed in the first sentence of this passage with the verb Fortleben, “to survive,” such that the mythic lives on in the enlightened as an archaic survival, the undifferentiated penumbra of things that marks them as more than what they appear as to knowledge. This survival involves parallel historical movements of the past living on into the present and the present reverting to the past, and as each movement dovetails into its opposite it is difficult to tell them apart and thereby ascertain the tendency of any particular moment. Later, Adorno will speak of the “hinge” of negative dialectics as the turning of conceptuality toward the nonidentical, which depends on the distinction of these countervailing tendencies [ND: 24/12]. But this process is made complicated by the fact that the nonidentical is understood through its intertwining with the natural whole, which means that its material and nonmaterial connections are not distinguished, as it simply appears where the known fades into the Ungeschiedenheit. Instead, it is the undifferentiated cry that is drawn out in response to this penumbra that becomes its name, its only proper name, and this is a first hint as to the mimetic aspect of language, which in its expression finds the same survival of the mythic within itself that, by opening a nonconceptual connection to the undifferentiated, then becomes the basis for a conceptual, enlightened response, which would otherwise be ungrounded. This expression is thus the afterlife of the undifferentiated as it is recapitulated in language, so that although its primal form can only be negatively apprehended (as that which remains beyond the expression of the cry), it still bears the seeds of enlightened division, if only in the minimal form of its individual appearance. To clarify this point we are told that the name “fixes the transcendence of the unknown in relation to the known,” so as to give it a semipermanent designation or circumscription (just as heat enables particles to be affi xed to a surface in photographic development, or like the ancient belief that if a nail is driven into the ground at the scene of a violent death, then the soul of the departed is prevented from wandering). Again, this thought would later become translated into a conceptual context: “Philosophical reflection makes sure [versichert] of the non-conceptual in the concept. Otherwise it would 166

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be, following Kant’s dictum, empty, no longer the concept of anything and thus in the end nothing at all” [ND: 23/12]. Thus the essence of the cry is not simply nominal, as there is an unavoidably bodily dimension to the encounter with the undifferentiated: the shudder, which provides meaning to the cry by mimetically conveying a sense of the appearance as one of excess. (It should be emphasized that, although Horkheimer and Adorno are focusing on the feeling of fear, as is fitting for their critique of instrumental reason, and that in turn resonates with Paulhan’s sense of the terrible opening of language to abyssal uncertainty, there is nothing in their account that would prevent reading the awe that arises in the face of the undifferentiated as one of wonder, which, as will be shown in the next chapter, becomes the basis through which metaphysics reemerges in the turning of the hinge of negative dialectics. As Kant recognized in his study of the sublime, the significance of awe is precisely that it combines fear and wonder and does so in a way that asserts both the necessity and the impossibility of their decision, an antinomy that is then explicated in the dialectic of enlightenment.) Fear thus becomes the source of doubling or differentiation that for the first time reveals the mythic and the enlightened, the natural and the cultural, the whole and the part. But this differentiation is also an abstraction, as it is not the whole of nature that is present in its parts but the echo of this whole, the reduced simulacra of nature as it appears to us. There is no sense of a reconciliation to be found by way of the embodied cry, as that which is enunciated is only a further remove from nature, even if it is in some diminished way its image, as if, like an echo, the cry was an inversion of the unutterable: the only means by which the muteness of nature can reveal itself being this inversion, which only betrays it further, which is why it is a cry.3 It is from this point that language is found to be identical and nonidentical to itself, and this contradiction is expressed through its differentiation from the undifferentiated, in which it passes from simple tautology to language as such: If the tree is no longer merely addressed as a tree but as testimony for an other, as the site of mana, language expresses the contradiction that it is something itself and at the same time something other than itself, identical and not identical. Th rough divinity language becomes language from tautology. The concept, usually defined as the unity of the features of what is subsumed under it, was rather, since the beginning, a product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing only is what it is insofar as it becomes what it is not. [DA: 31–32/11] The Language-Like Quality of the Artwork

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Consequently, the basis of thinking also lies herein, for if any concept only comes to be what it is by way of what it is not, then this is through the estrangement of language, whether material or otherwise. Thus a concept cannot be reduced to the term for a unity of characteristics without underestimating its nonunitary aspects—those that contribute to its meaning but cannot be synthesized into any manifold, like the shudder excised from the name of the holy. Such reductions are nevertheless inevitable, as without them no conceptualization could occur and language would remain hysterical, merely “the tautology of terror,” but doing so entails an unavoidable mutilation that can only be marked negatively, leading to an endless dialectical process in which the differentiation of central and extraneous elements is never certain. But this process of extrication from fear cannot seek to exclude the undifferentiated; otherwise it would only reimprison us within a static ignorance, a naive positivism that admits of no unknowns, no obscurity, and no change. Fear would become universal in being suppressed, indicating that life had allowed itself to be infiltrated to its core by the nonliving, just as, conversely, the nonliving in mythic thought would be thoroughly permeated with life, and thereby revivified: Th is determines the path of demythologisation, of enlightenment, which combines the living with the nonliving as myth has combined the nonliving with the living. Enlightenment is mythical fear become radical. The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product, is nothing other than, as it were, a universal taboo. Nothing at all may remain outside, since the mere idea of the outside is the real source of fear. [DA: 32/11] As is apparent, Horkheimer and Adorno see the development of negative dialectics as an outgrowth of the modes of excession already inherent in nature that are made use of, albeit crudely, in the mimetic acts of sympathetic magic. That is, the mechanisms of manipulation and reconfiguration that grant magic its power do so by echoing the movements of mana as it transcends conceptual language. Negative dialectics operate on the same basis: by drawing out the mechanisms by which thought exceeds or disrupts itself as the means to not only understand but also extend thinking into its disavowed mimetic ground. Myth, in its expression of the contradictions of this mimetic ground, is thus already enlightenment, and it is precisely this edge that can be turned against the rationalized whole, unfolding the rational edge of myth by explicating its nonconceptual language, which is what becomes the basis of Adorno’s aesthetics— although it is also necessary to inhibit the reversion of this newly grounded enlightenment to a reestablished mythology of the putatively secure and resonant 168

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natural affinity of reason, as it is never possible to be certain about the direction or dimensions of any such unfolding of myth, as the differentiation of enlightenment is never given. Before going on to examine how this dialectic informs the development of Adorno’s aesthetics, it is useful to deviate slightly in order to gain a clearer idea of how the artwork, as opposed to the work of thinking, responds to this mimetic relation. I will do so by focusing on the two aspects of the literary work that Blanchot has emphasized, its peculiar vitality and spatiality, for these also form the two dimensions of mimesis as it was explored in the writings of Roger Caillois. Despite serious reservations, Adorno found Caillois’s work very suggestive, as it developed a materialist understanding of myth by linking human imagination to zoological behavior, which draws out the ambivalence of the relation between the mythical and the rational with striking resonance. For Caillois had begun his own explorations of the logic of mimesis by studying the mimetic capacities of the praying mantis, which continue to be available to it even after it has been partially devoured by its mate: Indeed, alongside the jointed rigidity of the mantis, which recalls a coat of armour or an automaton, it is a fact that there are hardly any reactions it is not perfectly capable of also carrying out in a decapitated state, that is to say, in the absence of any centre of representation or voluntary activity: it can, in these conditions, walk; regain its balance; sever one of its threatened limbs; assume the spectral stance; mate; lay eggs; build an egg case; and, this is truly disturbing, fall, in the face of danger or following peripheral stimulation, into a fake cadaverous immobility: I am deliberately expressing myself in this indirect way as it seems difficult to me for language to signify and for reason to understand that, dead, the mantis can simulate death.4 The profoundly uncanny nature of this phenomenon lies in its ambiguity, which proves irresolvable, for it is impossible to definitively distinguish between the two modes of this operation: is it the triumphant survival of the mantis who, driven to extremes, is even able to imitate death and thereby find a way to live on; or is it the remorseless submission to necessity in which the mantis is only able to carry on living in the guise of the living dead? Both readings find their way into Adorno’s work, for in relation to Celan he talks about an “inorganic” style, a language “of the dead of stones and stars,” in which this “language of the lifeless becomes the last comfort for death that has lost every meaning” [AT: 477/322].5 Equally, the second interpretation responds to the mass alienation of contemporary labor, in which its “consummate organisation demands the coordination of people The Language-Like Quality of the Artwork

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that are dead. The will to live finds itself dependent on the denial of the will to live: self-preservation annuls all life in subjectivity” [MM: 260/229]. As Horkheimer and Adorno had noted, this ambiguity arises out of the mimetic interrelation of the mythic and the rational that “determines the path of demythologisation, of enlightenment, which combines the living with the nonliving as myth has combined the nonliving with the living”— which is to say that in encountering an object like a rock, for example, is it to be treated with respect as the mute vehicle of mana, or shame as the petrified endpoint of human labor? But this ambivalence is also present in language, in the nature of prose as both banal and real: is it language rendered meaningless through its reified use; or does it bear the concrete opacities of everyday existence whose resistance comes from their irreplaceable singularity? There is a scene in Thomas l’Obscur that brings out the stakes of such an ambiguous encounter with language: “He was reading with a meticulous and unsurpassable attention. He was, in relation to every sign, in the situation in which the male praying mantis finds itself when the female goes to devour it. They looked at each other. The words, issuing from a book that was taking on a deadly power [puissance mortelle], exercised a gentle and peaceful attraction over the gaze that touched them” [TN: 27/67; cf. TP: 43–44]. Words, even the same word (like fichu), are never simply the same, and this means that their meaning and direction, their status as words, become uncertain such that, merely by reading, our objective relation to them is exposed to an immense instability. For it is the enigma of similarity that is here encountered as that which is labile, liable to transition: is this a sameness to itself or to something else; is it the sameness of a thing or a word, and is it possible to tell these apart objectively? While Horkheimer and Adorno may attempt to differentiate the two by claiming that “as sign, language must resign itself to being calculation and, to know nature, must renounce the claim to resemble it. As image it must resign itself to being a likeness and, to be entirely nature, must renounce the claim to know it,” this division does not reflect the enormity of their dialectical ambiguity [DA: 34/13]. The other side of the mimetic relation is discussed in Caillois’s next article, where he looked more closely at the range of mimetic behaviors found in the natural world and concluded that their development was not solely due to the need for more effective defensive or hunting strategies but, at a more basic morphological level, betrayed a seduction by space, which presented itself in the movement toward invisibility [cf. DA: 259–60/189]. Consequently, the sense of sameness in mimicry derives from the depersonalization or self-effacement that occurs in its movement, as is shown in

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his description of the pathological fear found in certain types of schizophrenia and other psychological disturbances: Space seems to these dispossessed spirits to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. In the end it replaces them. The body then dissociates itself from thought, the individual breaches the boundary of its skin and inhabits the other side of its senses. It tries to see itself from any point whatever in space. It feels itself becoming space, black space where things cannot be put. It is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And it invents spaces of which it is the “convulsive possession.”6 Although he is drawing on the psychological studies of Eugène Minkowski, much as Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty will do, Caillois’s concerns are less with the phenomenological implications of these descriptions than with the manner in which this archaic mimicry reveals a drive toward a nonhuman correspondence. The becoming-space that occurs (particularly in the night) arises because of the way that the night unbounds the subject and releases a neutral and impersonal force, such that the subject becomes dislocated into “any point whatever.” Caillois refers to this spatial attraction as an “instinct of renunciation [abandon],” which blurs the borders between the animate and the inanimate by indicating “the inertia of the élan vital,” thereby indicating, as Blanchot had done, how the peculiar vitality and spatiality of this experience converge [MPL: 11/113]. Such self-effacement thus has important aesthetic consequences, as has been pointed out by Rosalind Krauss, since it involves a disruption of the (literary) compositional field whereby the relation of a figure to its background is lost as the figure effaces itself, so that now there is only ground, but a ground that has a life of its own albeit one of worklessness, inertia.7 The significance of this spatial configuration of mimesis comes from the way that it takes on the form of abstraction in modernist writings. On the one hand, in common with other artistic innovations of the period, as writers became more engaged in the formal investigation of literature a movement of abstraction emerged as an attempt to uncover something of the nature of the literary beneath or outside its conventional forms, and in doing so the nature of the literary space itself emerged as a problem insofar as it remained its most basic form. Whether in terms of the layout of the text on the page or the form of the space that the text both explores and creates, the spatial opening of literature became the mode in which its form could be most effectively examined. On the other hand, the space of literature began to act as a cipher for the complexity and confusion of modern

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urban life and of the attempt to impose meaning or order upon it; in this sense abstraction is a mark of anxiety as well as experimentation. In fact, experimentation comes to be something of a critical-mimetic response to this anxiety, as is reflected in the thoughts of Caillois. But, as Blanchot’s writings have shown, the nature of this space is also materially anonymous, in that materiality is what remains when all determining factors are removed, and so the text becomes impersonal and elusive, persistently estranging itself before its investigation in the potentially endless series of recapitulated scenes familiar from Kafka’s or Klossowski’s novels. Thus there is a sense that this abstraction involves a translation of the (lyrical) temporal unity of the self into a dissociated (prosaic) spatiality, in which its parts are rendered simultaneous and exterior to each other in a paratactic inorganic repetition without rhythmic synthesis. But as such it is also the space of the event as the singular rupture of historical, social, or aesthetic meaning, since it is able to present the anomalous nature of the event through the endless breaching and framing of its receding exteriority, becoming its site, its moment, and its approach, as is found in Blanchot’s récits. For it is at this level of formality that the text can give expression to the inner tensions of its materiality and its conceptuality, which both enfolds and unfolds its space. Traditionally, mimesis implies an attempt to organize the kinship with nature in order to predict or control the future by drawing the repetition of spatiality back into time, thereby combining a sensible kinship to nature with a rational difference. Although it is this rational impulse to order that leads to the scientific and instrumental attitude and a domineering separation from nature, without the initial kinship or similarity there could also be no attempt to order. But it is precisely this similarity that becomes remote as rationality attempts to extend the ground of its dominance by trying to ground itself in itself, but in doing so it becomes objectified and loses touch with the self that it was ostensibly trying to preserve and promote. By contrast, in art the attempts to control or predict nature manifest themselves only as images or semblances: the image of presenting itself as self-determining and autonomous alongside the image of presenting itself as evidence of the reconciliation of nature and artifice; the image of being more than a mere object alongside the image of being nothing but an object as an assemblage of natural-historical material, but in these images there is still a similarity to nature insofar as the rational impulse in art to represent is subordinated to nature’s own movements of similarity (to itself and to what is not itself ) as it mimetically repeats and extends itself. As a result, mimesis lies at the basis of both the separation from and the kinship with nature, which means that from both sides the self persists as 172

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a resistance to full separation or kinship: a trace of indeterminacy that cannot be assimilated to the drive to rationality and a residue of ipseity that refuses to be subordinated to the drive to similarity. The self is never fully united or integrated in itself but remains in transit between nature and reason, and it is mimesis, as a process of recognition and learning, that maintains a grasp on both the reality and alterity of objects and the manner in which these are organized and interpreted by the self, thus making it an imaginative process that is passive and active, receptive and creative. It is precisely this experience of material dissembling that was mentioned at the end of the discussion of Blanchot’s Aminadab as the basis of the notions of similarity and alterity in the understanding of relation. For it is only by way of our experience of similarity in this mimetic faculty that we can come up against that which is nonidentical, the enigmatic manifold of other people and things, as it is only in realizing the common ground of similarity with what is not similar that it can be negatively encountered by way of its resistance to comprehension. But it is only through an awareness of the separation and difference that reason produces that any drive to explore the mimetic faculty could arise (as is found in art, religion, and politics) as an attempt to make the life of difference bearable, the life of mutual alterity that persists in the subject-object interrelation. Thus, there is in the aesthetic experience an opening to the otherness of the object, not its alterity in relation to us but rather its alterity toward itself: that which inheres in it as its force of adaptation by which it “is” in the first place. This is the artwork’s identity, which is not a self-identical identity but a mimetic one that is also its shared ground of communication with others. This would be an experience of the mimetic force of nature in which similarity is that which enables it to repeat itself into difference, the force of natura naturans in which it is not the objects of nature or art that are being repeated or imitated but that which brings about such objects and keeps them from being fulfilled. As a result, experience of such factical alterity implies some form of knowledge of the thing, even as it resists conceptual comprehension and persists as a specific but multiply determinable experience that arises from the overlapping relations of its manifold obduracy. Hence the need for continued commentary and critique to make sure that in our understanding this obduracy is maintained as such by recapitulating the force of its resistance, for doing so is necessary if we are not only to come to a better understanding of the nature of nature but also to open up pathways such that we are able to respond to the life of people and things by recognizing that mimetic force in ourselves. Adorno makes clear that the relation of art to mimesis is the means by which the dialectic of the mythical and the rational becomes translated The Language-Like Quality of the Artwork

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into a concrete form, such that it bears within itself a further dialectic of the aesthetic and the cognitive—which is to say that it is precisely in its aesthetic elements that we find the cognitive bearing of the work, insofar as these indicate its material relations, while, conversely, it is only in its rational, constructive elements that we find the peculiarly aesthetic, mythical qualities of form, insofar as it is appears as it is, as if it were natural. To some degree, Adorno is clearly keeping within the aesthetics of both Kant and Hegel in terms of the relation between the natural and the artificial and form and material, but this network is made much more concentrated and elusive by its situation within the model of mimesis as the “survival of mimesis, the non-conceptual affinity of the subjectively produced with its unposited other, defines art as a figure of knowledge and to that extent as ‘rational’ ” [AT: 86–87/54]. Mimesis, paradoxically, becomes the key to the rationality of the artwork, its cognitive but nonconceptual content, although it is only by way of its form that such mimetic relations can be realized within the work—that is, brought to a state of tangibility, however obscure or marginal. Thus it is not possible to ascribe the mimetic relations of the work to its aesthetic content, as opposed to its rational form, since such a division is what mimesis works to undo, but this in turn makes it more difficult to ascertain exactly how and where the mimetic relation works within the object, leaving it open to misunderstanding or obliteration. Consequently, in approaching a work that may be an artwork we are presented with something that resists or evades conceptual identification even as it provokes it—that is, the work presents itself in a way that appears to suggest familiar conceptual forms while also resisting any attempts to conceive of it as a natural object or tool, and instead somehow indicating another unknown form of presence (which is precisely why the issue of the artwork is a question of Schein, of appearance and illusion, or semblance). So, in thinking about such an object, we are already involved in making tacit selections and identifications based upon our (personal and sociohistorical) experience, which attempt to conceptually delimit the work, hence this is an approach that already carries decisions about what aspects of the object will be addressed and how they will be configured.8 But what is left out of these decisions is the “material,” which appears as that which fails to be encompassed by concepts, so it is only by way of identification and its failure that the nonidentical can be determined. But this may not be material as we commonly understand it; indeed, within prose writing, for example, it can very often be the form (or apparent lack of form) that takes on the status of material after such attempts at conceptualization. Thus the challenges faced by an artwork in attempting to appear to us as 174

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it is are considerable, and this is even more problematic when the work is in or of language. Conversely, for the artist, material is everything that is encountered, since every aspect of the thing is something that the artist has to make a decision about and thus becomes material to be worked through, which is then the basis of art’s critical capacity [AT: 222/148]. But these decisions do not avoid the processes of resistance and evasion that prevent an artwork from being fully conceptualized, so the materiality of the work for the artist may or may not coincide with the materiality encountered by others. There is thus a sense of the artwork as multiply material, such that it cannot be totalized but remains variably fragmentary, as is the case, for example, with Perec’s La disparition, whose materiality is formed differently at the different levels of plot, imagery, and narrative, such that it cannot be fully integrated with itself. As a result, the identity of the artwork rests on this lack of self-identity: that it is not identical to itself but is internally differentiated by what is nonidentical to it, which prevents it from ever appearing fully coherent, wholly present, or self-contained. The autonomy of the artwork is constituted by the degree to which this nonidentity is made apparent without being made identifiably present and, equally, any response to such a work would only be true to the extent that it enabled its truth-content, its vibrant incompleteness, to be revealed without conceptualization. From this point we can see that the artwork’s autonomy is illusory and compromised but that it is as such that there is autonomy, for artworks or for ourselves, so recognizing the extent of autonomy in the artwork means recognizing the limits of our ability to understand or even recognize it, for it presents itself as resistant and inaccessible to the culture that produced it and of which it is thus a representative concretion, a material autocritique of the dominance of instrumental reason and commodity-exchange, even as, to an equal extent, it necessarily also means recognizing the artwork’s complicity with its sociohistorical context and thus its lack of autonomy. For even as the artwork’s withdrawal from its context exposes this network of sociohistorical relations to critique, if that withdrawal were total there would be neither critique nor art, so critique only remains possible to the extent that the artwork remains heteronomously part of its context. The fact that autonomy is partly constituted by heteronomy indicates how the critique that the artwork bears is a mimetic inversion, a negative image, of the whole of the social situation that it resists [AT: 342/230]. Thus the artwork manifests this unresolved dialectic of the natural and the historical in order to repeat and thereby reveal the truth of its own origins so that it can then emerge in the identity of its own lack of self-identity, The Language-Like Quality of the Artwork

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appearing to overcome its separation from nature but in actuality only restaging it “as the illusion of the illusionless [Schein des Scheinlosen]” [AT: 199/132; cf. GS1.1: 356/OGT: 180]. But this identity is also the form in which the work actualizes the ontological antagonisms of its own nature and history as a nonconceptual knowledge, as a material instance of its failure to fully articulate itself. It is for this reason that the work’s truthcontent appears through its lack of identity with itself, since it not only bears a form of knowledge about the work in its origins but also (negatively) indicates the possibility that this knowledge could be actualized in the reconciliation of its unresolved dialectic, if it could fully articulate itself. But as this is only a negative indication its possibility can never be actualized, although without such an impossible possibility the knowledge borne by the work could not achieve the status of being its truth-content. So it is only through our continued use of terms like truth, knowledge, identity, and beauty that we can come to understand what these words fail to address and thereby come to understand the nonconceptual basis of conceptual understanding and the perpetual negative dialectics that constitute their relation. The thought embodied in the artwork is thus an attempt to find the conceptual that animates the empirical as well as the particular that grounds the theoretical, without allowing this dialectic of grounding and animating to become settled but rather indicating its inherent instability by pursuing a determinate negation of each, which makes apparent a semblance of its other side—that is, not an actual appearance, which would only make possible a reversal from one side to the other, but nevertheless a real if negative or illusory appearance of what is not yet but may be. Thus the essence of the artwork lies in the fact that although it is material it is not only material, which is to say that its objectivity is accompanied by the penumbra of its appearance as a work, its illusory self-semblance as a thing in itself that in referring to what it is not (a natural object) shows how it is languagelike: able to indicate by its material configurations something other than what is present and their paradoxical coexistence [AT: 160/104]. This in turn reveals the mimetic aspect of language, which in being like things through its materiality is also not like itself as a transparent medium of conceptual identification and communication but an object with its own reality and history, its thingly resistances and evasions. It is this mimetic character of language that enables it to act in the world, just as, but differently, the language-like aspect of artworks enables them to speak, and thus be works of art. But because the artwork’s truth-content only appears by way of negation, through what it is not, it cannot be realized in another form (such as 176

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language) unless this negativity is also realized—that is, its appearance as a semblance has to be recapitulated for it to be understood. This point leads into a further aspect of the dialectic of nature and history, for if the work only exists by way of negation and so only exists as itself in the semblance of an appearance, then although it is real it is not fully present but remains to come (zu-künftig), and it is as such that it can be critical of what “is.” It is in this way that critique can be historically grounded in particular works and yet offer a possibility of irreversible change or innovation. But this also means that art as such is not guaranteed an existence, since it is only grounded in specific, contingent works, although as long as the concept of art as the expression of truth remains incomplete and aporetic it remains possible. Peter Weiss’s Die Ästhetik des Widerstands offers one of the most extended and remorseless examinations of this dialectic between the possibility of art and the possibility of revolution, in which the only guarantee of their possibility (rather than their actuality) is the continued activity of historical critique, which is remorseless precisely because this demand for continued critique operates both within and without the text. So while the possibility of art is the condition of truth’s appearance, it is a possibility that is dependent on a reconciliation of the nature-history dialectic that the work can only indicate as a semblance, which is why it is an aporetic possibility. Thus it is only by recapitulating this illusion, as the work’s nonidentity with itself, that the work can be encountered as a work, which is what is undertaken in the language of aesthetics: Aesthetics must, however, take care not to believe that it achieves its affinity to art by, as if with a pass of a magic wand and excluding conceptual detours, pronouncing what art is. The mediation of thought is qualitatively different from that of artworks. What is mediated in art, that through which its structures are other than their mere factuality, must become mediated a second time by reflection: through the medium of concepts. This succeeds, however, not through the distancing of concepts from artistic detail, but by their turning towards it. [AT: 531/357–58] As was noted, this turning is the hinge of negative dialectics, its turning of the conceptual to its nonconceptual ground, for if the “essentially mimetic awaits mimetic relation,” then it is also a case of finding in the artwork what “is more than simply its particularity; it is mediated even in its immediacy, and to this extent it bears an elective affinity with concepts” [AT: 190/125, 532/358]. So, if we were to ask what is at issue for any theory that would seek to respond to the artwork, then the answer would be, in short, linguisticality. The Language-Like Quality of the Artwork

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For it is by virtue of its language-like nature that the artwork is able to speak, just as it is by virtue of the same that any aesthetic theory could hear and respond to such a work. Linguisticality is that in which the artwork and aesthetics come together, but if it is that which provides the possibility of their communication, then it is also that which presents the greatest difficulties, for it only enables communication insofar as this also involves alienation. Thus the dialectical eccentricity of linguisticality has the effect of recapitulating itself, as it can only be answered in kind, which only perpetuates its fragmentary instability, but in doing so the artwork finds that mode of autonomous reproduction that Kant ascribed to the organism. The Form of Linguisticality in Language In the course of this discussion it has become evident that the structure of the artwork in Adorno’s aesthetics is centered on the mimetic relation between the material and the cognitive by which it is both natural and artificial. While this may set up the possibility of a relation with the language of aesthetics in terms of its own contrast between the conceptual and the nonconceptual, such a relation is not given simply in its parallelism, as Adorno made clear. The relation of thought to the artwork may go by way of the convergence between language and the work, but this is not a harmonious convergence, as each distorts the other. It is in this mutual estrangement between the artwork and aesthetics that truth occurs, both in terms of our understanding and its critique, but if it does so, then paradoxically any such truth-content is rational only insofar as it is fragmentary. The cognitive possibilities of the work arise through its incompleteness, its lack of systematicity, for at each point that it reaches toward the conceptual it is also material, just as its form is particular, which is the basis for understanding its autonomy. However, such an approach to aesthetics necessarily becomes more complex when it comes to negotiating the literary work, which already partakes of this dialectical eccentricity in itself. In Adorno’s terms, a work of art is more than a mere object because of its language-character (Sprachcharakter) or language-like quality (Sprachähnlichkeit), which enables it to mean in ways different from and irreducible to the intentions of its producers or audience. But this is not simply a question of a work of art conveying meaning and being structured like language, for Adorno understands the basis of likeness (ähnlichkeit) itself as linked to the issue of language, as he says, “only as language is like able to know like” [ND: 65/56].9 Understanding this statement requires that we not only explain it by the quality of similar things coming to rec178

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ognize each other, for this leaves the quality of similarity opaque. In Adorno’s thinking, likeness refers to the mode of appearance of a thing that makes it what it is like, in which its likeness involves a self-relation that is not fixed but open-ended, as it is mediated by its relations to the various elements of its environment. Hence, for an artwork to operate as a work of art is for it to bear a likeness (to that which it is addressing or responding to) that is reflexive so that it responds to itself as well as to its object, thereby establishing a relation in which its quality of likeness is not simply passive but also active, since this is a likeness that knows (both that which it is like and that it is itself a likeness). That is, for that which is to know what it is like, is for it to reflect on its likeness (what it is like) and thereby to know what it is like. Similarity has a cognitive component such that it is not epistemologically neutral but becomes a means of knowing, and artworks preeminently exemplify this by the way that they concretize this relation. For, if language enables the mobile and reflexive analysis of likeness, then being language-like is the quality of repeating this critical mode of relation in other material forms. But this then raises the question of what happens when the artwork is already one of language and whose language, insofar as it is an artwork, necessarily displays a quality of being language-like: what is it for language to be like language when language is already an exemplary structure of likeness? Another way of approaching this issue is by realizing that what is language-like is precisely what is not language but nevertheless seems like it. In this way, Adorno takes up a very old line of thinking in which nature is felt to speak in a cryptic quasilinguistic manner that artworks attempt to interpret; for example, Kant speaks of “the cipher by means of which nature figuratively speaks to us in its beautiful forms” [CPJ: §42, 180]. That is, what artworks imitate is not nature as such (natura naturata) but rather its manner of being (natura naturans), which mutely expresses itself in the codes and ciphers by which it persists and that artworks seek to unravel. This notion of a liber naturae is ancient and recurs through various lineages of mystical thought up to the Romantics and ultimately, for Adorno, finds its most potent reading in the prologue to Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study. Although Adorno thought that Benjamin succumbed to a “mythological Platonism” in this work by identifying an ideal Adamic origin of language from which all subsequent forms have decayed, he would nevertheless take advantage of the notion of a mimetic nonlinguistic language as a way of disrupting the rationalization of the subject-object relationship to the natural world.10 Indeed, it is precisely in response to his reading of Benjamin that Adorno formulates his own understanding of the relation between nature and history in “Die Idee der Naturgeschichte,” The Language-Like Quality of the Artwork

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which offers a notably more dialectical reading than Benjamin’s own thinking. A dilemma is raised here, though: for insofar as nature is mute then the artwork operates by bringing it to speech, but inasmuch as nature is mute then the only truth of its expression is this muteness. But the latter cannot be uncovered simply by not speaking, for that would not only express nothing but would also suggest that there is nothing language-like about nature, that it is absolutely inexpressive. Rather, this muteness has to be conveyed through language, which is the challenge underlying the difficulty of making language itself language-like, for this is to make it nonlinguistic such that it can be like language while not making it entirely unlike language, such that it would be entirely mute (an endeavor not remote from Mallarmé’s thinking). Hence, the question of Sprachähnlichkeit or “linguisticality” is one of form, since it is in the notion of form that there lies the possibility of the artwork being language-like while not being language, but this means that there is a mutual constraint or antagonism between the conceptual and the nonconceptual aspects of the artwork that cannot be ignored (due to the complex interweaving of Adorno’s thoughts on this issue I can only enumerate the different points and their interrelations here): Everything language-like [Sprachähnliche] in artworks comes together in form and thus merges into the antithesis of form, the mimetic impulse. Form seeks to bring the par ticu lar to speech through the whole. But this is the melancholy of form, especially with artists for whom it prevails. It always limits what is formed, for otherwise its concept would lose its specific difference from what is formed. This is confirmed by the artistic labour of forming, which always selects, cuts away, renounces: no form without rejection [Refus]. This prolongs the guilty domination in artworks, which they would like to be rid of; form is their amorality. They do injustice to what they form by following it. . . . Art comes into the guilt of the living, not only because through its distance it lets the authentic guilt of the living persist [gewähren läßt] but moreover because it places cuts in the living in order to help it to language and thus mutilates it. [AT: 217/144, cf. 308/207] 1. The linguisticality of artworks realizes (aufgehen) nonconceptuality by bringing it to conceptuality, rendering it in a form that is apprehensible but that also betrays its object, thereby leaving the artwork with an inevitable sense of failure [ND: 23/11]. This failure has long been the mark of modernist aesthetics, which have attempted to avoid this reduction by trying to limit the manner in which conceptualization falls short of its 180

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object by seeking an approach that tries to respond to and thereby counter its own inadequacy. Such an approach is behind the attempt to bring artworks to speak without speaking, for something need not be represented in order to be apprehended in experience, and in doing so the dialectic of conceptuality and nonconceptuality tilts decisively toward the more material, nonconceptual aspect of linguisticality, but artworks “that divest [entäußern] themselves of any semblance of meaningfulness do not thereby forfeit their linguisticality [Sprachähnliches]. They enunciate [sprechen] their meaninglessness with the same determinacy as traditional artworks enunciate their positive meaning” [AT: 230/153]. Thus the form in which this meaninglessness is enunciated is not that of a structure imposed on the material but instead that which arises immanently out of the material in a manner akin to that of Berg’s microtransitions, which leads to the artwork achieving an intensively composed form as Benjamin had envisaged: Artworks become language-like in the development of the connections [Verbindung] of their elements, a wordless syntax even in linguistic structures. What these say is not what their words say. In their intentionless language the mimetic impulses are bequeathed to the whole, which synthesises them. [AT: 274/184] 2. So, what is most enigmatic about artworks is not their irrationality, their intentionless materiality, but their rationality, their attempt to orga nize this materiality into a specific form. The enigma of the work is precisely its formation, which addresses us in the mute expression of its being there at all, given the still-present mimetic relations from which it arises. And “the more methodically [these relations] are mastered, the more [the enigma of the work] is thrown into relief. Through form [these relations] become language-like, seeming in each of their aspects to announce [bekunden] this and only this, even as it slips away,” for such a form only offers the semblance of meaning in the dialectical transition between formation and materiality [AT: 182/120]. However, this formation works in both directions, for just as mute nature is brought to language in the objectification of the artwork (the rational movement of reconciliation), so the language-like structure of the artwork itself only arises through the intensive connections of its wordless syntax (mimetically revealing the unreconciled). So, although there is a whole to the work of art, it consists of divergent tendencies such that there is no uniformity to its expression, for the presence of unreconciled nature continues to resonate in the enigma of its form as the expression of that which lies outside its apparent meaning.11 The Language-Like Quality of the Artwork

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3. But this inconsistency is inherently linguistic, as the relation of nature to the artwork concerns the relation between the particular and the universal, which language essentially articulates: Th at universal aspects are indispensable to art, even as it opposes them, is to be conceived from its linguisticality. For language is hostile to the particular and yet is directed towards its rescue. It mediates the particular through universality and in the constellation of the universal, but it does justice to its own universals only when they do not become rigidly related to the semblance of their autonomy but are rather concentrated to the extreme on what is specifically to be expressed. The universals of language receive their truth by way of a process that countervails them. [AT: 304/204] That is, just as Adorno had found in his studies of Schoenberg, it is only at the extremes of this formed expression that the relation between the rational universals of nature and the mimetic particulars of art come together in the work. And this means, as Adorno makes clear by referring to a letter Benjamin wrote to Martin Buber in 1916, that the energy of formation paradoxically comes from its elimination of the unutterable, for, in Benjamin’s words, “only where this wordless sphere discloses itself in unutterably pure power can the magical spark spring between word and motivating deed, where the unity of both these is equally real. Only the intensive aiming of words into the nucleus of innermost muteness achieves effects.”12 So it is only at the most intense point of inexpressibility, in the mimetic resistance to expression, that language finds the form that enables it to speak. It is not simply the case that it is the essence of language to attend to the unutterable, to the mute language of things, in order to bring it to language, for this is not just how it speaks but how it is, and were it not to do so it could neither speak nor relate to things, for it is only in placing itself alongside other things in the wordless syntax of the world that it can ground its otherwise metaphysical universals and thereby speak. Thus the linguisticality of the artwork is constitutively paradoxical, as it only operates under the greatest tension of diverging from itself, finding its raison d’ être only at the very limits of expressibility: Universals are strongest in art where it comes nearest to language: where something speaks that, in being spoken, goes beyond its here and now; art succeeds at such transcendence, however, only by virtue of its tendency to radical particularisation; that it thereby says nothing but what it can say by force of its own elaboration, its immanent process. The language-like aspect in art is the mimetic one; it only 182

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becomes universally eloquent [beredt] in the specific impulse away from the universal. The paradox that art says and yet does not say, has its ground in the mimetic aspect by which it says at the same time opposing speaking as opaque and particular. [AT: 305/205] 4. But artworks do not succeed at such transcendence because they are constitutively enigmatic—that is, their attempts at expression are marked by a quality of being-fractured (Abgebrochensein) because they are only semblances [AT: 191/126]. Thus the attempt to speak is persistently interrupted, broken off, such that the expression of its universals is blocked, as Kafka’s parables so emphatically demonstrate. The artwork thereby comes closest to transcendence in its material particularity, as it only finds universality indirectly: in the enigmatic disruption of its form. This divergence manifests itself as the dissonance of a perpetually unresolved dialectic of form and materiality, in which form arises out of material only insofar as material is expressed through form, which is the combined sense of linguisticality as speaking, albeit discordantly, as both (mimetically grounded) material form and (rationally intelligible) formed material. However, this aporetic ambivalence provides an important insight, for it enables Adorno to understand the relation of expressiveness and expressionlessness in the artwork by way of Kant’s formula of the purposiveness without purpose of beauty: Art’s purposiveness, disposed of any practical purpose, is its linguisticality; its “without purpose” is its non-conceptuality, its difference from significative [signifikativen] language. Artworks move towards the idea of a language of things only by way of their own language, through the organisation of their disparate aspects; the more they are syntactically articulated in themselves, the more eloquent [sprechender] they become in all their aspects. The aesthetic concept of teleology has its objectivity in the language of art. [AT: 211/140] It is thus that the internal dissonance of the work becomes the form and basis of its autonomy, which is construed by Adorno as the mode of its expression, its material individuation by which it states that it is, which is then also the basis of its mimetic relation to other things, as the material expression of its own language allows it to come into relation with the language of other things in their expression. Since, critically, it is only by combining the conceptual and nonconceptual in itself that language can provide the means by which this dialectic can be apprehended in other things, and thereby enable them to speak. For in this dissonance the work finds for itself the objectivity of natural things: The Language-Like Quality of the Artwork

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The more that art is thoroughly organised as object by the subject and divested of its mere intentions, the more articulately does it speak according to the model of a non-conceptual, non-reified [nicht dingfest] significative language; this would be the same as what is inscribed in what the sentimental age named, with a beautiful and threadbare metaphor, the Book of Nature. [AT: 105/67] 5. If this estrangement is the case for the artwork in general, then it is even more so for the linguistic work, which has important consequences not just for the writer but also for the role of language in society and the representation of reconciliation. As Adorno makes clear in regard to poetry, the traditional subjectivity of the poet, the lyrical I, “is in no way identical with the I that speaks in the poem.” Instead, “the grammatical I of the poem is only posited by that which speaks latently through the work [Gebilde], the empirical is a function of the spiritual, not the reverse.” That is, this latent I “is immanently constituted in the work through the action of its language,” which then identifies the work as that which it is by realizing its motivating interiority, its material import (Gehalt), rather than its content (Inhalt) [AT: 249–50/167]. This process recalls the way that the manifesto realizes itself through its material formation and so legitimizes its ideas through the text that proclaims them, which thus repositions its authorial voice away from any lyrical subject and toward that of the impersonal, for “the one who really produces it is in relation to the work an aspect of reality like others”; in a sense the apparent producer is recruited by the artwork for the purpose of its realization and in doing so, by entrusting itself to its material, production results in a universal in the midst of utmost individuation. The force of this externalisation [Entäußerung] of the private I in the object is its collective essence; it constitutes the language-character of works. The labour in the artwork becomes social by way of the individual, without it needing to be conscious of society; perhaps all the more so the less that it is. The intervening individual subject is scarcely more than a limiting value, something minimal required by the artwork for its crystallisation. In this externalization (Adorno uses Hegel’s word for the self-alienation of Spirit into its objects, which in turn translated the Greek kenosis) the artwork finds its language-character in the ability to speak as a We rather than an I, “and all the more purely the less it adapts externally to a We and its idiom” [AT: 250/167]. For, by realizing itself in a material form that is yet autonomous, the artwork becomes a thing and thus can differentiate itself and oppose those things that have become reified. So Adorno is not 184

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adverting to a form of socially committed art in which the subjectivity of the artist would be subsumed into that of the collective— quite the opposite, as the greatest potential for social critique lies in that which does not engage directly with society but rather works to question it from the position of its own autonomy. But this is all the more difficult in literary forms, since “for the sake of their own eloquence [Sprachlichkeit] they must strive to free themselves of all external communication” such that “the subject forms itself to collective experience all the more intimately the more it hardens itself against linguistically objectified expression” (Adorno is thinking of Kafka and Beckett here, whose works he defended on exactly this point) [AT: 251/168]. Thus this does not imply a univocal or determinate sociality, for artworks remain constituted by their actual historical conditions; consequently the speaking of a We in the artwork is riven: Although art is tempted to anticipate a non-existent social whole, its non-existent subject, and is thereby no mere ideology, it bears at the same time the mark of its non-existence. Nevertheless the antagonisms of society remain preserved in it. Art is true insofar as its speaking [Redende], and it itself, are conflicting and unreconciled, but this truth only becomes its own when it synthesises what is fractured and thus makes its irreconcilability determinate. Paradoxically, it must testify to the unreconciled and at the same time tend towards its reconciliation; a possibility only for its non-discursive language. Only in this process is its We concretised. What speaks out of it, however, is truly its subject insofar as it speaks out of it rather than being represented by it. In appearing through its material interconnections to the world, the work realizes its unacknowledged natural-history but does so only as a possibility, thereby all the more emphatically indicating what has been passed over in the reification of these social and material relations. This unrepresented but nevertheless determinate possibility speaks out of the work in nondiscursive expressions, which subtend but also hollow out the universality of its We by showing what it has been built upon. So even as the work becomes objective by realizing its language-like speech, it retains a sense of the anomalous, for its objectification “takes place at the cost of the depiction [Abbildung] of the living. Artworks win life only when they renounce likeness to the human [Menschenähnlichkeit]” [AT: 251–52/168; cf. NL: 189/NL1: 163]. This renunciation is the source of the obscure, inaccessible forms of much modernist art whose apparently alien qualities arise out of their removal of conventional gestures in order to give better voice to their natural-history, for it is only thus that these gestures can The Language-Like Quality of the Artwork

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resonate, however enigmatically, which becomes all the more challenging in written works, as Paulhan found, and leads to an ever more stringent abstraction of language from everyday use. 6. What this means is that expression, whether in the artwork or in the language of aesthetics, is not innocuous, as it involves the obscuring of actual material traces, which nevertheless reassert themselves in their obscurity as the gestures that hollow out the work. Th is is the source of the instability with which the language of aesthetics has to contend, an instability that does not simply refer to the ambivalence of its dialectical structure but to actual material traces that it obliterates. Thus for the language of aesthetics to come to a point of approximation with the work is for it to come to terms with its own natural-historical gestures and the loss involved in their expression, but also with that which these gestures indicate, however obliquely or eccentrically. This would remove aesthetics from the language of universals, or at least place these at the ser vice of its material particulars, which would thus remove it from the language of aesthetics as such insofar as it becomes an aesthetic language, the relation between the two being necessary but impossible to decide, as it reveals an irreconcilable tension between what this language must and must not do to be true to itself, unless a form can be found in which this lack of reconciliation can be presented as it is, in which truth and beauty, for example, can be presented alongside their material interruptions. Adorno summarizes the challenge of realizing this expression of the work beyond the subject in the following key passage: Through expression art closes itself off to being-for-another, which is eager to engulf it, and speaks in itself: this is its mimetic consummation. Its expression is the antithesis of expressing something. Such mimesis is the ideal of art, not its practical procedure, nor is it an attitude directed towards expressive characters. The contribution made to expression by the artist is mimicry, which in him releases the expressed; if what is expressed becomes the tangible content [Inhalt] of the artist’s soul and the artwork a copy of this, the work degenerates into a blurred photograph. Schubert’s resignation has its locus not in the purported mood of his music, nor in how he was feeling, as if the work could give a clue to this, but in the So it is that it announces with the gesture of letting oneself fall: it is its expression. Its quintessence is the language-character of art, fundamentally distinct from language as its medium. One could speculate whether the former is incompatible with the latter; that would provide a clarification of the effort of prose since Joyce to put discursive language 186

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out of action or at least to subordinate it to formal categories to the point that construction becomes unrecognisable: the new art tries to bring about the transformation of communicative into mimetic language. By virtue of its double character, language is a constituent of art and its mortal enemy. The phrase “So it is” (So ist es) is related to the quiddity or essence of a thing, what it is (Sosein).13 But as is apparent from the way that it is developed in this passage, it is no longer the essence of a thing that is being referred to in this phrase but its facticity: the expression of its irreducible “thereness,” which would seem to exhaust any sense of essence precisely insofar as it resists the universalization inherent to language. For it is only through the nondiscursive aspect of language that such gestures are expressed, which, after his earlier discussion of Kafka, reveal the nonconceptual form of the work’s thereness, its natural-history or how it is.14 Adorno elucidates this further: Etruscan vases in the Villa Giulia are speaking in the highest measure and are incommensurable with all communicative language. The true language of art is mute [sprachlos], and its mute aspect has priority over the signifying of poetry, which is also not wholly lacking in music. The linguisticality of the vases most likely rests on their Here I am or I am this, a selfhood not first excised by identificatory thought from the interdependence of entities. Thus the rhinoceros, that mute animal, seems to say: I am a rhinoceros. Rilke’s line “for there is no place, / that does not see you,” which Benjamin held in high esteem, codified the non-signifying language of artworks in an unsurpassable fashion: Expression is the gaze of artworks. Its language is older though unredeemed in relation to signifying: as if artworks, by moulding themselves to the subject through their organisation, recapitulated the way it arose, how it wrestled itself free [indem sie durch ihr Gefügtsein dem Subjekt sich anbilden, wiederholten, wie es entspringt, sich entringt]. They bear expression not where they communicate the subject, but rather where they tremble with the protohistory of subjectivity. [AT: 171–72/112]15 So although the natural-historical expressiveness of the artwork does not derive from the artist or develop to the degree of expressing a subjectposition of its own, it nevertheless only develops as expression by recapitulating the subject’s own manner of emergence (conceived in terms of the relation of entspringen and entringen found in Benjamin’s understanding of origin in the prologue to his Trauerspiel study, which is behind much of The Language-Like Quality of the Artwork

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Adorno’s rethinking of the work of art).16 It is thus that the artwork appears as if it bore a form of mute protosubjectivity of its own, a blank gaze, with its own history and unreadable intentions, which also inflects the nature of the language in which it expresses itself. But this recapitulation is not only akin to that of an animal in its autonomy, as the reference to the mundane materiality of Etruscan vases also indicates a response to Hegel and the development of prose (hence the reference to Joyce), since it is in the abstract and secular quality of Etruscan art that Hegel found evidence for the “prosaic” quality of Roman life in contrast to the harmonious and beautiful “lyricism” of Greek art [PH: 288].17 And this move from the lyrical to the prosaic is key to the disenchantment of the world in art, which shows itself, for Adorno, in the way that the material autonomy of language comes to speak in its own (enigmatic) voice [AT: 119/76; MM: 251/222]. 7. Despite its apparent muteness, this language-like expressiveness of artworks is still a form of rational mimesis, which thereby qualifies its sense of rationality as well as its sense of mimesis: For that to which the mimetic relation responds is the telos of knowledge, which it simultaneously blocks through its own categories. Art completes knowledge with that which is excluded from it and thereby once again impairs its character as knowledge, its univocity. [AT: 87/54] So while the expression of natural-history in the artwork is a form of nonconceptual knowledge that grounds knowledge in general, in doing so it also indicates how such knowledge remains intrinsically incomplete with or without it, as the next chapter will show. But the same is true for the artwork as well, since it seeks to fulfill itself by realizing its mimetic relations, although actually doing so would not only mean that it ceased to be an artwork but also that it would be impossible for anything less than absolute thought, as these mimetic relations cannot ever be fully realized. Thus the artwork occupies an aporetic position between its network of affinities and its reflexive conceptuality and as such hovers midway between the rational history of things and the natural mimesis of thought, knowing that in the conceptualization of its material affinities it is removing itself from its own constitutive nonconceptuality. Therefore, whether it is a case of expressing too little or too much, the risk is just as strong that the artwork will lose its expressiveness in meaningless silence, since the crisis of art, increasing the agitation of its possibility, affects both its poles equally: its meaning and thereby ultimately its spiritual content, and its expression and thereby its mimetic aspect. Both depend 188

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on each other: no expression without meaning, without the medium of spiritualisation; no meaning without the mimetic aspect: without art’s language-character, which today seems to be perishing. [AT: 413/278] This language-character is, as we have seen, the prosaic enigma whose presence brings about a semblance of reconciliation in the work, and it is only by a recapitulation of this image in the language of aesthetics that the work can be recognized as a work, just as the work can only appear as such by recapitulating the formation of the subject. Since if “artworks imitate nothing but themselves, then none will understand them other than those who imitate them,” which has significant consequences for the nature and extent of any understanding that might be arrived at by way of them [AT: 190/125]. But Adorno’s concern with the crisis of art has further implications for the linguistic artwork, for if it is a case of recalling the languagelike character of language, then it is only in certain areas of modernist writing that an exploration of the autonomy of the textual medium in both its materiality and its metaphysics, its immanent cognitive forms and their material refractions, has been taken up, just as other modernist art practices have found themselves through the autonomy of other media. But in doing so the specificity of the prosaic is uncovered, which then brings the autonomy of literature into view by indicating the nature and extent of its materiality. To appreciate the role that materiality plays in language it is necessary to realize how poetry exists in its two forms: the oral and the textual. Oral poetry explores the full range of affects and effects available to vocal performance, which means that it uses language in terms of its sounds and rhythms. Textual poetry may attempt to follow the modes of the voice, but it can also pursue its own forms through modifications of writing understood as an alternative appearance of language. The use of lineation, which traditionally operated as a means of conveying the vocality of a poem onto the page, has often been seen as a defining feature of poetry in contradistinction to prose, but with the development of modernist poetry (particularly that of Mallarmé and Stein) practices associated with the page and with writing, rather than the voice, began to emerge, and, as a consequence, the prose poem with its lack of lineation became more significant. However, this was not prose as the supposedly transparent medium of communication, for this is no more than a convention that defines it by begging the question. Instead, the manner in which prose takes place on the page, when looked at on its own, presupposes no prior relation to vocal rhythms or grammatical form but rather allows each line or sentence The Language-Like Quality of the Artwork

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to be seen in isolation and with equal emphasis to all its parts. This does not replace the structure of spoken language with the noise of concrete poetry, but rather forces us to look more closely at exactly how language operates in terms of its own internal structures and relations, rather than those that we might seek to impose on it from without in the drive to conventional meaning. The nature of the line, whether poetic or prosaic, since at this point the two are indistinguishable, thus takes on the endlessness and formlessness that characterized what was called the Gothic line in architecture, which replaced the harmonious organic form of classical architecture with something essentially formless and lacking in harmony, as it appeared to be without beginning or end but simply persisted in what was seen to be a mechanical or nonorganic fashion, as is also found in the formalism of Beckett’s writings. In doing so, we seem to come up against the thingly quality of language, its own condensed natural-historical reality. But the movement by which language becomes thingly, and thereby appears to us as such, is the same movement in which it becomes exposed to reification (Verdinglichung). Consequently, and this is the nature of the crisis of art that Adorno spoke of, reification, like mimesis, autonomy, or enlightenment, is a movement that is dialectical through and through, which is to say that it is impossible to separate the movement of reification whereby a concept becomes objectified in the culture of exchange, from the movement of reification in which an artwork makes itself apparent in its thingliness, which is why they are necessarily referred to by the same word, much as Hegel’s and Marx’s use of Entäußerung also carries the same ambivalence [AT: 96/60, 211/140; CC: 321]. Indeed, the word translated as “double-edged,” Zwieschlächtigkeit, in the sentence “Artworks share with enigmas the double-edged quality of being determinate and indeterminate,” is the same word Marx uses to describe the ambivalent use-value and exchange-value of commodities [AT: 188/124]. As we have seen, because of this double-edged quality artworks possess a structure whose meaning is both withheld and compelled, and it is as such that they are enigmatic. And Adorno is particularly clear on the nature of this enigma: “artworks are language only as writing,” since it is in writing that we come across the hieroglyphic quality of a form that bears meaning for which the code has been lost, and to which its content does not seem to contribute [AT: 189/124]. The literary artwork thus presents a particularly difficult but exemplary exploration of the ambivalence of artworks in general, which makes its nature and experience that much more significant in terms of the dialectic of materiality and formality, mimesis and rationality, that it aporetically, elusively exhibits. 190

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7

The Possibility of Speculative Writing

For Adorno the question remains as to how the gestures of language are able to grant a form of (nonconceptual) understanding; in what way do they allow for a sensible knowledge of materiality in its difference, that is, without subsuming it into a system of identity, yet without also slipping into irrational intuition? Given his understanding of the artwork as that which bears a language-like quality and his situation of metaphysics as a materially grounded speculative thinking, it is key to his responses to both aesthetics and epistemology that there should be a rethinking of language in its materiality, which is thus also to rethink the nature of the relation between thought and the world. For if consciousness is “a moment of that in which it intervenes,” then the mode of this intervention is to be found in the work of language, in both its material affinities and its conceptualizations, and, as was the case with the work of art, these are two aspects that can never be fully reconciled [ND: 262/265]. This interdependence of epistemology and aesthetics in Adorno’s thought is of central significance for my purposes, since the problem of finding the form in which materiality can be speculatively apprehended is also the problem of literature in modernist writing, as it is the problem of finding a form in which language can critically engage with the world in both its actuality and its possibility. Adorno approaches the relation of materiality and thought by extending his thinking of gesture to the rhetorical dimension of language, which not only mimetically grounds thinking in the body and the world (ow!) but also indicates how these objective aspects come to be reflected within 191

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thought (that hurts!), for rhetoric “represents [vertritt] in philosophy what cannot be thought other than in language” [ND: 65/55]. Language is placed at the heart of mimetic reason by Adorno because the rhetorical dimension of language is the means by which nonconceptual material intuitions make themselves sensible (the registering of an instance of pain) and the means for understanding how conceptuality depends on these material intuitions (the comprehension of pain as such), and in doing so it demonstrates a key aspect of his thought, which is that “the antithesis between universal and particular is necessary as well as deceptive. Neither of them is without the other, the particular only as determined and to this extent universal, the universal only as the determination of a particular and to this extent particular. Both of them are and are not.”1 That is, material particulars can only be recognized as such through their conceptualization, which thereby reveals their universality, just as conceptual universals are only meaningful in their par ticu lar determination, which renders them par ticu lar. Separately they may exist, but only as abstract, for it is only through their dialectical articulation that they can appear as such, and for there to be an understanding of their relation and their positions as aspects of this relation (this is pain). Thus, in terms of the situation of language, it is rhetoric that takes on this role of the mimetic milieu of subject and object, which was discussed in the last chapter as linguisticality—that is, it is in rhetoric that the language-character of language is found. As Bernstein explains in his analysis of the material inferences of language, on the one hand rhetoric inflects statements toward their object through the use of emphasis so that they cannot be submerged (through their relation to other statements) into simply being part of a sequence of rational inferences; on the other hand, the idiom of this inflection operates as a mode of mimetic approximation to the actual object. Together, this means that material inferences become apparent in statements through the way that their rhetorical dimensions convey knowledge in the form of their resistance to conceptual rationalization and their approximation to objects, such that the materiality of the object itself becomes known through this nonnegligible rhetorical inflection of the statement (the nature of pain).2 As a result, the dialectical articulation of such statements operates as the organon of thinking insofar as it enables a mutual approximation of thing and expression “almost to the point of indifference” [ND: 66/56]. Hence, the concept is not undermined by this material inference but grounded, and thereby transformed, as its particular materiality or mimetic aspect, which has been lost through its universalization, is restored to it, and it is thus that Adorno can speak of dialectics as rescuing thought by thought. But this is not just to replace conceptual thinking by mimetic, as 192

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they bear forms of reasoning that do not coincide, for the latter “identifies more and otherwise than identity-thinking. It wants to say what something is, whereas identity-thinking says what it falls under, what it is an example or representation of, thus what it itself is not” [ND: 152/149]. This is why the dialectical rescue of materiality is an endless critical endeavor for Adorno, as neither aspect can be neglected even if the two cannot be synthesized, since they are rigorously incommensurable; thus pursuing a goal of unity or harmony is misguided, for the nature of material inference is profoundly dissonant. What this means, Bernstein points out, is that the dimension of rhetoric is to be recovered by attending to the manner in which statements conceal their effects, and it is from this impulse that Adorno derives the necessity for a rethinking of the relation between thought and language. For if it is a question of allowing the materiality of language to make itself felt, then it is a question of finding a mode of writing that can allow thought to broach this materiality without abandoning itself, which is why Adorno will pursue a number of different rhetorical techniques to achieve this. Attendant on this approach to writing is the effect that it has on reading, which as an experience of language’s material expression is irreducibly tied to its appearance. For it is the materiality of the experience that grants reading its objectivity, just as it is the material nature of this experience that is the ground for its conceptualization, even as it exceeds conceptualization by virtue of its density, which admits of no complete determination or paraphrase. Instead, reading operates by tracking the tensions sedimented in the work via a recapitulation (Mitvollzug: literally, co-implementation) of its immanent movements, as if understanding could only arise through a rewriting that followed the text by reconstituting it on the same page [NL: 433/NL2: 97]. It is in doing so that the text then imparts a sense of its materiality while resisting conceptualization, which indicates the mimetic basis of understanding in the combined “sensuous-nonsensuous intuition” that is reading and, conversely, the linguisticality of its material, even when that material is already linguistic [AT: 415/279]. Equally, by reorienting our reading practices to the primacy of the object we also submit ourselves to it, but doing so is not an experience without content, even if it is nonconceptual; instead, it is workless or intransitive, an experience without products or conclusions, and so reading not only provides intransitive knowledge but also enables us to learn what such knowledge is. Literature then becomes a mode for communicating this intransitive understanding (just as music had been for Schoenberg)— a knowledge of the partial, ongoing, and inconclusive movements of language with its inherent ambiguities and contradictions. It is thus that literature provides a way for The Possibility of Speculative Writing

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philosophy to move beyond the confines of identity-thinking and express the material, indeterminate, and forgotten traces of existence, but whether it can remain philosophy in doing so is of course precisely the point that Blanchot would contest. “A hole is a true,” Stein remarks playfully, punning on the French word for hole (trou), but thereby opening up a linguistic-historical axis with Adorno’s counter-Hegelian sentence, “the whole is the untrue” [MM: 55/50].3 Such verbal resonances are only as arbitrary as their reading leaves them, for, in anticipating Adorno, Stein effectively places his writings in a more experimental poetic context, while also adducing Hegel’s thought to her own playfulness. This does not demonstrate any philosophical point but rather illustrates how the contextual and historical determination of language is never complete, since it bears “holes” through which moments of material truth can always be expressed. That this is done by way of an apparent identity, since a hole is a trou in terms of its translation, further indicates how the basis of simple linguistic identity is only established by cementing over the indeterminacy that insists beneath it, one in which the homonymy of trou and true reveals an entirely different logic of association that, in its materiality, is not negligible. Th is is perhaps no more than the kind of linguistic game that Novalis spoke of in his Monolog, in that the meaning of language is always on the point of evading or resisting our intentions, but what is significant is the manner in which Stein’s aside is granted a reinforced existence by way of Adorno’s version years later, as if it had to wait for the moment in which its truth could be historically saved, a moment that of course was never inevitable. Recognizing the contingent but nonarbitrary associations that language exposes is what takes place when we submit to language as the object of thought, rather than seeking to subordinate it to conceptual usages that determine its meanings and operations, and this is the way that the constellational logic of Adorno’s writings attempts to proceed. For it is only by such writing that the reading of this intransitive linguisticality can be learned, as much by the writer as for anyone else, a linguisticality that makes itself felt by way of the material traces of words, such as their visual or aural effects, which exposes the inability of language to be wholly reduced to semiotic values. This intransitivity is critical because it reflects the contingency of language, for being conditioned is the only aspect of language that is unconditional, as if Novalis were thinking of language when he wrote, “we seek the unconditioned [Unbedingte] everywhere, and only ever find the conditioned [Dinge: things].”4 Stein’s writings are very strong in this regard, since they replace the ordering of conventional syntax, which subordinates words to chains of meaning, with an attention to the singular presence of each word in its 194

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particular historic-material constellation of resonances, its own immanent “wordless” syntax [AT: 274/184]. While this might allow us to experience the primacy of the linguistic object, it necessarily also has implications for our capacity for understanding, which still requires some degree of conceptual coordination, and it is to this problem that Adorno and Blanchot attempt to respond, whether through reading or writing, as it is not just a case of succumbing to the experience of language, but of allowing its materiality to be thought so that its resonances can be recognized. Adorno finds one of the most compelling examples of this problem in Hegel’s prose, precisely insofar as it fails to realize its own goals. As he points out, the difficulty of reading Hegel’s written works, and he draws a distinction between these and the posthumously published lectures, is what appears to be their constitutive lack of clarity: One cannot glide over the passages in which what is being dealt with remains in the balance [Schwebe]; their structure must be derived from the substance of Hegel’s philosophy. A character of suspension [Schwebenden] is associated with it, in agreement with the doctrine that truth cannot be grasped in any individual thesis, any delimited positive statement. Form in Hegel is in accordance with this intention. Nothing isolated can be understood, everything is to be understood only in the whole, with the awkwardness [Peinlichen] that the whole in turn only lives in the singular moments. But this doubleness of the dialectic eludes actual literary presentation, which is of necessity finite when it unequivocally states something unequivocal. [DSH: 327–28/91] Yet to bring to language that which eludes its determinate presentation, because its concrete existence is historical and contextual, is, as Adorno adds, perhaps the only meaningful definition of philosophy, and this is why Hegel finds himself in such difficulties when he comes to write. For the only solution to this problem is to attempt to write from the point of totality, which is to write tirelessly, hoping vainly that, through the mediations of language, the unmediated existence of what is can eventually be brought to expression [DSH: 336/101–2]. But necessarily such expression is flawed, as it identifies through the concept what is nonidentical, so if the life of the thing is to be manifested in the word, then a different approach is required, one in which language confronts this inadequacy of expression by turning against itself. It is thus that each sentence enters into a dialectical relation to its neighbors and to the whole, which is the basis for the lack of clarity and concision in the text: for the individual sentence is only comprehensible in the light of the whole, which is itself only The Possibility of Speculative Writing

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actualized in individual sentences. But it is precisely this relation of particularity and universality in Hegel’s language that reflects that in the thing itself, such that it is not irremediably isolated from it, and it is because of this that the naming of the thing in the concept can still bear an element of its particular existence and yet be communicable. This is to grant to concepts the singular density and exemplarity of the name, as Benjamin had suggested, with the caveat that this singularity can only be harnessed by way of a careful attention to its configuration in the text so that its singularity is not lost [DSH: 341/107]. Adorno nevertheless claims that this is not what actually takes place in Hegel’s writings, which have too much faith in their totality of perspective and thus fail to bring this textual dialectic to a degree of critical acuity in relation to the inherent disproportion of conceptual language. This failure appears as a vagueness in the operation of the dialectic, which needs to be countered by an objective focus in the use of language as well as in its content, so that there is a rigor to the formulation of thought as well as to its focus [DSH: 342–43/109–10]. Central to this reorientation is the discovery that the subjectivity of the concept arises out of the objectivity of the thing, as was indicated by the material inferences of linguistic gestures, for these rhetorical inflections of language are in no way merely circumstantial; rather they arise solely because language is grounded in the concrete, which thus reveals it as being able to speak to both its particularity and its universality: If one wants to reach the object, however, then its subjective determinations or qualities are not to be eliminated: precisely that would run counter to the primacy of the object. If the subject has a core of object, then the subjective qualities of the object are all the more an objective element. For it is only as determinate that the object becomes something. In the determinations that seem merely to be attached to it by the subject, the subject’s own objectivity comes to the fore: they are all borrowed from the objectivity of the intentio recta.5 This refocusing leads to a reconsideration of nominalization, as it indicates that concepts are not neutral or transparent terms but carry their own natural-history that reveals their actual context, and while this may disrupt the abstract or subjective use of concepts, doing so also exposes their objective material expression. Adorno finds evidence for this approach in Hegel’s overly casual use of language, which demonstrates that, in his attempts to track the movement of Spirit through the concept, there is just as much validity in its moments of abstraction as there are in its passages of specificity. While the latter may identify aspects of its movement, the 196

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former does so negatively, by what it fails to capture, what proves resistant to conceptual naming and thereby makes its presence felt otherwise; through the idiomatic gestures or obscurities that in their own way bear as much material specificity as any actual conceptualization (like the use of aber, “but,” for the purposes of connection, rather than antithesis). In these moments Adorno sees the emergence of the mimetic relation that guarantees the concept but is repressed by it [DSH: 354/123]. What seems to drive Hegel to these casual expressions is the inadequacy of conceptual language, which fails to address the actual precisely because of its concepts. Instead, as Adorno notes, “the trace of the empirical element that is incommensurable with the concept takes refuge in the presentation,” but in doing so this empirical element also indicates “the conceptual irreducibility of the concept,” the fact that concepts are not fully or not only conceptual, which is revealed in the attempt to move beyond them, a dialectical tension that Blanchot would exploit, as will be seen in the next section [DSH: 355–56/124]. The challenge for the reader is thus to try to disentangle these threads: to attempt to read with an eye to both the overall movement of the work and its individual blind spots, as it is only by doing so that their dialectical interplay can be drawn out in terms of how they structure the work and how they undermine it. Whether such a mode of reading is possible is not given, nor should it be seen as an attempt to sublate the negative aspects of Hegel’s writings into a totality of meaning. Rather, what Adorno has done is to show that by the logic of Hegel’s own thought the materiality of the concept must make its presence known by way of its presentation in language and that this raises the necessary critique of such thinking (which takes place in reading) to a further level of difficulty, as it shows how this critique is also grounded in these moments of obscurity, for they are its actual empirical occasions—that is, those occasions when it is perforated by its historical conditions. Reading these blind spots thereby exposes thought to a nonconceptual knowledge on which the labor of the concept works. But learning to read with an eye for the detail as well as the structure, for the rhythm as well as its syncopations, only comes with time, through time, although in doing so the time of the work itself becomes known, its own eccentric natural-history, for through the explication of its concepts, “the concept’s other, the non-identical becomes evident within the concept itself ” [DSH: 363/133].6 Reading thus operates as an ongoing critique of the work, both prospectively and retrospectively reconsidering its movements and dialectically reconstituting it outside the work at hand—that is, by taking up those areas in which the terms and concepts point beyond themselves, albeit The Possibility of Speculative Writing

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vaguely, and recapitulating the work from that point of view. And, as Adorno significantly points out, this “conception of totality as an identity thoroughly mediated by non-identity is a law of artistic form transposed into the philosophical domain” [DSH: 366–67/137; cf. AT: 415/279]. While this law refers to the dialectic of aesthetic material Adorno developed in his studies of music, particularly in regard to Beethoven, by which the objective temporality of the work is uncovered, it also emphasizes the aesthetic supplementation of philosophy: that philosophy can only proceed as philosophy if it is grounded in the aesthetic. But Adorno adds the reminder that in philosophy this idea of totality is not treated as a semblance or necessary illusion, as it is in art, but as “actualised reason,” thereby covering over its nonconceptual basis, which is the problem highlighted in earlier chapters in relation to Kant’s treatment of the idea of totality, and while Hegel can be said to have pursued the consequences of this idea more thoroughly, he is only saved from the same error of reification by virtue of the equivocations of his writing. What needs to be understood is the fact that concepts only point beyond themselves (cognitively or metaphysically) by virtue of the fact that they are grounded in an experience that cannot be reduced to the concept, and it is thus that the identity of the totality that they indicate is thoroughly mediated by nonidentity, but this also means that the subjective nominalistic aspect of the concept “coincides” with its objective reality, that aspect that exists in itself, and that thereby guarantees that the concept is of the thing itself [DSH: 344/111]. As such, the concept that brings the thing to the expression of its existence is objectively determined as part of its own historically and materially contextualized manifestation of truth and is thus by no means subjectively arbitrary: “According to Hegel there is a constitutive need for the non-identical in order for concepts, identity, to come into being [zustande kommen]; just as conversely there is a need for the concept in order to become aware [bewußt] of the nonconceptual, the non-identical” [DSH: 375/147]. Inasmuch as Adorno is thinking speculatively he is demonstrating the nonconceptual ground of cognition, that which enables its concepts to be objective, but insofar as he is thinking critically Adorno is also indicating the limits of such conceptual thinking, which cannot be exceeded except by adverting to another nonconceptual mode of thinking. Thus although he is asserting a particular dialectical relation of thought and language, this only occurs in the mode of epistemology, for pace Bernstein this dialectic comes apart in aesthetics under the weight of its negativity, so where there is a coordination of thought and language this is only from the perspective of conceptual synthesis; outside this there remains only the lack of reconciliation. Thinking is thus enhanced by the speculative realization of 198

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concepts but also restrained by its inability to conceive of what exceeds it, which has the consequence of placing it on equal terms with those aesthetic spheres that accompany it and thereby refusing the division of labor that would seek to submit one to the other. But this situation becomes complicated when it comes to writing, which may bring out the possibilities of speculative enhancement insofar as thinking takes up the nonconceptual movements of textuality (as Hegel attempted), but at the same time it indicates the limits and lack of reconciliation for such thinking insofar as it encounters those movements of textuality that remain materially aporetic. And it is not always possible to tell these moments apart, so there is a risk not just of misapprehension or obliteration but more seriously of the text as such becoming a contradiction for thought, that which both affirms and denies it, although it is precisely this that renders it an exemplary instance of negative dialectics. For only thus is the dialectic followed through in its entirety, to the point of unraveling any possibility of its end. Hegel, Blanchot, and the Work of Writing The dialectic of the universal and the particular that Adorno finds in Hegel’s writing takes place in a mode of language that appears able to realize its nonconceptual aspects by the way that these inflect the materiality of its textual appearance. But in relation to writing in general this dialectic plays itself out more broadly in the relation between the different aspects of its “work” as thing and as activity. And it is this problematic that Blanchot takes as his starting point in “La littérature et le droit à la mort” in order to examine the implications of Hegel’s thought in regard to the work of writing. As has been noted, the materiality of writing bears its own aporetic complications, but, as Blanchot will show, the attempt to dialectically coordinate the nominal and verbal aspects of “work” becomes attenuated in writing to the point that, insofar as it realizes itself as work, writing also realizes its impossibility to be treated nominally as a work, for any guarantee that it may bring to its material inferences also, and to the same degree, suspends the possibility of their certainty or completion. This essential ambiguity comprises the work and is the form of its autonomy: it is that which is encountered in the work of writing. It is as if literature were taking to an extreme a double-bind found in the artwork more generally, which Adorno summarizes by saying that such “works speak like fairies in folktales: ‘you want the absolute, you shall become it, but without knowing it’ [du willst das Unbedingte, es soll dir werden, doch unkenntlich]” [AT: 191/126]. This is the ambiguity also found in Kafka’s parables, which are only capable of realizing their gestures if they are not recognized as The Possibility of Speculative Writing

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parables, an ambiguity Blanchot will render abyssal, although in doing so something else will be uncovered. Writing begins with a dilemma “that the writer must and must not overcome,” for if his work is one of bringing forth a work, then in order to start he needs to have already started [PF: 295/303]. But, following Hegel, an individual cannot determine the purpose of his actions until they have been carried out, just as he cannot know what he is before he has brought himself to actuality through action: The individual who is going to act therefore seems to find himself in a circle in which every moment already presupposes the other, and thus no beginning can be found for his actions, because he only comes to know his originary essence, which must be his purpose [Zweck], from the deed, but in order to act he must have that purpose beforehand. [PG: 297/240] As was remarked at the beginning of this study, Blanchot, in a move that characterizes his work in general, translates this existential problematic into the context of the writer’s work, which reveals that these difficulties are concentrated in the writer’s work to the point of being insurmountable, for this circularity means that “the work cannot be planned, but only carried out, that it has value, truth, and reality, only through the words that unfold it in time and inscribe it in space,” thus the writer “will set to writing, but out of nothing and with nothing in mind— and, following an expression of Hegel’s, like a nothingness working in nothingness” [PF: 296/304; PG: 296/239]. In saying this, Blanchot has begun to indicate how Hegel’s position holds a more radical interpretation, since for Hegel the solution to the circularity of presupposition is simply to begin, immediately, without further thoughts about beginnings and purposes. But, as Blanchot points out, if this is to write out of nothing, then it is without the security of any project or ideal but grounded simply in the contingency of the everyday (which of course was an element of his own existence as a writer of literary reviews, in which the occasion was the material clinamen removing both the writing and the writer from the void of pure nothingness), and such writing is thus condemned to be repeated without summation, for it is mired in mediacy, as the contingent is its very condition, which cannot be overcome or sublated, since it is that in and through which its words unfold. Nevertheless, the work comes to be in a form that seems to arise out of nothing, without being reducible to its conditions, occurring in a moment of sheer existence as its words bring forth a perfect appearance, a sudden self-positing proposition of subject and object, writer and work. However, this is not equivalent to Fichte’s Tathandlung, since no sooner is 200

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the sentence written than it is dissolved into the everyday, lost to its putative author, alienated, and thereby alienating its author as well. But in doing so, as Hegel notes, a discovery is made, for in passing through the stages of actualization and dissolution the writer becomes aware of the thing itself (die Sache selbst), for although the work disappears the fact of its disappearance remains, as “the movement that allows the work to be realised as it enters the stream of history, to be realised as it disappears” [PF: 300/308]. This sublates the alienation and negation of the work into its “truth,” which thus unites the writer and the work in the ideal movement of Spirit. But literature offers no such possibilities for reconciliation, for although its context may authorize the work its status remains uncertain, since whether it succeeds or fails, whether it is completed or abandoned, whether the writer claims to write for himself or for others, he is still able to say that the truth of the work has been maintained. So where is this truth? Blanchot’s answer is not hopeful, for “in the final analysis literature, by its very activity, denies the substance of what it represents. This is its law and its truth. If it renounces this in order to attach itself definitively to an exterior truth, it ceases to be literature and the writer who still claims he is a writer enters into another aspect of bad faith.” Such negativity would seem to lead to an inescapable nihilism, but before we confirm this, Blanchot goes on to say that the response of the writer is not to “turn his face to the wall,” as doing so will only make the wall into a world, hence the negativity of literature does not entail asceticism, for even if it can never fully engage with the world it can also never fully abdicate from it. The chance that is discovered here is the “sickness” of words, their inability to be free of equivocation, which is also their health, for without it there would be no possibility for communication or meaning at all [PF: 301–2/310]. This means that, in relation to the work and its truth, the absence of the work and its actuality, the reader and the intentions of the work, the writer is “the movement that brings them together and unifies them,” such that this shifting (glissement) from one aspect to another leaves him perpetually absent, claiming at each point to be faithful to each aspect absolutely, without reconciliation, and so appearing multiply but not totally determinable [PF: 302–3/311–12]. If the writer hereby finds himself afflicted with the mimetic identity of the work, then this would seem to confirm that the negativity of writing has made it useless for action, but again this is not given, for if “we see in work the force of history, that which transforms man in transforming the world, then it is necessary to recognise in the activity of the writer the form of work par excellence” [PF: 304/313]. The dialectic of labor, in which work The Possibility of Speculative Writing

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realizes being by first negating it and then revealing it in the form of history, is in fact followed by the writer to the highest degree, since in order to write “he must destroy language in its present form and create it in another form, denying books as he forms a book out of what other books are not.” But here the implications of Blanchot’s deviations from the dialectic become evident, as the form of this new book cannot be foreseen, for while it may have been conceived according to some idea, the actual realization of it is unpredictable, and in the face of something objectively other, the writer too becomes other, but not in the sense of becoming united with the work in its truth, as the book itself is the writer “become other,” and so there is a relation of persistent dialectical estrangement rather than reconciliation between them [PF: 305/314]. In following the dialectic of alienated labor developed by Hegel, Marx, and Kojève, Blanchot has been showing how its implications are at each stage made more demanding in the work of writing, but he now proceeds to extend these implications further. For if the writer finds the act of writing to be a negation of everything and an immediate seizure of the freedom it does not have, then this means that it neglects “the real conditions of his emancipation.” Not only that, but if a writer can write anything and in doing so negates everything in the current situation, then he in fact negates nothing, for by getting rid of its own limits writing also negates the possibility of negation and thus becomes “the realisation of the inability to negate anything” [PF: 306/315]. This becomes the basis for the imaginary nature of writing in general, which seems to release itself from the finite world and give itself the infinite immediately, thereby removing the necessity of action. But Blanchot pushes this thought further by claiming that this realm of the imaginary is still the world that is given to us, but it is that world as a whole, which is what is never given to us, as it only arises through the negation of everything. Action thus becomes reconceived through the imaginary as absolute, that which destroys and recreates everything, but at a distance, which indicates both the challenge and the extreme risk involved in pursuing the autonomous work. For such writing sidesteps reality and consists precisely in this divergence (écart) it takes from the everyday, from which it can then describe reality itself as remoteness (éloignement), as this divergence becomes the basis of its understanding of the world, and although it thus operates out of an illusion, it is one that it declares itself, unlike the reified image of totality as actualized reason that Adorno spoke of in reference to Hegel [PF: 307/316–17]. Such an image of literature would seem to confirm the worst suspicions about the immaterial nature of Idealist aesthetics, but the illusion that it operates out of derives from the actual activity of writing in its negativity, 202

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as Blanchot proceeds to show. For he stays with Hegel to indicate that while the conventional forms of the imaginary writer reflect the descriptions of Stoicism, Skepticism, and the unhappy consciousness, there is a more radical form that realizes the convergence of imagination and action: the revolutionary. For revolutionary action “is in every respect analogous to action as embodied in literature: the passage from nothing to everything, the affirmation of the absolute as event and of every event as absolute” [PF: 309/319]. From this arises the convergence between the demands for freedom or death as proclaimed by revolutionary figures or artworks, since neither appeal is possible without the other. But this means that death no longer has a meaning in such acts, as they have placed themselves outside history, as was found in the Reign of Terror, and for Blanchot it is the Marquis de Sade who encompasses these contradictions of death and freedom, negation and affirmation, power and impotence, visibility and invisibility to the utmost. For in the Revolution literature sees its ideal, in the moment when, in Hegel’s words, life endures death and maintains itself in it, in order, as Blanchot adds, “to gain from death the possibility of speaking and the truth of speech” [PF: 311/322]. While Blanchot has been following Hegel’s thought very closely, albeit along the lines emphasized by Kojève (and Bataille), this has been done to show that the effects of the dialectic of labor are made more extreme and yet more ambivalent by the work of writing, where the notion of work, whether nominal or verbal, is such that it can never achieve the level of alienation claimed for it. For the effects of this ambivalence of the work cannot be isolated from the writer, who is drawn into the extremities of its negativity without any possibility of resolution, since at each stage the work brings to the writer, or vice versa, an added level of complication. Although Blanchot is pursuing such a reading of Hegel as a way of exposing the inadequacy of Sartre’s contemporary account of committed writing as action, he is not realizing a new-found allegiance to Hegel but rather showing how his own understanding of the ambivalence of nothingness, as developed in his novels and his readings of Paulhan, Kafka, and Mallarmé, brings a much needed caution and rigor to any attempt to apply such dialectics to literature. It is for this reason that the course of Blanchot’s analysis after Hegel should lead back to de Sade, rather than on to Marx, Kojève, and Sartre, as the figure of de Sade exemplifies the impossibility of separating the empirical and transcendental conditions of writing, for the insistent negativity of writing operates at a level that is as metaphysical as it is sociopolitical. It is now possible to understand the nature of the aporia Kafka faced after having written a sentence like “He looked out the window” (Er schaute The Possibility of Speculative Writing

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aus dem Fenster), for in itself it is perfect, so why does he find himself awake at two in the morning considering it; why does it lead him to consider himself both the most fortunate and the most unfortunate?7 Why, conversely, does de Sade work obsessively for years on texts that he cannot believe anyone will read, and yet within which something absolutely critical is at stake? The relation of the writer to his work cannot be encompassed by any dialectic of committed and alienated labor without resituating that dialectic within the very existence of the writer as a “spiritual animal,” one whose nature is constituted by and through its ongoing relation to language, which cannot say anything without equivocation and so never becomes elevated to the level of being valid (gelten), which Hegel would require of it for it to be “the actuality and the activity of self-consciousness” [PG: 311/253]. Instead, the dialectic of labor inherent to the work of the writer is such that it does not allow for a transcendence of the animal kingdom (Tierreich) into the actualization of Spirit but remains bound to it, insofar as writing cannot accommodate the sublation of mediacy into pure activity, as its negativity prevents it from ever finding a pure beginning or completion. While such negativity undermines the possibility of the work being an ethical substance as far as Hegel is concerned, the implications of this empirico-transcendental complication of literary language instead lead to a more ambiguous imbrication of thought and reality, which is what Blanchot turns to next.8 Although the two parts of the essay initially appeared two months apart, Blanchot joins them together seamlessly for their republication in La part du feu and proceeds from his comments on de Sade and the negativity of the activity of writing to a discussion of the negativity of its practice through its role in naming. This section is very close to Adorno’s own thoughts on the relation of concepts to materiality, but Blanchot emphasizes the ethical and ontological implications of negation by demonstrating how naming involves the actual negation of the thing, its annihilation, in favor of its resurrection in the word, which thereby becomes its essence. From this he seeks to recover the sense of things before this resurrection, their existence without the sublation into nominal essence, as well as to indicate how this negativity works away inside language by granting it the ability to annihilate things, but also persisting within the word as its pre- or nonconceptual trace. Thus, as Hegel made clear, the ambivalence in language works both ways, for without its nominalization things would not exist in their essence, even though language only provides this possibility at the cost of their annihilation, but in doing so, these things that are elevated into the word continue to bear their negativity within them. Language exists then as the voice of things in their negation, and here Blanchot draws 204

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a parallel with the way that the consciousness of the slave becomes selfconsciousness through its encounter with the fear of death, as Hegel describes: This consciousness did not have anxiety about this or that matter, or this or that moment, but about its whole essence; it felt the fear of death, the absolute master. It was inwardly dissolved in it, shaken thoroughly in itself, and everything fixed in it quaked [Es ist darin innerlich aufgelöst worden, hat durchaus in sich selbst erzittert, und alles Fixe hat in ihm gebebt]. However, this pure universal movement, this absolute melting-away of all existence [Flüssigwerden alles Bestehens], is the simple essence of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-itself, which thereby is in this consciousness. [PG: 153/117] As before, Blanchot transfers this encounter into the context of language, such that “if true language is to begin, then it is necessary that the life that will carry this language has experienced its nothingness, that it has ‘trembled in the depths and everything in it that was fixed and stable has been shaken.’ Language can only begin with this void; no fullness, no certainty can speak; for whoever expresses himself something essential is lacking [ fait défaut]” [PF: 314/324]. Thus Blanchot can claim that such language is (with all the Orphic resonances that this implies) “the life that bears death and maintains itself in it,” which was Hegel’s description of the life of Spirit [PF: 316/327; PG: 36/19]. But language is not like Spirit in one key respect, for it is able to be the means by which things speak by virtue of the fact that it remains a thing. It is only because of the materiality of language that it can express the side of things that is not brought to light in the name, the side that remains in the darkness of nonbeing, indeterminate and anonymous and yet restless with its inarticulate nothingness, its lack of essence: The name ceases to be the ephemeral passing of non-existence to become a concrete ball, a clump [massif ] of existence; language, giving up the sense that it solely wanted to be, seeks to make itself senseless [insensé]. Everything physical takes precedence: rhythm, weight, mass, shape, and then the paper on which one writes, the trace of the ink, the book. Yes, happily, language is a thing: it is a written thing, a bit of bark, a sliver of rock, a fragment of clay in which subsists the reality of the earth. The word acts not as an ideal force, but as an obscure power [puissance], as an incantation that coerces things, renders them really present outside of themselves. It is an element, a piece barely detached from its subterranean milieu: no longer a name, but The Possibility of Speculative Writing

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a moment of the universal anonymity, a brute affirmation, the stupor of a confrontation in the depths of obscurity. And in this way language insists on playing its game without man, who formed it. [PF: 316–17/327–28] Such materiality would serve to counter the doubts that Bernstein had about Blanchot’s approach to language, but it also recalls Novalis’s Monolog by insisting on the elusive nature of this materiality. But this is still, as Blanchot notes, a futile evasion, for the word remains language, and so even if it submits to its own materiality this would still speak, for language cannot approach this muteness without expressing it. However, expression is itself not immune to negativity, for in drawing out the anonymity of its own materiality it thereby dissolves the meaning of the names that it uses to express this, even as it names it, and in its place reveals “the very possibility of signifying”—that is, the “meaning of the meaninglessness [insignifiance] embedded in the word as expression of the obscurity of existence,” which is that part of Sprachähnlichkeit in which language’s materiality approaches the linguisticality of material [PF: 318/329]. Thus, just as he did with the imaginary status of the writer’s activity in the world, Blanchot has uncovered the series of reversals inherent to the concept, which in annihilating the thing gives us a name in its place, but if we turn away from the name and seek to find the thing itself, we only find its existence already passing into the light of language, just as, conversely, the more we seek to determine the conceptuality of the thing, the more the obscurity of language’s materiality begins to displace our thoughts, and it is as such (and in the spirit of Paulhan) that he comes to speak of literature as having two slopes (versants, pentes). One is the path of negation, which is not interested in language but only meaning, and meaning as a whole, thus it proceeds to negate everything in order to recreate it as meaning. This might ordinarily pass as realist writing, but for Blanchot it is purely imaginary, as it proceeds not by way of language’s relation to the world, but through its subordination to thought, as was seen in the first part of his essay. On the other side is the path of materiality, in which literature submits to language and bypasses meaning, but what it finds is that, when words are considered without meaning, meaning becomes detached from its conditions and is rendered mobile and thing-like in its inability to disappear, a mere gesture, and as such becomes a “power without power . . . the proper determination of indeterminate existence” [PF: 320/331].9 Blanchot is not speaking here of a distinction between prose and poetry, or fantasy and realism, as his descriptions cut across both; rather it concerns an understanding of the relation of thought to language that veers 206

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either toward the universal or the particular, but as these paths are designated as slopes it is not possible for either one to be treated in isolation, but only dialectically. But as was found in Aminadab, when words and things become dissociated it is not possible to assume that the existence of names without things, and things without names, will occur without consequence, or that their interrelation will be as feasible as Hegel hoped. For, as this is a relation of thought to language, it concerns not just the fate of literature but the very position of the writer in relation to the world. Blanchot’s intention in this is not simply to show that Sartre’s attempt to differentiate the committed nature of prose from the reactionary nature of poetry is unworkable in sociopolitical terms but also that it fails to grasp how the negativity of the dialectic of work cannot be delimited and extends through all aspects of the writer’s work and practice, at each point destabilizing what might seem to be a position or meaning of certainty. However, this also means that it is only from the extremes of this negativity that writing is able to develop both its critical relation to the world in its remoteness and the expressions of its own historically conditioned materiality and thus to be literature in its combined sociopolitical and metaphysical (philosophico-aesthetic) senses. Consequently, it may appear that literature offers a nonconceptual actualization of the dialectic of the universal and the particular—that is, a demonstration through its existence—how it realizes itself—of how instances of particular materiality are transformed by way of their literary perspective into exemplifications of the universal, which in turn finds itself actualized through such determinations, through the ongoing materiality of words as they unfold. In doing so it would seem to provide a nonphilosophical mode of approaching this dialectic, which was the basis for Bernstein’s account of material inference. However, as close as Blanchot’s thought comes to demonstrating this dialectic in the interplay of the two slopes of literature, it nevertheless critically diverges from it by also demonstrating that the particular mode of material inference that literature provides is radically disruptive not just to this co-constitution of the universal and the particular but also to the possibility of cognition itself occurring by way of this materiality. As we have seen through each of the phases of his early writings, which culminate in the reading of Hegel in “La littérature et le droit à la mort” (which is why it is only after examining the development of his thought through the early critical and fictional writings that we can come to a proper understanding of this key essay), Blanchot works to bring the possibility of dialectical thinking into doubt by indicating the singular disruptions that literature introduces into any philosophical understanding of the relation of universal and particular. The Possibility of Speculative Writing

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For what thought comes up against in the materiality of language in the written word, in its senseless anonymity, as he pointedly remarked, is not a name that can find its place in the cycle of thought thinking through its own conditions but that which persistently remains outside such a unity, resisting it by virtue of its lack of any meaning. This is what Blanchot would understand as the impact of literature on thought: the displacement and disruption that occur to thinking as it comes up against a singularly evasive materiality that cannot be recruited to any system of thought, but rather perpetually indicates that which unsettles any such system by showing that literary language bears a nameless recalcitrance that cannot be dissolved. In the face of such resistance thought suffers an estrangement that cannot be contained, as Blanchot has shown in the experiences of Gracchus and Thomas, but also through the obsession that overtakes writers like de Sade. But his account does not end there, for the encounter with this namelessness of the word is an encounter with the actual material ambiguity of language, which in its resistance offers itself to thought as that which cannot simply be read. For what is thought in such instances is not simply the material inferences of language, or its natural-history, but more radically, the basis of thinking in its materiality and the (im)possibility of meaning in its ambiguity, the groundlessness of what is not thought. So although it remains possible to uncover the material inferences of language and thereby see how rhetoric can reveal the particular conditions of thought, this does not explicate the depth of Blanchot’s response to Hegel. For, by demonstrating that the possibility of meaning is filled with a negation that only persists as it is too weak to negate itself, literature actualizes and grounds a negative dialectic of cognition, one without an endpoint but with the constant presence of nihilation bearing it out: real negation and loss alongside the impossibility of dying. Literature does not act in the world like a tool or an agent, nor does it provide any explanations of it; rather it exists as a world in itself that is nevertheless coextensive with our own, the world of “language turning into ambiguity” [PF: 328/341]. While everyday language has its share of ambiguity, this is kept in check by the constraints of real situations, but in literature ambiguity is able to appear without these limits and thus to expose itself as such, thereby bringing its unchecked possibilities to bear on the world. So it is not simply a case of literary language bearing ambiguous meanings but of it being ambiguous in itself, as it does not clearly indicate whether it is representing something or expressing itself, whether it is a thing or the meaning of a thing, and so it reveals itself as the materiality and nihilation present in all language but that in literature is autonomous. For Blanchot this autonomy is indicated 208

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by its disinterestedness, which masks the absolute nature of its ambiguity in which its unreality is both a principle of action and the incapacity to act, its fiction is in itself truth and also indifference to truth, and it is nothing if not its own end, but it cannot have its end in itself as it is without end [PF: 329/342]. Insofar as it fails to be a work, literature cannot be an artwork (as this counter-Kantian description of autonomy makes clear) but is instead the form in which the conditions of thought and language can(not) be examined speculatively, since it is the form in which material ambiguity reveals itself. Thus the question that literature poses and around which it ceaselessly turns is the question of the very possibility of metaphysical thinking. Serial Hiatus Form in Hölderlin And it is precisely because literature bears on the conditions of speculative thinking that it presents such a challenge for philosophy, for while literary works in their autonomy already present a challenge to reading, when they bear speculative content then reading itself starts to resonate with this content. Thus, such works need to be approached in a way that can respond to these difficulties by indicating how they are speculatively meaningful but not by making them conceptually reducible. To do so it is necessary to consider the formal dimension of linguistic works, since it is in its form that the work seeks to broach the mode of its material existence and thereby respond to the ambiguities of its practice and activity. Adorno is quite clear on the need for this formal approach to language, for although “the unity of the word calls to mind a unity, however hidden, in the object itself,” this unity “should not be mistaken for linguistic affinities [Sprachverwandtschaften]” (this appears to be directed against Heidegger or any more broadly Cratylist position, for there is no “natural” affinity between language and the world) [NL: 31/NL1: 22]. That is, the word does not yield an immediate relation to the object; there is a need for something further, a logic or form that structures the language of the work and in doing so provides its material form by bringing out the equivalent order in the object. Thus, it is through their form that such works express the particular speculative thinking unique to them, just as it is in their form that their autonomy as artworks is most explicitly felt, for that in which their content comes forth is also that which gives them the sense of indifference that is the mode of their actual intervention and innovation. Adorno provides one of his most detailed considerations of this problem in his attempt to read Hölderlin’s poetry from outside its domination by a Heideggerian poetics of being. He starts by noting that while there The Possibility of Speculative Writing

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are moments in a poem that, in exceeding the poet’s intentions, constitute points of obscurity that transcend the structure of the poem, nevertheless these are still rooted in it. As a result, such points require interpretation in order to bring out their significance, but since they arise solely out of the configurations of the work they must be understood from out of its immanence, even as this is exceeded by its significations. Up to this point, Adorno is remaining with Benjamin’s understanding of the truth of the work as surpassing its intentions and appearing as an obscure point, but the appearance of truth also indicates how form is a mode of sedimented content, its own natural-history, which in a work of language constitutes the distance separating the work in its truth from reader and writer alike. This distance that the work makes apparent is, crucially for Adorno, also that which constitutes the relation between subject and object, such that it is only by way of such works that we are able to come to a concrete understanding of the interrelation of subject and object in the first place. For the poet this means that it is only by way of a “hiatus of form” that the content (Inhalt) of the work can become its material import (Gehalt), in that the exposure of distance or remoteness in the work through its sedimented interruptions (its content) reveals the actual relation (its import) that subtends and thereby constitutes the relation of subject and object [NL: 470/NL2: 129]. It is this sense of hiatus that Adorno refers to under the notion of parataxis, the sense in which the lack of syntactic order, the disruption of conventional hierarchies of conjugations, speculatively conveys something of the materiality that is subsumed under this order. Often this formal innovation appears to occur beneath or outside the writer’s intentions, but develops into a rigor of its own that is not just expressive of the failure of the poem to submit to a conventional form, but is expressive of that which is suppressed by such forms. Thus the prosaic quality of Hölderlin’s later hymns arises from the ever more discrete articulation of their units, which yields what Adorno calls a “non-conceptual [begriffslose] synthesis,” in which form is not expressed through a domination of the material under a concept but by transcending itself otherwise, through seriation. For if language “is chained to the form of judgement and proposition and thereby to the synthetic function of the concept,” then nonconceptual synthesis can only proceed by poetry turning against its medium (language) through “constitutive dissociation” [NL: 471/NL2: 130]. It is this constitutive dissociation that brings about the serial rigor of the poem, for it brings the two axes of its expressive and significative order into a dialectical constraint so that neither its material nor its form are subordinated to each other, as the work instead emerges through an explication without deduction ( folger210

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ungslose) of its material, like the prose of sacred texts, as Adorno adds.10 So despite the harsh, disconnected appearance of parataxis, the poem still recognizably if enigmatically speaks, as its parts bear their mediation within themselves rather than through an external unifying order, and it is as such that it demonstrates the transformation of its content into actual material import. Thus, in reference to Hölderlin’s poem “Hälfte des Lebens” (Half of Life), Adorno is able to state that content and form become determinable as one, as an autonomous work, insofar as each appears to generate the other, for each of its parts needs its counterpart, since “to become expression the substantive [inhaltliche] antithesis of sensuous love and beingaffl icted [Geschlagensein] break the stanzas apart, just as conversely the paratactical form itself first executes the cut between the halves of life” [NL: 473/NL2: 133]. That is, it is not possible to say whether it is form or content that is the determining notion here, as each seems to reflect the other, just as the split between the halves of life runs through each stanza as well as between them: Mit gelben Birnen hänget Und voll mit wilden Rosen Das Land in den See, Ihr holden Schwäne, Und trunken von Küssen Tunkt ihr das Haupt Ins heilignüchterne Wasser.

(Hanging with yellow pears And full with wild roses The land in the lake, You lovely swans, And drunk on kisses You dunk your head Into sober holy water.

Weh mir, wo nehm’ ich, wenn Es Winter ist, die Blumen, und wo Den Sonnenschein, Und Schatten der Erde? Die Mauern stehn Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde Klirren die Fahnen.

Alas, where shall I find, when It is winter, the flowers, and where The sunshine, And shadows of the earth? The walls stand Speechless and cold, in the winds The weathervanes rattle.)

Parataxis operates here at the level of the poem, in which the harshness of its juxtapositions is its own form of nonconceptual synthesis, for each part finds its counterpart within and between each stanza, both in terms of its images and its rhythm, thereby allowing its sequence to form an image of life in its halves (or, allowing the sequence of life to reveal itself in its halves), which does not assimilate them. In this way, Adorno suggests, the writer finds that the form of the work is loosened from the grip of logical synthesis and slips into the material as it exists prior to its conceptual organization, something he sees in Hegel’s The Possibility of Speculative Writing

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prose as much as in Hölderlin’s poetry, and that he discusses in terms of the writer’s conformity (Fügsamkeit) to the matter of the work (Sache). As a result, the form of the work arises as the subject retreats, for the “sublimation of primary conformity to autonomy is that supreme passivity that found its formal correlative in the technique of seriation [Reihens]” [NL: 475/NL2: 135]. In Hölderlin’s case the conformity of the writer is to the matter of his language, which means that while his writing may appear in the form of parataxis, this is only from the (negative) perspective of subjective intentionality, which only sees the failure of conventional form, rather than from the (positive) perspective of ongoing material conformity, which reveals the expressiveness of what insists outside the intended identity of the form. A form that is not syntactically structured according to a hierarchy of subordination but presents its material forms in an undecidable parataxis, one after the other, side by side, as “Hälfte des Lebens” demonstrates. For Hölderlin this material expression requires persistent effort, which can only be achieved at the most basic level by setting syntax against itself through what he calls “the inversion of the period,” the syntactical defeat of syntax, such that there is no subordination of language to a preexisting logic but instead the possibility for a reflexive form arising from language itself.11 Such an inversion does not lead to a complete loss of unity or synthesis, but with the loss of the period through conformity to the matter there is a concomitant loss of the legislating subject that grounded itself in the unifying structure provided by the period. So in the same movement in which intentional meaning subsides there emerges language’s own constitution of meaning [NL: 477/NL2: 136]. Thus the resulting subjectivity is not lacking in logical form, but its logic now arises from the critical reflexivity of language rather than being imposed on it, and this then leads to the emancipation of the subject through its mediation by language. As was shown in the last chapter, this is not to advert to an expressive model of poetry in which the lack of conceptualization allows for a freer expression of the poet’s “innate” subjectivity, for what Hölderlin aspires to here is a model in which the poet’s subjectivity is first discovered through the language of the poem and is thus grounded in its matter. For Adorno this discovery must be understood “polemically” rather than ontologically, for what is at stake is not the preexisting being of language but a dialectical tension in which language speaks for a subject that cannot speak for itself.12 But as it is mediated through the material of history such a complete reversal of language is an unattainable ideal, so it is as the endless emptying out of speech in pursuit of this ideal that Hölderlin’s lines speak as they seek but fail to reach a point of fully realizing this reversal 212

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[NL: 478/NL2: 137]. There is thus a constitutive contradiction to such a poetic method, between its aims and its inversions, which cannot but undermine its possibility to speak: The more sustainable Hölderlin’s lyrical claim to objectivity is, the more it distances itself from the subjective expressive lyric because of its frailty, the more painfully his work is struck by the contradiction with its own possibility, between the objectivity it hopes for from language and the poetic fibre’s refusal to fully grant it. [NL: 480–81/ NL2: 139] It is here that the form of the work responds to the depth of the dialectical tension that permeates it, a tension between the materiality of its language and the conceptuality of its object that becomes polemical as each disrupts and displaces the other, rather than uniting harmoniously. But out of this failure of possibility there is a deepening of meaning to the words that remain, so that their “pathos, in the objectification of the name, is immeasurable [maßlos]” [NL: 481/NL2: 139]. Such words without measure form points of singularity within a poem, which then provide moments of nonconceptual synthesis; for example, names like Hesperia no longer operate as concepts for Hölderlin but find a density that leaves them autonomous, like punctures in an immense geometry of history, which leaves them all but inaccessible to any simple reading. Instead, as Adorno would write in relation to the place names recalled by Proust, the promise that such names offer, however inchoate, is perhaps the closest we can come to understanding the nature of an experience that goes beyond the everyday and is thus “metaphysical” [ND: 366/373]. As Adorno explains, on hearing or reading such names “one has the feeling: if one were there, in that place, that would be it. This ‘it’—what the ‘it’ is, is extraordinarily difficult to say” and, of course, should these places be visited “it” would not be found, but the sense of the experience would still remain [M: 218/140].13 In fact, its fallibility (Fehlbarkeit) becomes its form, a nonidentical particularity that refuses to be translated into a universal and thus remains weak, although it is precisely this that grants it the sense of being metaphysical. Hölderlin’s significance lies in the fact that his use of parataxis enables such names to be revealed in their weakness, without conceptualizing them, which then enables a conformity to the natural-history sedimented within them. As a result and concomitant with the repositioning of subjectivity there is a revision of history as material and secular, but as pervaded by a transcendence that cannot be extinguished and that marks the points of its inversions with these names. For it is through the self-reflection of its history and nature in these singular names that language demythologizes The Possibility of Speculative Writing

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its relation to history and nature as such so that it is possible for there to be a retrieval of (itself as) a negative dialectic of natural-history. Although this reflection does not restore what has been lost, it holds out the possibility of liberation from the domination of myth by way of a mimetic recognition of nature through the faculty of genius, since genius for Adorno is precisely this consciousness of the nonidentical, the matter of the work or word that is suppressed in its conceptualization [NL: 488/NL2: 146]. But any such consciousness is itself transient and material, since “what halts the state of nature is mediated with it, not through a third element between them but in nature itself. Genius, which replaces the cycle of mastery and nature, is not wholly unlike it but has its affinity with it” [NL: 490/NL2: 148]. If we recall Kant’s understanding of genius as that movement of nature that speaks through the artist, then it is through the fractured form of the work that this affinity reveals itself, although in this form the nonidentical can only appear as partial and all-but-illegible ciphers. Before going on to explore how this sense of form is pursued within a specific literary project it is necessary to deal with an important note of caution, as the approach being used here, that of treating literature in terms of autonomous artworks, is one that Adorno argues against as he sees a profound difference between language and art, one that his notion of linguisticality has however put in question.

Linguistic Works of Art The inadequacy of the concept of art is registered in the linguistic sensorium by the expression Sprachkunstwerk. This was chosen by a literary historian, not inconsistently, for poetry. But it also does damage to poetic works that are artworks and yet, because of their relatively autonomous discursive elements, are not only and not thoroughly artworks. [AT: 272/182, cf. 482/326] Despite Adorno’s well-founded reservations about the usefulness of Sprachkunstwerk as a term, it may be helpful to stay with it for a moment, for what it does offer is a way of thinking about works of language—which is to say, not specifically literary or even poetic works—that places them in the same context of social, historical, and conceptual issues as the other artworks that Adorno spends so much time discussing. In doing so, it also foregrounds the fact that the materiality of such works, that by which they appear, is nothing other than language, which forces us to consider language primarily as a material medium in the same way that we think about the materiality of stone, metal, wood, glass, cloth, plastic, and so on, in 214

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our approaches to other artworks—that is, language is made apparent in this usage not as a more or less transparent medium of expression or communication, which is how we commonly approach it, but as a self-appearing material. By understanding that we have to approach such works differently, that only reading them is not sufficient, we gain an understanding of the equivalent change in the way that they have been made as linguistic artworks. For a work of language to be considered an artwork is for its status in the world to be put in question, since an artwork is primarily that which reconsiders how its materials mediate its own existence. Thus a linguistic work of art is one in which the relations of thought, language, and the world are the very questions that it seeks to address, rather than being issues that are already given. In saying as much, the meaning of Sprachkunstwerk has already been moved far from its formalist understanding, which involved specific artistic rules of composition and interpretation, toward a materialist reading that centers on the problem of a work’s status in the world as the issue that comprises its mode of existence.14 This change means that the term can be used to address anomalous phenomena like Blanchot’s récits, as well as Stein’s portraits, Beckett’s prose pieces, and Roussel’s novels, works that otherwise seem difficult to address precisely because their status does not accord with any received generic notions, particularly that of being artworks.15 Having said that, it is important to reiterate Adorno’s reservations about the term, since literature cannot simply be subsumed into the genus of art, because literary works “are not only and not thoroughly artworks,” which is to say that there is an element to the literary work that, through excess or deficiency, means that they fail to be artworks, and this element is their conceptuality (whereas for Blanchot a literary work, insofar as it is an expression of indeterminacy, fails to be an artwork because it fails to be a work). But, paradoxically, it is precisely because of this failure or lack that these works thereby demonstrate their status as artworks, which can never appear without remarking on this appearance, rendering it a semblance and so undermining it. This paradox is at the heart of the way that Adorno conceives of the relation between art and literature, which on the one hand is marked by the clear distinction he makes “between literature, which depends upon concepts and cannot dispense with them entirely, even in its most radical form, and the non-conceptual forms of art,” but on the other hand is blurred by the lack of clarity in the relation between art and conceptuality.16 For as we have seen, there is both a nonconceptual aspect of language and a conceptual aspect of artworks, which contribute to the fact that artworks themselves “are not only and not thoroughly artworks.” Thus the distinction Adorno is making here is designed to draw our attention to the relation The Possibility of Speculative Writing

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between language and conceptuality, which is not given, just as he had done with the notion of the language-like quality of artworks. This approach is clearly explicated in “Zu Subjekt und Objekt,” which shows that it is not possible to erase these categories and divisions, for they are our ever-present starting point; instead, it is necessary for critical thinking to work negatively on these distinctions to show how materiality bears meaning, and vice versa, which is precisely the question that is brought into focus by the relation between language and the artwork. One of the key points where this reconsideration of language takes place is within Adorno’s own writing, and particularly in regard to his understanding of the form of the essay, which is central to the way that Ästhetische Theorie is written, since, although he is writing a work of theory, which is evident by the concepts that appear in it, the manner in which these concepts appear and the way that the theory arises, its aesthetics, is deliberately unsystematic. This formal resistance operates not just at the larger level of chapters and paragraphs, which do not pretend to any linear structure or synoptic perspective, but also and more crucially at the level of individual sentences, which only allow concepts to appear to the extent that they are also accompanied by a deliberate lack of fixity. Hence, we find that concepts are elaborated over a number of sentences whose exact interrelation is undetermined, and this emphasis on the implicit, coupled with the extensive and varied use of examples, means that concepts arise in a manner that is not fully determined but is no less specific, which then enforces a need for historical recapitulation on the reader (as my reading of linguisticality in the last chapter showed): to make sense of these aesthetic concepts they must be transposed into different contexts, as their historical situation and truth-content are never given. For, as Adorno writes in relation to music, “to interpret music means to make music”—that is, interpretation is never simply a question of understanding, but rather of Mitvollzug, re-creation.17 And because of the irreducible ambiguity of the concepts he is considering, what he offers is essentially incomplete. Moreover, the nature of the essay lies in the way that its form reflects and derives from its matter, which means that if Adorno’s writing is to actualize its nature as an essay, then it needs to demonstrate those issues it is discussing such that they are realized in and as its form. By looking closely at Adorno’s use of language it can be seen that this affinity to what is being discussed (which thereby provides the specific ground of its conceptualization, enabling the work to become a theory) is made apparent in his writing through the tensions involved in bringing thought into relation with language. These tensions manifest themselves in the peculiar inconsistencies that creep into Adorno’s language, and for which he has become 216

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notorious, where he slips between the informal and the abstruse without comment or apology. To take one particularly representative example: in describing the way that the essay is disregarded as a genre because it does not follow the prescribed conventions of a scientific treatise, Adorno writes that it “is shunted into the allotria” (rangiert er unter den Allotria) [NL: 10/ NL1: 4].18 Allotria is an unusual word in any context, but here it is being used without explanation of any kind. Its form is Greek (from allos, meaning “other”), and so it appears to be a technical term, and given the failure of the essay to take on a scientific form, this would seem to be the classification ironically appropriate to it. This is indeed the case, for allotria refers to that which is trivial, meaningless, or irrelevant, a subject matter that does not achieve the seriousness required for it to be taken seriously. It is then the classification for what is cast aside as the refuse from other categories, which is why Adorno can state that the essay is “shunted” into this form, thereby emphasizing the casual violence of such divisions. Thus the combination of the two terms in their rhetorical disparity is a deliberate point of dissonance, as he is emphasizing the appropriateness of the combination once the terms’ meanings are understood even as it appears unnecessarily rebarbative. The provocation in such phrasing is deliberate rather than gratuitous, for it signals that language bears no natural simplicity and transparency but has its own self-destructive micro-vagrancies, which in turn bear witness to the overlooked natural-history of its materiality that runs counter to its conceptual formation. Such phrases direct us to look more closely at how the words we use structure our thinking and create a sense of “natural” propriety about what should and should not be combined, regardless of what is actually at issue in the phrases involved. As such these moments are far from being merely playful, as they highlight the inconsistency of tone that language exhibits while demonstrating that this inconsistency is in no way incoherent. Rather than assuming that there is a standard of clarity for philosophical prose that can be followed unproblematically, Adorno’s writing shows how language bears its own manifold structure of natural-historical meanings that has not formed organically but changes discontinuously under the pressure of foreign words. Thus the introduction of foreign words not only brings singular nuances unavailable to the home language but also demonstrates how language changes inorganically by colliding with the resistant forms of such words as they are found or made: the life of language does not run its course with the teleological breath of the creaturely, with birth, growth, and death, but rather with naming The Possibility of Speculative Writing

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as the enigmatic ur-phenomenon between grasping thought and apparent truth, with crystallisation and disintegration. The true words, fragments of truth, are not the buried and mythically evoked ur-words. They are the found, the performed, the artificial—in short, the made words. [NL: 643/NL2: 288] There is thus a form of dissonance in these locutions that is not lacking in precision and that indicates that precision or coherence do not depend on a supposedly transparent and systematic method (that bears its own suppositions about language), but is rather multiply determinate and discovered in its objective ruptures. For the presence of these foreign words indicates both the alienation and the irreducibility of their individual relations, their allotropism, since “if things were in their right places, it is the foreign words that would be the first to arrange themselves accordingly, even if it were in the disintegration of historical-organic languages” [NL: 643/NL2: 289]. So, as we cannot assume that language is transparent and systematic without simplifying it to the point of losing its expressiveness, we must instead respond to it by focusing on its peculiarities, and these are precisely what are seen as damaging inconsistencies from the perspective of transparency. It is thus the essay, with both its concepts and its lack of formal structure, that is able to make explicit this inconsistency and grant it its own coherence, and, in doing so, it also makes manifest the process by which thought becomes translated into gestures with their multiple determinations and contingent obscurities. Nevertheless, and in contradistinction to Lukács, Adorno is keen to stress that the essay cannot be considered “art-like” (Kunstähnliche) except in regard to the constant reworking of its form due to the nonidentity of its Darstellung and its Sache, “otherwise,” he goes on to say, “by virtue of the concepts that occur in it and that bring with them from outside not only their meaning but also their theoretical references, it is necessarily related to theory” [NL: 26/NL1: 18, cf. 11/5]. Thus Adorno’s skepticism toward the notion of a linguistic artwork not only derives from the conceptuality of language but also from the fact that it risks undermining the specificity of language by subsuming it to art, whereas the significance of language is precisely that it is not art, because it is able to articulate concepts explicitly, and thus the specific challenge inherent to linguistic works is that of seeking to articulate their concepts while remaining attuned to their nonlinguistic but language-like material affinities. But in writing a work of “aesthetic theory” Adorno is showing that these two aspects are interrelated and can be brought to an explicit form in the essay, as any attempt to demonstrate how the theory is to be aesthetically grounded only 218

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reveals how the aesthetic bears its own theoretical conceptualizations, just as the theoretical ambitions of the work include their own inescapable aesthetic ramifications, as the language and form of Ästhetische Theorie itself demonstrates. This is not just a question of understanding how the language-like character of art relates to the mimetic character of language, since it is not possible to simply match up the expressive aspect of artworks with the imitative aspect of language, as the two are materially and conceptually divergent. Thus there is no scope for any actual reconciliation, for although the two aspects may respond to each other, they do not correspond. Instead, it is a question of how linguistic works can activate their languagelike character and thus differentiate themselves from theory, while remaining linguistic and thus conceptual, which is precisely the situation that would make them a work of art, but not only and not thoroughly. The linguistic work of art thus finds itself confronted by the prospect that as a work it is not consistent, as it bears an irresolvable divergence within itself, which thus bears witness to its lack of identity with itself; instead, it actively makes present what is nonidentical. To understand how this may be the case it is necessary to find literary works that exhibit this nonidentical aspect, works that are expressive of their existence and yet submerge themselves within that moment, so that in becoming like “themselves” they uncover an inner divergence that is not of themselves, which is the basis of mimetic identity. There are works that do this, that announce themselves and also recede from any such annunciation, although as these moments do not coincide the artwork is left with a temporal disparity in relation to itself, as it bears aspects that do not exist in the same moment. In relation to Beckett’s works, it would be a mistake to see the innovations of his writings in strongly philosophical terms, for it was neither his concern nor their result; rather, the significance of his writings comes from the distance they take from any philosophical approaches by virtue of their formal concerns. Thus, instead of suggesting that his writings arise out of the autonomous movements of language and thereby reveal the being of language, Beckett shows that such effects of autonomy are achieved by laborious artistry, which casts light on our understanding of language as natural, and by making the effects of his artistry so evident and seemingly so autonomous he also indicates how such work involves elements of chance and refraction that language bears within itself. It is this discovery of linguistic materiality that formal innovation makes possible, and what this materiality bears is evidence of the passing of time, of repetition and variation, invention and decay—that is, of irreversibility. The Possibility of Speculative Writing

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If there is an interplay between the differing levels of dialectical tension in artistic practice (the dialectic between intention and material in the construction of the work, that which occurs across its sociopolitical context, and that which operates through the broader conceptual history of the art), then such a practice has the task of drawing this interplay out of the material and thereby negatively indicating what is not subsumed into it. This is the pressure upon formalism that forces it to an extreme of intervention to do justice to what remains. Hence, we cannot approach artistic material as naturally given; rather it is historically and socially compromised through and through, but this should not lead us to assume that it is irredeemably reified, as these compromises are integral to its autonomy and offer pathways to recover its nonidentical aspects. Formalism then becomes the means of approaching this materiality. The significance of this formal reflexivity lies in its relation to the world, in the attempt of the work to be more than an artefact and to become an actual mode of critical intervention. This sense lies behind Adorno’s use of the term “model” in Negative Dialektik, for, following on from the speculative sense of the artwork explored by Schlegel and Benjamin, such “models are to clarify what negative dialectics is and to introduce it, in accordance with its own concept, into the realm of reality.” As such, models are not merely indifferent examples, for they “do justice to the substantive [inhaltliche] intention” of the matter at hand by situating its key concepts in order then to intervene in it [ND: 10/xx]. The demand implicit in such an approach concerns the need of critique to actualize itself as a thing in the world alongside other things, not to extinguish itself in doing so but to enable the materiality of existence to be thought and for its possibilities to express themselves critically.

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8

Echo Location Beckett’s Comment c’est

Adorno’s long essay on Fin de partie appeared in 1961 and is his only extended discussion of Beckett’s works. It is also one of his most lucid examinations of the dialectic of the material and the historical that revisits many of the themes from his earlier reading of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study, since Fin de partie, in its analysis of the destruction of nature and the loss of worldly authority, reposes many of the concerns of the baroque mourningplay in a modern, technological context. But in this chapter I will turn to Beckett’s Comment c’est instead, partly because it is a prose text rather than a drama, but also because it appears to have had a greater influence on Adorno’s thought (even though this was not developed at any length) as its formal experimentation resonated with his own ideas on the nature of the contemporary artwork. Evidence for this influence can be found in the scattered references to Comment c’est that he makes in Ästhetische Theorie and other late texts [e.g., AT: 36/19, 331/223]. But what is interesting about these references is that Adorno seems unable to bring his thoughts to any greater degree of development and instead returns to this novel as a topos that can only be discussed through its name. Although Adorno’s thoughts on this topic were never as extensive as Benjamin’s own fascination for names, he was intrigued by the density and status of the titles taken on by artworks, which become more than just markers but are profoundly aporetic forms of their own. For the title expresses something above and beyond its relation to the work that it marks, something closer to the quality

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he had noted in relation to place names but one that after Beckett would be hollowed out of its content: the paradox of the work of art is recapitulated and condensed in the title. The title is the microcosm of the work, the scene of the aporia of literature [Dichtung] itself. Can literary works that can no longer be called anything still exist? One of Beckett’s, L’ innommable, not only fits its subject matter [Sache] but also is the truth about the namelessness of contemporary literature. [NL: 326/NL2: 4] However, the aporia that Beckett marked with L’ innommable would be followed by a work that Adorno was just becoming aware of when he wrote these lines but that would respond exactly to this question of what kind of work could now exist.1 For a few years later Adorno would write that the “unposited truth-content [of artworks] is their name. This is however strictly negative in these works. Artworks say what is more than existing only by bringing into a constellation how it is, ‘Comment c’est’ ” [AT: 200–201/133]. Such a thought is reflected in the title of Beckett’s novel as it enacts the same material gesture as the artwork of announcing itself solely through the gesture of its own existence: comment c’est—“(this is) how it is”—or So ist es, which Adorno uses as a parallel phrase, and which he had previously discussed in his reading of Kafka and in Minima Moralia [MM: 239/211–12]. The enigma of this gesture is that it encompasses so much while remaining so slight, since the whole of the work rests on the most prosaic intimation, and yet it still says more than what is, even in saying that this is how it is. So the fact that Beckett’s novel refers to such a gesture and then develops its implications through an enormous historicomaterial odyssey that is as rigorous formally as it is thematically may indicate why Adorno never got beyond discussing its title (just as the difficulties of unfolding such a reflexive eponymous gesture were behind the failure of Mallarmé’s work in Igitur: “thus”)—although we should also recall that Ästhetische Theorie was to be dedicated to Beckett, and so perhaps the whole of this work is to be considered his response to Comment c’est. Thus it is essential to come to terms with the formal-material challenge of Beckett’s novel if we are to understand the manner in which the artwork works through its relation to history and materiality, and in terms of literature, this means in relation to its status as a work of prose—that is, a work in which the problems of received and recorded speech are most at stake, an issue that Beckett pushes to an extreme in Comment c’est that he would not equal elsewhere. Comment c’est was published in 1961, and the English translation, How It Is, which was also produced by Beckett, came out in 1964.2 At that point 224

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it was the most arduous piece of work he had done either in French or in English and was at once a continuation of the impasse encountered at the end of L’ innommable and in Textes pour rien and a radical change of form that would lead into the stringency of the later prose works. Beckett labored over this work because he wanted its formal innovations to be as rigorous as possible, and this extended not just to the particularly restricted language he was using but also to the layout of the text on the page, which appears as a series of short, unpunctuated fragments that appear to mark the pauses “when the panting stops.”3 The narrator is alone, lying face down in the dark, on an endless plain of mud; he has with him a sack containing tins of fish and a tin opener, and he crawls assiduously from west to east. This is what we are told, but we are also told that this is a quotation, that what we are reading, the voice of the narrator, is reciting a voice from elsewhere, which now speaks through him. This is how it was, the first part of the story, the prelude or background before Pim, the figure encountered and tortured in Part 2. Part 3, the final part, will be the narrator’s recounting of what happens after Pim, after he has found himself on his own again. The characterization of these figures is very basic; they are both naked and male, and both have sacks with them as they crawl across the mud. Pim however can speak audibly, whereas the narrator’s speech only consists of “brief movements of the lower face” that are seemingly mute. Despite the sparseness of its elements there is still a story, and it has its “good moments” as well as its suffering. The first part includes descriptions of the narrator’s situation and his movements and brief images that are seemingly memories of the life “above in the light.” But these are no more than isolated and fragmentary images of childhood and adolescence as they have been worn down over years of recollection with all their generic or unresolved half-meanings. The encounter with Pim is constituted through violence, as the narrator brutally trains him to speak coherently by scratching him with his fingernails until he bleeds or gouging him with the tin opener; nevertheless they are good moments, moments of communion as Pim sings or recounts the words that are carved into his skin by the narrator. The time comes for them to part, and the narrator moves on, crawling eastward in the dark and the mud, and in doing so he begins to imagine a vast system of crawling figures, on their own and then together, torturing and being tortured, on and on, round and round—the whole system designed to regulate its injustices through their infinite redistribution and by being watched over in some way in order to ensure its proper functioning. Such a thought cannot be supported for long, and the narrator’s imaginings eventually collapse; it is then that we are told that all of this is false; that there has been no crawling, no Echo Location: Beckett’s Comment c’est

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sacks, no Pim, no life above, no voice other than his own, face down, tongue lolling in the mud in the dark. But this discovery has not had to wait for the end; it has been latent since the very beginning in the peculiarities of the voice itself, its manner of proceeding, its halting, meandering, self-doubting progress across the page from left to right: how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is three parts I say it as I hear it voice once without quaqua on all sides then in me when the panting stops tell me again finish telling me invocation past moments old dreams back again or fresh like those that pass or things things always and memories I say them as I hear them murmur them in the mud in me that were without when the panting stops scraps of an ancient voice in me not mine my life last state last version ill-said ill-heard ill-recaptured illmurmured in the mud brief movements of the lower face losses everywhere recorded none the less it’s preferable somehow somewhere as it stands as it comes my life my moments not the millionth part all lost nearly all someone listening another noting or the same [Com: 9–10/3] For as many times as we are informed about a voice from elsewhere we are also given reason to doubt it, since each statement comes with its own unsettling rejoinder that does not quite cancel it. And although the lack of punctuation leads to ambiguities, as it is not clear where the statements should be parsed, this is not insurmountable, for with careful reading it becomes possible to adapt to the rhythm of the text. And yet there are also the non sequiturs that disrupt the progress, thorn-like words or phrases that do not seem to be part of the whole, and as we adapt to the rhythm of the text we tend to overlook these points, disregarding them as marginal, but this is not a text that has been quickly or casually constructed. The narrator is never entirely convinced by the narration even as he allows himself to be carried away with it, by it, until it all becomes too much, when the extent of the illusion is too much to sustain and its falsity can no longer be ignored. There is a relief that comes with this final cancellation of what has been constructed, a relief that is perhaps attached to the idea that now there can be a sense of proportion, even if this is one of emptiness: “no preference no searching not 226

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even for a language meet for me [à ma mesure] meet for here no more searching” [Com: 21/12]. By proceeding slowly, it is possible to pick up these threads of doubt. The first line begins with a standard scene-setting statement: “how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim,” along with its narrative positioning. The next part seems to offer a slightly more reflective statement, but what is the status of the “how it is” between them? It would seem to indicate that the story of how it was leads into the situation of how it is, thus implying that the narrator is recounting from the latter position. But its inclusion is unnecessary, as the narrator’s position outside the narrative is already apparent from the instance of “I quote,” which then leads into “three parts I say it as I hear it.” Consider the difference: how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is three parts I say it as I hear it how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim . . . three parts I say it as I hear it What is the necessity of the inclusion of this “how it is,” except perhaps to highlight the manner in which this position after the fact is also the position of the fact—that is, should we be reading this with a stronger indexical inflection? For example: how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is three parts I say it as I hear it The italicized phrase now speaks to a stronger reflexive sense of its own situation, which becomes lost amid the flow of language, of narrative, a sense in which the meaning of the whole line, which is to say, the whole narrative, is the referent of the phrase how it is, which is thus a statement voiced from outside the narrative as such, outside its before, with, and after. In the second line a similar disruption occurs as the first part of the line, “voice once without quaqua on all sides then in me when the panting stops,” although not without its ambiguous variations, comes up against a change of tone in the last part, “tell me again finish telling me invocation.” This last word again intrudes like an afterthought, clarifying the nature or status of the preceding: is the use of “invocation” descriptive or performative? Is the use of “telling” transitive or intransitive: is the voice telling the narrator something or is it telling him as such, substantively bringing him about through the act of telling? In either case there is a significant contradiction between “tell me again” and “finish telling me,” if that is how the phrase is to be parsed, suggesting something of the undecidable Echo Location: Beckett’s Comment c’est

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hesitancy of the narrator’s position in relation to the voice, which here in the second line, directly after its muse-like invocation, has already become complicated by what would appear to be his own words. These omissions of sense are what need to be attended to, for they are the points at which the calm assumption of narrative authority breaks down and the reflexive ambiguity of the voice appears in its material ruptures. But this should hardly need to be emphasized, for although we are told that “scraps of an ancient voice in me not mine,” this is then followed by “my life last state last version ill-said ill-heard ill-recaptured ill-murmured.” Any possibility of the narration arising from a simple recollection or invocation is emphatically undermined, as the narrator himself persistently remarks “something wrong there,” which is only to be expected when the movements of the lower face are qualified by the phrase “losses everywhere.” But this should not lead us to jettison the narrative entirely, as the voice cannot be so easily dismissed even if its provenance is uncertain, for despite all else it goes on, restarting with each pause, and what is said despite its ambiguities is nevertheless still said with its ambiguities—through them, even. Thus the seemingly arbitrary elements, like the sack with the tins of fish, take on the same status as the marginal linguistic elements, as they both constitute the essentially opaque interstices of expression: the materiality from which there can be formations of thought and action, and thus the slim but nonnegligible possibility of material communication. These formations are then records of their own formation, just like the memories and inscriptions that come to Pim and the narrator, records that are “preferable somehow,” for they imply that there is “someone listening another noting or the same.” Although the presence of someone listening is harshly erased at the end of the book the idea returns, for if the one listening is the same as the one noting, is that also the same for the one listening to or narrating the voice? Even if the narrator is only speaking to himself, then that would seem to be enough to avoid complete loss. The final words of the book seem to pursue this, for after the end the fi nal line appears to restate itself: good good end at last of part three and last that’s how it was end of quotation after Pim how it is [Com: 177/129] The narrative and the quotation end; there is no more; everything has been unmistakably wiped away, and yet after the end something remains, which is “how it is.” There is no end, no complete extinction. But it is not necessary to lean solely on this point, for equivocation is built into the finale earlier on, as the narrator invokes the possibility of 228

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extinction precisely as a possibility. Exhausted by the massive exercise of imagining and trying to make sense of its expanse he comes to a point of resolution: “to have done with this voice namely this life,” and so he reaches out for “a solution,” “a formulation that would eliminate him completely and so admit him to that peace at least while rendering me in the same breath sole responsible for this unqualifiable murmur.” While this conclusion seems to demonstrate a definitive distinction between the voice of the narrator and that from which he quotes and thus a distinction between what is inside and what is outside the narrative, this is complicated by the way that this conclusion was reached: “has he not staring him in the face I quote on a solution more simple by far and by far more radical.” For this suggests that it is the voice that is being quoted that offers this solution for its own elimination, although it also places pressure on determining the positions of “him” and “me” in the subsequent formulation of elimination and responsibility, as it is not clear whether the one to be eliminated is the voice of the other that is quoted or that of the protagonist/narrator who quotes. But this uncertainty is only exacerbated by its apparent solution, which is one of asking questions of himself to which he will answer positively or negatively, as is stated, “if all that all that yes if all that is not how shall I say no answer if all that is not false yes,” which only reaffirms the presence of the other against which this putative self-interrogation proceeds [Com: 173–74/126]. The implication is thus that if this self-interrogation is credible, then the preceding story is somehow suspect, but the interrogation has itself arisen out of this story, from which it cannot be simply extricated. And so the narrator goes on, interrogating himself and receiving answers that progressively impoverish his position, apart from those that he cannot answer (since to the questions of where he actually is and what his fate and even his name might be, in other words, how it actually is for him, to all this there are no answers). But what is the status of this coda in relation to the text that precedes it? By virtue of its wager it would seem to distinguish itself from what has gone before, but it appears to operate out of the same narrative voice, so are the terms of the wager spurious? It seems that there is a strict equivocity to this solution, for the narrator turns from one voice to another, by way of the voice, and while the first voice was one of expressivity, the second rigorously demolishes this expression. But the first voice is only false and thus ripe for demolition, if the second voice is not false (no mention of truth is made, only falsity and its lack), but no key is given as to what might merit the lack of falsity attributed to this second voice, apart from its basis in interrogation. Thus the reader, in being faced with the inability to resolve the equivocity of the voice in this conclusion, is forced to consider each possible reading, thereby rendering Echo Location: Beckett’s Comment c’est

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it inconclusive.4 The truth-content of the work, in Benjamin’s terms, is encountered in its virtual formulability—that is, in its possibilities, such that it remains a problem for thought. But the significance of Beckett’s text is that this problem is made concrete, as the turning from one voice to the other is enacted in the voice as well: the narrative voice that has subtended the entire book like an echo chamber with both its images and rejections, and it is this that remains at the end, seemingly ineradicable, a concrete marker of its inability to end. The voice turns within itself from one side to another, recto to verso, and it would appear to be this turning that is the element that cannot be effaced, since for all that is said there remains that which is unsaid, just as for all that there is restraint there is also what appears through this restraint. But this is not so much evidence of a double-bind as of the mechanism by which the two sides communicate. For what it touches on is the central episode of the book, which contains its most elusive image, as the narrator is able to bring Pim to speak by carving words into his back with his nails. Although much discussed, it has rarely been noted how peculiar this act of communication is, since it requires Pim to translate the unseen carvings in his back into words, for what is inscribed on the recto emerges as sounds on the verso, as if his skin were a means of translating writing into speech. It is thus that the mute narrator is able to speak, to communicate with himself by way of another, and as such Pim operates in the same way that the tape recorder operates in Krapp’s Last Tape, which is spoken into in one form and returns those words, or others, in a different form. But here it is the surface of Pim’s back that takes on the qualities of the magnetic tape to record and replay, until such time as Pim himself has been cast aside and the narrator’s own language takes on this role in his selfinterrogation. This relation implies an understanding of language as a material medium that bears its own disruptions, which are then communicated from one side to the other, for it is the act of marking the tape or the skin that conveys the words, which is not just a model of inscribed speech, as it also bears the noise that accompanies it; the refractions and disruptions that are also communicated, the “prosaic materiality of the letter,” as de Man called it, and “no degree of obfuscation or ideology can transform this materiality into the phenomenal cognition of aesthetic judgement.”5 Thus it is a question of whether we attune ourselves to what has been expressed or what has been carried along with it as its materiality, what has not been (phenomenally) given, but for Beckett the two would seem to be inextricable, even if they are inassimilable, for we cannot pursue the one without finding ourselves immersed in the other, since they are recto and verso of the same word. So we cannot be done with expression, nor can we 230

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escape its disintegration, but this disparity is not simply aporetic, as the two sides are bound together through their formation, which is the basis for the nonfalsity of the word, its ineffaceable, irrevocable communication. Consider the text of Beckett’s book, which is described as unpunctuated, since it lacks grammatical marks, but we are told that the voice occurs when the panting stops, so the breaks between the fragments are not silent, but they are also not pauses for breath in the usual sense. The text is thus presented in a negative form: the noise occurs in the spaces left blank while what we read are the silent utterances between them. So it is a text that is far from unpunctuated, since it is persistently interrupted by its inability not to speak, just as these mute words are forever interrupted by the panting that cannot be withheld for long. Punctuation marks the text through and through, whether as words or as noise, and in doing so communicates itself through both the narrative and its disruption: “suddenly afar the step the voice nothing then suddenly something something then suddenly nothing suddenly afar the silence” [Com: 16/8]. But in admitting “him to that peace at least while rendering me in the same breath sole responsible for this unqualifiable murmur,” there is an attempt to resolve the tension between the two sides of the voice, the speaking and the responding, whatever their origin. And taking responsibility for this voice, even as a murmur, implies an indissoluble inclusion of materiality, which is equivalent to taking up the expression of suffering and giving it form, recording it. But in doing so there is a drawing in of that which resists or obscures thought, its mortal pauses, which gives a sense of the strangeness of the narrator’s existence as neither fully alive nor dead, unable to begin or end (“when the panting stops tell me again finish telling me invocation”), and only thus able to persist. Adorno understands this as the basis for speculative thought, which arises only through its insistence in that which resists it: The power of what exists [Bestehenden] constructs the façades into which consciousness crashes. It must try to break through them. . . . The speculative moment survives in such resistance: what does not allow itself to be governed by the given facts, transcends them even in the closest contact with objects and in the renunciation of sacrosanct transcendence. What in thought goes beyond that to which it is bound in its resistance is its freedom. It follows the expressive urge of the subject. The need to give voice to suffering is the condition of all truth. For suffering is the objectivity which weighs on the subject; what it experiences as most subjective, its expression, is objectively mediated. [ND: 29/17–18] Echo Location: Beckett’s Comment c’est

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Suffering gives rise to the endlessness of the work, the inescapable murmur of life that enables thought to imagine its own end, and beyond, its own impossibility, existence without it. Sound occurs as a result of contact, either because an object has been brought into contact with another or because an object is made to vibrate by way of contact with movement in the surrounding air. In both these circumstances the air around the point of contact is disturbed such that vibrations emanate from it equally in all directions. These vibrations spread out until they reach another object, whereupon part of the vibration passes into the object that has been reached while part bounces back, depending on the nature of the object reached. The part that bounces back is called an echo, and by examining the returning vibration we can not only determine where the object is that the vibrating air has struck, but also, by comparing the returning vibration to the initial sound and tracing how it has been disturbed, determine the nature and movement of the object that has been reached. This is called echolocation. However, the sense of this process can be reversed, so that we pass from an understanding of the object that the vibrating air has reached to the returning sound and its deformation; in this case it is the echo itself that we are trying to locate, and this kind of echo location is far more difficult. What we can say is that the harder the object the sound reaches, the less deformed the echo, such that the density of the object is what is felt in the deformations of the returning sound; the echo resonates with the depth of the limit it returns from. So, attempting to locate this echo by way of another will only lead to interference and the greatly reduced if not total loss of the returning sound, but this is what language attempts when it seeks to address what happens when it comes up against its own limits, leading to a deformation that is infinite not just because it is endless but because it is deformed by the other “side” of its limits. The interference that takes place when we try to hear the resonance of the limits of language by way of language is so great that it leads to a language utterly permeated by deformation, which occurs as a myriad of fading echoes. The limits thus reached are not abstract or conceptual, for the language here is our language, therefore its limits are ours— our mortality, temporality, and alterity— and it is the resonance of these material limits that permeates language with its dull and distant echoes. If language bears the traces of the nonfinite in this way (and perhaps it is only as such that the nonfinite “appears,” thereby indicating its intimate relation to language), it does so only insofar as its words are hollowed out by the resonance of its limits, and in doing so its words reveal themselves in the very materiality that literature seeks. 232

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There is an ambivalence here that haunts language, and haunts it as literature, for if, in seeking to turn language back to that which precedes language, a hope, a chance, is found in the sheer materiality of language, in the marks on the page, the sound and rhythm of words, and so on, then this success is also always a failure, for in finding these traces they have inevitably been brought into the light of meaning. But if in doing so language fails, for it is simply making materiality speak, then, as Blanchot made clear, it has also not failed insofar as it has also let materiality speak, and it is this ambivalence that haunts language and goes by the name of literature. It would seem that what is found in this mode of literature is a form of metaphysics, inasmuch as it explores the nature of what is and what is not, what passes beyond or beneath the existence of (literary) things and, as Adorno proposed, indicates what has been suppressed by them. But while it exposes us to the (material) conditions of possibility of (literary) experience, and in doing so reveals the speculative possibilities that are thereby entailed, it does not permit of any systematic totalizing. Rather, the experience of such literature is of an endless space, a space that would be literally utopian, as it cannot be determined as being anywhere but instead is a material space: a space of materially different possibilities. Among Beckett’s earliest notes for Comment c’est, when it was still called Pim, there appears (without any explication) the isolated word “Ontospéléologie.”6 I would not want to make too much of such a marginal remark, but the notion of a speleologically determined ontology is provocative, especially in relation to the work of Comment c’est, or the burrowing explored by Blanchot, Kafka, or Novalis. For this would be an ontological thought determined by its relation to the materiality of underground spaces, but unlike the teleological burrowings of the “old mole” of history in Hegel and Marx, this would not be a thought that tended toward the light of a phenomenological appearing that purports to place everything under its gaze, but one that remained underground amid the compacted residues of historical life and seeks to navigate by way of them. As Blanchot emphasized in Aminadab, there can be no certainty of returning to the surface for such endeavors; instead, they would enter into a science or discourse of being that is determined by its natural-historical materiality and is revealed in its subterranean spaces by way of those modes of thinking and speaking that can find an affinity with this obscure labyrinth— a discourse that would not culminate in an all-encompassing vision, nor would it merely undermine it, but would rather present it with its own hollows and fragments, its singular truths and indeterminate (because endlessly conditioned) objectivity. For, as Kant remarked, the construction of philosophical edifices has to contend with the fact that the ground designated for its Echo Location: Beckett’s Comment c’est

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foundations is riddled with “all sorts of mole-tunnels [Maulwurfsgänge], left over from reason’s vain but confident treasure hunting, which make every building insecure.”7 Such a discourse is thus still a form of reason, but one that remains constituted by its medium rather than trying to suppress it conceptually, and is found in literature when it emerges through the immanent critique of its own language as a form of material space or self-generating exteriority. In realizing this material space, literature would do so in the form of a nonconceptual knowledge, for in being derived from the internal contradictions of its own language it would express its natural-history, but in doing so in the form of an indeterminate materiality it would remain nonconceptual. Literature would then be the mode in which these material formations are brought to thought as a space that it both generates and explores. Such is the metaphysical import of literature, ontologically and epistemologically, aesthetically and critically, which in the most formally innovative works of modernist prose becomes an expérience (that is, not just an experience but also an experiment) of space and materiality as a form of nonorganic life that is also a nonphilosophical mode of thinking, which through its logic yields concrete expressions of secular transcendence, a mode of material thought, with all that that implies in terms of its being both a mode of thought and a mode of materiality. In Hegelian terms literature would be the truth of language, that which explicates its inner contradictions, but for Blanchot and Adorno literature cannot be the truth of language, but only its partial allegorical ciphers that encode its meanings nonconceptually, since it never departs from the materiality of its object. Literature would thus reveal the natural-historical traces of what has been suppressed in language in the form of its self-estranging material spaces, for the critique of the disenchanted world can only appear through such autonomous forms, which means that any transcendence such forms may express will remain strictly immanent to their space, pointing beyond it but not leaving it, only extending it through their fragmentary estrangement, and expressing only the semblance of hope, or of life. But the object of the narrative is Pim; he is the figure that structures the work both formally and narratively. It is a story of how it was “before Pim with Pim after Pim.” Everything about the work is centered on the relation to Pim, and Beckett originally considered naming it after him, much like his earlier novels received proper name titles. But it proves impossible for the narrative to keep to the initial schema of before-withafter, as the chronological development of the work is constantly being disrupted not only by how it is told but also by what we are told. The object refuses to remain in a consistent position in relation to the narrative 234

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schema, for it seems to resist being situated as merely part of the narrative and persistently interrupts its flow to reinstate its own priority. It is as if, having fixed itself on the figure of Pim, the narrative is then unable to consider much else at length without reverting to this focal point, and so any attempt to present a sequential narrative of before-with-after falls apart under the preponderance of its object. But why then did Beckett decide to change the title from Pim to Comment c’est? Like many of the proper names Beckett uses, there is a minimal phonemic quality to Pim, indicating how barely it operates as a name and instead is just a placeholder. But as Pim is not the protagonist, who remains nameless, but rather the one who, like Godot, structures the work, Beckett may have considered it too distracting to name the work after him, given the misapprehensions that were caused by naming the play after Godot. But perhaps it was simply the case that after moving through Murphy, Watt, Molloy, and Malone, Beckett had already marked the exhaustion of this approach in L’ innommable, and so could not now return to a proper name title. And so, in renaming the work Comment c’est or How It Is, a change of approach is signaled in which the focus moves back from the object of the narrative to the fact or situation of its narration, as Adorno had noted, and in doing so the centrality of Pim is balanced by its framing or context, which in turn reveals that the actual object is not the figure posited as its focus but the nature of its telling: the materiality of the murmuring in the mud. For the ostensible object is no more than a figure that the narrator seeks to dominate and manipulate, both within the narrative and through its narration, while that which actually is the object remains in the background and cannot be removed, as it is the very medium of the narration, and it is only when this is recognized by the narrator that he can recognize his own position. Since in recognizing his relation to the mud he also recognizes the extent to which it constitutes his own position as that in and through which he is, which is to say no more than that the narrative is as dependent on its medium (whether as language or as mud) as the medium is constitutive of the narrative in both its form and its content (its writing and its murmuring), but there are also those aspects of its materiality that refuse to be thought in their entirety and so remain without, as we have seen. It is thus that any understanding of the work needs to be informed by both the murmuring and the mud, what is said and what, in conveying this as its rhetorical medium, remains unsaid. For the work speaks not only through what is explicit but also through the failures and interruptions of intelligibility, which speak of and from the nonconceptual background of thought that persists within and without the intentions of the author or Echo Location: Beckett’s Comment c’est

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narrator. As such, the materiality of the narrative can present itself without completely undermining the intelligibility of the work, just as conversely the narration of the work can be interpreted and yet fails to offer itself up fully to any reading. It should also be recalled that this is a work without progression or development, since, despite its putative narrative schema, it all takes place at the same moment, but a moment that is constituted as a serial iteration on the spot, circling over and around itself without leaving it. There is no synthesis that would organize the work into something greater, for at each point the textual interruptions work to undo any higher-level associations: the structure of the narrative, both materially and formally, operates in a mode of parataxis in which each point is delivered into a new space alongside all the others but without any stronger coordination that would hierarchically organize them.8 Much like the infinite array of figures distributed across the landscape of mud, each engaged with but isolated from the others, the paragraphs and themes within the work operate according to a similar logic of material approximation without synthesis. And yet Comment c’est continues to exist as a work with a distinctive identity despite the myriad wormholes that enervate it. In fact, it is the presence of this material-linguistic enervation that would appear to constitute the nature of the work as it appears, in which it is not possible to say whether it is the words or the spaces between them that hold our attention, since as a thing it is distributed evenly between what appears and what does not. And so, despite the absence of a whole that would organize the work and provide its meaning and form, and even though the attempt to provide a structure through the repetition of the phrase “before Pim with Pim after Pim” is accompanied by its dissolution in the phrase “something wrong there,” it still manages to carry on. And in doing so it finds that “they are good moments,” not there are good moments, which would suggest a greater reflective complacency, but simply they are good moments: the moments of the images in the mud, of the relation with Pim; the specific moments in themselves are good. Thus outside the attempted narrative structure and its attendant negation—that is, beside the immanence of its formal innovations—there remains something else, growing ever weaker perhaps, yet not disappearing entirely. For in stripping his language down to such bareness Beckett has not simply deprived us of a more conventional narrative but exposed what lies beneath it, as it indicates not just what has been lost and what can be painstakingly reconstructed through reading but also what this stripping away has revealed: how the rudiments of language operate without the voice from beyond providing guidance, 236

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how the material disruptions that arise outside the narrative reveal their own meaning, their own situation, their own sense. It might be supposed that, with the degradation of language and the almost musical mode of composition in which themes are varied and repeated, the formalism of Beckett’s writing is introduced so as to balance or organize the material he has gathered, as if each existed independently of the other. But we should look more closely at how this orga nization arises, as the thematic material operates at different levels: there are the few items that are repetitively described, like the wet jute sack containing tins of fish, the injuries inflicted on Pim’s body, and the movements of the narrator through the mud; then there are the memories or images of episodes apparently drawn from the narrator’s youth, which are all highly uncertain; then there are the more explicit notions the narrator develops in relation to his current circumstances, like the presence of a witness and recorder and the vast system of retribution involving an infinite number of figures. These may be the most concrete thematic materials, but they are embedded within and derive from the failing structure of language, for it is the inabilities or confusions of communication as such that provide its medium, which is then formed into iterated motifs through the circulation of images. So although perception, recollection, and imagination are the modes in which this decayed language attempts to communicate, these disintegrate according to the weaknesses of language in general: its material uncertainty and lack of precision. Adorno would argue that it is by way of this concrete ambiguity that the autonomous artwork is able to critique the disenchanted world from within its linguistic structures, but the weakness of this language is also the inextinguishable trace of its material existence, its thingliness that escapes the reifications of an instrumentalized world, and as such is the mark of an existence that can no longer die, even as it may find itself expressing “less and less” [AT: 52–53/30–31; Com: 177/128]. Such a language is one that, for both readers and writers, skirts the very limits of expression as it comes ever closer to material inexpressiveness, since it appears as the opaque and enigmatic marks of a language that draws thinking into an experience of its limits, its material basis as what is unthought. And for as much as this is evidence of a tendency of language to veer toward the material, it is also an exposure of materiality to speculative thinking, which brings its objective historical singularity, however prosaic this might be, to thought, by thinking through the materiality of language. And it is perhaps as such that we should understand the manner in which Beckett has eviscerated the form of the epic, as Blanchot suggested, by granting it a modern prosaic reformulation that at each point Echo Location: Beckett’s Comment c’est

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of the conventional epic structure deviates from its grounding operation [EI: 478–86/326–31]. For if the epic is to be understood as a founding myth involving the heroic adventures of an individual as he overcomes adversities before returning to his land; if it is to be understood as a narrative that begins in medias res by an invocation of the muse and a statement of its intentions and involves the liberal use of epithets, grand speeches, extensive lists, and a vast canvas of action; if it is to be understood as a potentially endless series of episodes where the defining characteristics of a people are established through the actions of its stereotypical hero who engages not just with the people of this world but also with those of the next, then Beckett has indeed written an epic for our times. For the voice of Comment c’est defines and situates, if only through its utterances, and as its status is uncertain what it says is also full of doubt, but its presence cannot be doubted or ignored as it goes on conjuring images from the mud. It is not the voice of someone, even though it imparts a temporary definition of subjectivity through its expression, as it is not a voice that speaks in any ordinary way, since it has no source or origin and all it does is begin again and again, but not by beginning but by recalling, recounting (commencer, comme on sait). As such it would appear to be the voice of received speech in general, but it is not the unattributable voice of folktales, as it is not a voice that attempts to found a community or impart knowledge. Rather it is the evacuation of such a voice, as the only community it founds is one of loss and isolation and its only knowledge lies in the revocation of certainty through the beguiling but inherently untrustworthy nature of its words. Knowledge and community are not abjured but rather extrapolated in the voice (through its potential for endless extension) to the point of emptying them of any distinctiveness, so that there is no difference between definite and indefinite knowledge, which is not to imply the chaos of sheer absurdity but an essential lack of certainty over what determines knowledge as such and thereby differentiates it from anything else. Its designation instead becomes arbitrary, merely nominal, which is not to advert to an image of language in solipsistic abstraction muttering alone in the dark, for there is still the mud. The elemental quality of mud, its formless generality and blank ubiquity, means that it cannot be defined either spatially or temporally; it is without dimension or position but is mere extension, neither the beginning nor the end as it exceeds both—it is what is before the beginning and after the end, and it is perhaps this that describes how “it” is. But face down, tongue lolling in the mud, it is possible to see this figure reversed: to see the tongue as part of the mud, as the temporary form of its voice—the mode by which its images are formed and recounted. That to which it re238

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counts (inverting the classically mythical account of the anthropogenic inspiration of mud) is thus itself as other, just as the voice does not come from beyond so it does not communicate with or to the beyond but speaks to itself in the mud, which is to return to itself by way of another—materiality forming material forms and in doing so circumscribing an infinity of bodies and utterances. But such a voice is also the voice of suffering, suffering as the inscription of pain, both given and received, for only thus is there memory and the need and possibility for recounting. But this inscription also reveals affinities, the forming of bonds in love or community, for such linkages not only depend on but also give rise to further affinities such that formation does not always require coercion, as there is always the element of chance, the unpredictable but inevitable association, the dirt in the system (of dirt).9 The voice is the material clinamen in this evacuated system that prevents it from being utterly empty and sterile, for it is through it that there is expression and affinity and thereby a semblance of life. The attenuated form of such a semblance is what is demonstrated in the text, which is also “how” it “is,” for it is only through such extreme formal sparseness that a glimmer of what remains outside the formal can be uncovered in its material associations, which is not limited to the multilingual puns (although this reveals a diversity of unconventional, indeterminable meanings) but resonates through the restricted form of the text in its brief unpunctuated fragments, which are essentially incomplete and lacking in secure foundation. There is a sense of fragility to these scraps of speech, of their still present inarticulacy, and yet also of their insistence, their refusal to disappear however minimally this is expressed. But there is also an ongoing formation at work in the words of the voice, in its repetitions and images, as the unfinished activity of a language being disassembled and reassembled, and thus evidence of the work undone, the language unformed: partial, residual elements still present in their indeterminacy and resonating with the materiality that has been obscured by their determinations. But as formal detritus these elements remain incomprehensible; they are the refuse of thought, which finds a way to be thought as refuse or allotria in this writing through its indeterminacy, which makes apparent the unnameable utterings and sufferings of unformed material, the indelible, illegible quaqua of the world, and it is precisely insofar as these textual residua are ill-formed—banal, repetitive, and indistinct—that they offer a metaphysics of the prosaic by the prosaic in its material affinities. For what is this mud without limit in which the narrator finds himself ? Mud is of course a highly indeterminate substance midway between solid and liquid, uniformity and variegation, but perhaps more fundamentally, between the organic and the inorganic. Mud is in effect the zone of transition Echo Location: Beckett’s Comment c’est

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between the two in which the narrator is stranded, neither one nor the other, but the secular occasionalist mediator stuck quintessentially between the material and the immaterial. This situation can be read in at least two different ways: in terms of the Dantean vision of the fifth circle of Hell, this great expanse of mud is the scene in which the damned souls of the angry and, particularly, the slothful and apathetic (those suffering from acedia) inhabit the externalized forms of their own sins; mud (in the form of the marshy waters of the Styx) becomes the concrete manifestation of the iniquities they once only wallowed in metaphorical ly.10 Alternatively, in terms of the scene that Clov apparently views out of the window in Fin de partie, the mud is the whole world, which in both its natural and human aspects has become “corpsed” (mortibus, Kaputt). For Adorno, this moment indicates how the end of the world has a double aspect, in which the reification of the human world conceals the additional catastrophe of the destruction of nature, for while they are distinct in their resonances they are interdependent in their actuality [NL: 285–86/NL1: 245]. The significance of acedia comes from the fact that it is able to reveal this double aspect, for its “disloyalty to the human corresponds to a loyalty to these things in a contemplative devotion of thorough absorption,” but this removal of relations to the world is an indirect maneuver as it “takes up dead things in its contemplation in order to rescue them” [GS1.1: 333–34/OGT: 156–57]. Melancholy (with which acedia became linked), in Benjamin’s words, betrays the world for the sake of truth and knowledge, however unconsoling this may be, since the desolation encountered in such contemplation is the morbid physiognomy of natural-history, the actual features of its material insistence: “the facies hippocratica of history lies before the eyes of the observer as a petrified primal landscape” [GS1.1: 343/OGT: 166]. So in terms of Comment c’est it makes little difference whether this is the mud of the narrator’s own personal hell or that of natural-history as such, as they come to the same thing; for he remains stuck in this irremovable but corpsed materiality, and whether this is the death mask of the decaying world or of his own intransigent corporeality the indeterminacy of its natural-history lives on, and as such it continues however weakly and formlessly to speak, and as such can in some form be heard: what to begin with drink to begin with I turn over on my face that lasts a good moment I last with that a moment in the end the mouth opens the tongue comes out lolls in the mud that lasts a good moment they are good moments perhaps the best difficult to choose the face in the mud the mouth open the mud in the mouth thirst abating humanity regained [Com: 33/21] 240

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9

The Negativity of Thinking through Language

If the question is one of understanding the nature and significance of Blanchot’s style of writing, then the response is that the development of his fictional writings in the 1940s has led to the emergence of a careful and deliberate style that is as critically precise and profound as philosophy but is not philosophy, insofar as it is solely concerned with its own manifestation and the implications thereof. In saying as much, the question of Blanchot’s style opens out onto the broader issues associated with the autonomous status of modernist artworks, but does so by situating these issues in relation to the materiality of language in which the question of the relation between philosophy and literature is focused. Thus, by resituating these issues of language in relation to aesthetics, Blanchot’s work is opened up to the questions that Adorno brings to bear on modern art, but the reverse also comes about by way of the manner in which these questions of autonomy are reconfigured when considered in regard to the materiality of language and, in particular, prose. In this way it has been necessary to consider the specific modes in which negativity is explored by Blanchot in relation to transcendence, thought, images, space, and narrative and linguistic meaning, and, by virtue of these modes, to consider how Adorno’s reading of the logic of negativity responds to these specific moments. For Blanchot finds in this language of negativity a mechanism by which the concrete and the abstract, the clear and the obscure, the precise and the ambiguous come to inflect each other. Such negativity needs to be distinguished from pessimism or cynicism insofar 241

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as it remains negativity—that is, it is a form of critique that is not satisfied with the mere negation or rejection of any position but proceeds to place results of this critique under further critique, one without end. This is not to aver to simple nihilism, for it is in the process of this critique that there arise elements that could not be foreseen and do not fall into the supposedly clear distinctions that are commonly used. For example, if this negativity is brought to bear on a form of language that is assumed to be clear and direct in its meaning, then it operates not just to indicate that this clarity and directness harbor their own obscurities and deviations but also to show how the one inheres in the other and thereby yields a sense of meaning that cannot be easily reduced to such decisive categories and, as a result, operates under a very different kind of logic in which clarity and obscurity are not exclusive— a logic that only becomes apparent under the operations of this critique, which is why it needs must persist, as it is not in a position to be able to produce fixed results. As always for Blanchot, the question remains of whether we can go further, and to that degree there is a sense of the immoderate to his thought but one that is no more that of the Schwärmer than it is of the nihilist, as it is a case of trying to come to an understanding of where this untrammeled critique will lead us, what its implications might be for one who, as a writer, lives in this medium and so cannot extricate himself from its effects. It is as such that Blanchot’s thought can be differentiated from that of Hegel or Adorno, who also pursue this logic of negativity, since for Blanchot, like Hölderlin, Mallarmé, or Kafka, this issue is primarily a question of art and aesthetics in the double sense of it being a question of what can be done (made or expressed) and what is experienced by way of this persistent demand, which is why the sphere of the writer tends to the absolute as it is defined by its own exploration and experience. What prevents this concern from becoming absolute is precisely the fact of its constitution by language in the full breadth of its sociohistorical and material ambiguities, which demonstrates why the process of determinate negation followed by Hegel and Adorno is less immoderate in its leanings because it is grounded in the contingencies of actual situations, but this moderation only exists by turning back from the vicissitudes of ambiguity that subtend it, which would unsettle the compromises and illusions that enable that situation to exist as such but that are as well the sources of its possibility. The process of determinate negation is more concerned with uncovering the relations that have been obscured by everyday distinctions and that mediate their supposedly given meanings, and although this is an unending process of critique it resists pushing itself too far in the direction of its own unfettered negation, since it remains tied to the critique of 242

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a specific situation. But it is not possible to keep these levels of critique apart when the situation is one of language, where its practice and its experience inform each other. It is thus that the demands of sociology and the demands of aesthetics pull in different directions in Adorno’s thought but come to their greatest tension in his discussions of the artwork. So, after having looked at Blanchot’s works with Adorno in mind, it has been necessary to invert this approach and examine Adorno’s thought from a Blanchotian perspective. This has been to focus on what might be called the poetics of his thinking to see what claims and implications it exposes. This approach can be brought to bear most fruitfully on the introduction to Negative Dialektik, as this is where Adorno makes his strongest statements regarding the method and focus of philosophy. In doing so, he makes clear that his rethinking of dialectics through the materiality of determinate negation is fundamentally linguistic, and thus rhetorical, and for which his forebears would not only be Benjamin and Hegel, but perhaps more profoundly, Hölderlin, whose own work in poetics was precisely geared toward an eccentric dialectics of the historicomaterial contents of language—that is, one not oriented toward an a priori summation but rather toward a prosaic estrangement of thought. Adorno finds that philosophy is fundamentally riven by the disparity between its aims and desires and its actions and abilities, between the excess of the former and the limits of the latter. On the one hand this means that the aims of philosophy are always undermined by the inadequacy of its actions, but on the other hand, it also means that the limitations of its abilities are surpassed by the excess of its ambitions. This internal tension cuts across the descriptions of philosophy as finite or infinite, practical or utopian, conceptual or nonconceptual, and so on, and suggests that although it may have missed the chance to realize itself, it nevertheless carries on, and does so through its persistent negativity. In fact, as Adorno pointedly remarks, philosophy lives on “because the moment of its realisation was missed,” which is to say that praxis “is no longer the court of appeal” against which speculation can be measured [ND: 15/3]. Instead, philosophy proceeds under the instability of its own internal constitution, which implies that any melancholy that might be adduced by the perpetual inability of philosophy to realize its aims is to be counterbalanced by the utopian urge that always overrides its limitations, and it is only against this immanent tension that philosophy can be held to account. So if it is only in the tension between these tendencies that philosophy finds its possibility, then if that tension were resolved philosophy would be extinguished. It is through this sense of only finding truth in the extremes that we can come to terms with the excessive nature of some of Adorno’s statements in The Negativity of Thinking through Language

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the introduction to Negative Dialektik, where, for instance, he speaks of the aim of philosophy as “unrestricted externalisation [Entäußerung]” but also as “full, unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflection” [ND: 24–25/13]—an experience in which “the concept can climb over the concept” and reach the nonconceptual, but that thereby allows thought to “open up the non-conceptual with concepts,” for in this contradiction philosophy approaches the antagonistic state of things themselves [ND: 21/9–10]. For in doing so, philosophy surpasses itself into a form of endless dialectics that is the “consistent consciousness of non-identity,” “the ontology of the false condition,” which is to inhabit the dissatisfaction of the concept to remain conceptual, to be its reflexive consciousness [ND: 17/5, 22/11]. If the writer is the proletarian of language, in terms of the necessity of achieving consciousness of alienation, then in this dialectics of negativity thinking finds itself to be the proletarian of philosophy, although reflexivity here is to be understood intensively, as in Schlegel’s work on the infinite medium of art rather than through Lukács’s work on class consciousness. As Adorno goes on to point out, these antinomies are intrinsic to idealistic thought, but also lie at the basis of the way that capital ceaselessly expands as it seeks to colonize those “realms outside of itself” [ND: 37/26]. The key to this parallel lies in the mechanism of abstraction that enables exchange-value to emerge out of use-value, but while this reveals the inherent commoditization of thought in language, it also indicates the reverse: the subterranean presence within this exchange economy of its own subversion and resistance, as exchange-value materializes into things that have no use like artworks, which in Benjamin’s words “have been freed from the bondage of being useful,” or the possibility of reasserting a fairer use-value arises in the attempts to promote a local meaningful truth in the particularities of language.1 This is the same instability and duplicity that Paulhan noted in the movement between Terror and Rhetoric in the critique of language, in which the Bolshevik tendencies of the former to reestablish a definitive use-value become transformed into a new form of exchange-value, while the latter finds itself being undermined from within as rhetoric is transformed in the hands of poets like Baudelaire or Rimbaud into a new expression of things in their disenchantment. For if consciousness is to immerse itself into phenomena, then dialectics “transforms itself qualitatively” in doing so, as this entails a movement that is not simply from the thing into the abstraction of the concept; instead, “the object itself would begin to speak under thought’s lingering glance,” and it is in this way that thought truly externalizes itself [ND: 38/28]. Although at one point Adorno states that the nonidentical element that the concept does 244

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not subsume is the use-value of the object, this point is also marked as its utopian horizon, for, in the face of either the conceptual or the nonconceptual, thought is negation, “resistance against what is imposed on it; this is what thinking has inherited from the relation of labour to its material” [ND: 22/11, 30/19]. The idea that abstraction finds its roots not in conceptual thought but in commodity-exchange is the materialist insight developed by Alfred Sohn-Rethel, which Adorno took up as a way of disenchanting the power of concepts.2 But what is not taken up in this inversion is the enigmatic quality of the commodity, the fact that it is not only a force of abstraction but also presents itself as a riddle, as Marx so clearly spelled out. For in such riddles we are given the presence of a thing that does not fully present itself but instead indicates something else that is not present, and furthermore, this indication exists alongside the presence of the thing as it is. Thus the riddle of the commodity, or the commonplace in Paulhan’s work, operates like the paradoxical statements of Heraclitus in that it presents both itself and something else that is not present at the same time; it is both literal and metaphorical, concrete and abstract. If we consider one of the fragments of Heraclitus, number 60 in the Diels-Kranz system, “the way up and down is one and the same,” then we find an almost paradigmatic model of this instability. On first glance we cannot take this statement literally, for in its contradictory meanings the “way” (hodos) would seem to have a metaphorical connotation, but if we proceed along this line we find that we cannot understand the metaphorical meaning unless we have carried over something of its literal meaning. But this reconsideration then affects our understanding of the literal meaning, to the point where we find that the phrase does not yield to either a literal or metaphorical reading in its entirety but oscillates between them. As such, this particular fragment is exemplary of Heraclitus’s fragments in general (hodos being the linguistic root of “method”), which operate between the concrete and the abstract without resolving the divergence of their readings. As Blanchot recalls, Paulhan provides a compelling instance of this gaping ambivalence in his short story Aytré, qui perd l’ habitude, which tells the story of a soldier tasked with taking a large group of workers across Madagascar.3 Aytré is the sergeant in charge of this group and the one who writes the log of its journey, and to begin with there is nothing remarkable about this log; it details the distance covered each day, the rations consumed, the prices of food and medicine, and so on. But then the writing starts to change; gradually but irrevocably the descriptions become longer and more personal. Aytré starts to include his own reflections; he begins “to set out his ideas on colonisation; he describes the women’s hairstyles, The Negativity of Thinking through Language

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their plaits, joined together on each side of their ears in the form of a snail; he speaks of strange landscapes; he goes on to the character of the Malagasy; and so on. In short, the log is unusable” [PF: 73/68]. The transformation here is compelling in its precision, in the way that the strictly objective quantitative analysis of the journey is slowly replaced by particu lar qualitative assessments and personal reflections; the purely formal exchange-value of his words as an official communication has become supplanted by something else, something useless. But Blanchot goes further, as it is not just the case that the strange lack of purpose or meaning that has arisen along the journey has forced Aytré to respond by trying to translate this lack into an excess of words, for this would only suggest that he was trying to reestablish a connection to the world that he felt was lacking. Instead, his descriptions become fewer but also less clear, less conclusive; it is the very nature of his language that is struck by this lack of meaning, exposing “the thick layering of words, the sedimentation of comfortable meanings that break away [s’ ébranle], detaching themselves, becoming a slippery and dangerous slope” [PF: 74/69]. There is a general collapse of meaning, a catastrophe, arising out of the encounter with the negativity of language, its inherent lack of sufficiency. It is telling that the story of Aytré strongly parallels Paulhan’s own experiences and that it was his research on Malagasy proverbs that would later inspire his analysis of French commonplaces. For Adorno, this encounter with the negativity of language means that the aesthetic moment is “not accidental” to philosophy, since the concept cannot represent the thing in its nonconceptuality “other than by appropriating something of the latter into its own approach” through mimesis, without however losing itself in it [ND: 26/14–15]. Dialectics is thus an unending critique of appearance, in its appearance, which is to say in language, as the mode in which thinking presents itself, and the basis for the unending nature of critique is precisely its negativity, which is also its inability to resolve itself, but which thereby offers an entirely different model of philosophical thought: The speculative power to break open the irresolvable is that of negation. Solely in it does the systematic movement live on. The categories of the critique of the system are at the same time those that comprehend the particular. What has once legitimately stepped beyond the particularity in the system has its place outside the system. The gaze that becomes aware, by interpreting the phenomenon, of more than what it merely is, and solely thereby what it is, secularises metaphysics. Only a philosophy in fragment form would give the 246

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illusionary projected monads of idealism their due. They would be representations in the particular of the totality that is inconceivable as such. [ND: 38–39/28] Adorno’s proximity to Benjamin’s work in the epistemo-critical prologue to his Trauerspiel study is noticeable here as he combines a fragmentary gaze with secular speculation to counter its melancholic immersion. The “systematic” movement of unending negativity in this speculative gaze is thus simply a reflection of the “affinity of objects to each other” as they confront us in the experience of the world, thereby revealing that the world is not conceivable as a closed and unitary system but only in its infinitely heterogeneous particularity [ND: 36/25]. Thus it is only in terms of such a micrology that dialectics uses macrological means, in what Adorno calls thought-models, for the speculative immersion in the particular “requires as one of its moments the freedom to also step out of the object” [ND: 39/28]. The logic of this negativity is also an everyday logic, a logic of concrete, fragmentary pieces that do not make a whole but that nevertheless signify, like the appearance of hairstyles and unusual turns of phrase. It is this dialectic of prosaic disruption that Adorno tries to carry over into his language, with its rapid changes of tone and heterogeneous vocabulary, which thereby bears a concentrated and manifold errancy whose tensions (between Hegel and Marx, or Lukács and Benjamin, for instance) cannot be resolved. The thinking that emerges from this logic is one without guidelines or safety net, but one that “throws itself at objects à fond perdu,” enduring the vertigo of its own negativity as the index of its truth. This is not to slip into a blind empiricism or intuitive enthusiasm, as there is an endless dialectical oscillation to this thinking in which the need to be immersed in the priority of the object is persistently countered by the need to recall it to its own conceptuality, and vice versa. Summarizing this point, Adorno states that we should not philosophize on the concrete, but rather out of it, and in doing so thought composes and renews itself as it proceeds “out of its own power as much as out of the friction against which it measures itself.” In this way, like a poem or joke or other contingent expressions of Witz, thought is “essentially not reportable [nicht referierbar]” [ND: 43–44/33].4 The context and occasion of thought, its historicomaterial background, is that which cannot be removed without something essential being lost, since it is from this background that it speaks, which is not to deny its universality but rather to indicate that every instance of universality arises out of a particular, out of what is not thinking. “The perception of the object depends not only on this differentiation: it is itself constituted from the object, which demands its restitutio The Negativity of Thinking through Language

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in integrum in it as it were. Nevertheless, the subjective modes of reaction that the object needs require for their part unceasing correction in the object. This occurs in self-reflection, the ferment of mental experience” [ND: 57/47]. There is an analogy here to the notion that Benjamin developed of nature as an endless lament, insofar as it laments because it is mute, and because it laments its suffering continues to be mute since to lament is only to perpetuate the wordlessness of suffering [GS1.1: 398/ OGT: 224]. The “need to let suffering speak is the condition of all truth,” which thus becomes the infinite horizon of thought for Adorno, just as “the freedom of philosophy is nothing but its capacity to bring its unfreedom to voice” [ND: 29/17–18; cf. AT: 161/105]. It can be seen that the movement in which the concept discovers its nonidentical element in the thing parallels the movement of the thing by which it transcends itself into the concept, but the combination of the two does not lead to union but to what Adorno calls differentiation (Diff erenziertheit), which is his materialist version of judgment. Insofar as this involves uncovering the particular of the universal and vice versa it resembles the unfolding logic of Spirit, but as these movements do not match up but only coexist, they do not refer to any underlying unitary movement. Each expression is specific to its context, and any attempt to refer them to a unifying schema undoes precisely the materialism that grounds the expression and renders it meaninglessly abstract. Differentiation is the capacity to discern [unterscheiden] in this and its concept even that which is smallest and that escapes the concept; only differentiation can reach the smallest. In its postulate, that of the capacity to experience the object—and differentiation is this subjective form of reaction become experience—the mimetic moment of knowledge finds refuge, that of the elective affinity of the knower and that which is to be known. . . . Even in the concept of rational knowledge, devoid of all affinity, the feeling for concordance lives on, which magical delusion once kept free of doubt. Were this moment wholly removed, the possibility of the subject knowing the object would be utterly incomprehensible; the unleashed rationality would be irrational. The mimetic moment for its part however dissolves into [verschmilzt] the rational in the course of its secularisation. This process summarises [zusammenfassen] itself in differentiation. It contains the mimetic capacity of reaction in itself as well as the logical organ for the relation of genus, species, and differentia specifica. Therein the capacity of differentiation retains as much contingency as every undi-

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minished individuality does in regards to the universality of its reason. [ND: 55/45] The impossibility of ever bringing this process of differentiation to summation, and thereby granting its parts their due expressions, does not undermine philosophy but rather imposes on it the burden of composition, recreation, and tradition, the endless task and labor of the concept. While this suggests that the diremptions that mark the social and mental divisions of labor cannot be fully healed, it does not suggest that the work is meaningless, for the whole purpose of restitution is that of bringing individual particularities to speak, and since they do not form mere sections of an underlying whole, their individual restitution is not lacking in meaning. From the eyes of the panther pacing back and forth in the cage at the Jardin des plantes to the marble torso of Apollo, Rilke provides glimpses of this immanent but fragmentary expressiveness, for even though the head is missing from Apollo’s statue, “his torso still glows like a candelabra, / in which his gaze, now turned low, // gleams and holds itself.” Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubertierfelle; und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht.5

(Otherwise this stone would stand disfigured and short beneath the translucent drop of the shoulders and would not shimmer like wild animal’s fur; and would not burst from all its borders like a star: for there is no place that does not see you.)

When Adorno goes on to discuss how this alternative mode of thinking finds its ur-image in “the names that do not categorically over-embellish [überspinnen] the thing, admittedly at the price of their cognitive function,” it becomes even harder to escape the impression that he is following Benjamin’s own methodological proposals in the prologue to the Trauerspiel study [ND: 61/52]. But this point becomes more difficult to fathom when it is recalled how critical Adorno was of the conclusions Benjamin reached in this prologue, conclusions that would continue to underlie his work on the Arcades and the related studies of Baudelaire and the artwork, which would give rise to even stronger critical responses. Adorno’s persistent concern with Benjamin’s work lay in the sense that there was

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a lack of dialectical critique in the montage-like approach that Benjamin had adopted, which meant that his work was liable to be at risk from the mythical aspects of the nominalization that he was pursuing. The suggestion was that Benjamin was too enamored of the magical quality of names to bring out the particular combination of material and transcendent specificity in the matter at hand, with the response from Adorno being one of seeking to critically suspend this nominalization by referring it to its material bases of ambiguity, as he did in his reading of Proustian place-names; to the fragility of the experience that enabled the name to emerge and what this left unmarked, and what this might lead to if the process is allowed to reify. While there is thus a greater analytical awareness of the cognitive and material limits of naming, there is also the corollary that this awareness may lead to a critical aporia, since each point is dialectically countered at the moment of its arising. Adorno’s response to this aporia is to insist on the necessity of working through the process of its mediation, insofar as mediation is the hylē or material form of the object’s implicit history, its own dialectic, which indicates what in the thing remains nonconceptual by indicating “that things are not simply so and not otherwise, but come to be under conditions. This becoming disappears and dwells in the thing, and is no more to be brought to a halt in its concept than to be split off from its result and forgotten. Temporal experience resembles [ähnelt] it. In the reading of the existent as a text of its becoming, idealistic and materialistic dialectics touch” [ND: 62/52]. Again, this passage seems to be following in the path of Benjamin’s thinking of the origin, as “that which arises from becoming and passing away. . . . On the one hand it needs to be recognised as restoration and reestablishment, on the other hand, and to the same extent, as incomplete and unclosed” [GS1.1: 226/OGT: 45]. Except that for Adorno this process of mediation is not being mapped from the outside in terms of its preand posthistory; instead, the temporal experience of its reading recapitulates the mediation at work in the thing so that what “negative dialectics drives through its hardened objects is the possibility that their reality has betrayed and that yet gazes from each one of them” [ND: 62/52]. As such there is never any guarantee of success for negative dialectics, since there is always the risk of cognitive or critical aporia, but such negativity is also its only hope insofar as it is the basis by which the failure of a particular reading provokes further ones, with no assurance of any final summation, but rather offering the grounding of its own “inner historicity,” which is “as immanent to thought as the mediating moment of its objects.” Such historicity is materially quasi-transcendental for Adorno, rather than purely transcendental, which means that it “is actually constitutive”—not only able to 250

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preserve but also to transform the tradition by activating its moments of self-transcending possibility [ND: 63–64/54]. The historicity of the work is the point where Adorno’s thought seems to diverge most strongly from Blanchot’s, since history is not just the network through which the artwork articulates itself but is immanent to the work and its truth-content, which is why the emergence and development of its truth-content is inherently inconclusive. It is through these relations to and against its particular context and moment that the work struggles to emerge, and that thereby infiltrate its form if it does emerge. As a result, the work of art “participates in history and thus oversteps its own uniqueness”; it comes to bear elements that are not of it but are of its becoming [AT: 532/358]. Since artworks are solely what they are able to become. In that no artwork is capable of resolving its immanent tension without remainder; in that history ultimately attacks even the idea of such resolution, aesthetic theory cannot rest content with the interpretation of given artworks and their concept. By turning towards their truth-content it is compelled, as philosophy, beyond the works. The consciousness of the truth of artworks touches, precisely as philosophical, upon the apparently most ephemeral form of aesthetic reflection, the manifesto. [AT: 533/359] In this radically contemporary moment aesthetics and artworks converge in the expression of their criticality. The nature of aesthetics is thus ancillary to art, as its task is one of “freeing art from its hardened state through theory” or “to render objective spirit into its fluid state once again through the medium of reflection” [AT: 520/350, 531/357]. For it is in the dissolution of concretion that the truth-content sedimented or congealed into artworks can come to reveal itself, which is to say that the work is unable to avoid concealing that which it attempts to expose and so needs the abstractions of theory to bring it out. But before it is concluded that this power of thought refers to the corrosive effects of capital, it should also be recalled that this force of abstraction comes from the speculative power of thinking to overcome the barriers set out by the division of labor, under whose conditions the artwork suffers. Consequently, the universalization brought to bear on the work by thinking is at the ser vice of its particularity, as the work cannot achieve its fluidity on its own because of its material individuation, for “in becoming what it is, it cannot be what it wants to become”; instead, it remains an image that “leads beyond and yet not beyond” [AT: 521/351; cf. ND: 368/375]. But in this concretization of the artwork there is that which “is not itself art,” that which does The Negativity of Thinking through Language

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not lead beyond it in the form of its inherent but latent conceptuality but rather refers to its congealed sociohistorical context that is made manifest as the abstraction of aesthetic critique takes hold [AT: 518/348]. It is thus that the work of critique, as unfolded by the interaction of aesthetics and the artwork, both leads onto the possibilities held out by the work and also back into a critique of the context that it has arisen from, and that this combined action of critique holds to its moment of contemporary actualization. But insofar as the work bears within itself elements that are not just contradictory or that undermine itself but that are in fact incomprehensible and inassimilable to the work as a whole, critique cannot offer to make such elements tangible by dissolving their intransigence or instability; rather they are to be re-presented in the understanding that their negativity cannot be transformed into an affirmation but is an element of the actual suffering that the work embodies. Thus to the same degree that the work finds that it is lacking in objective unity, it also finds that its sense of purpose or meaning is undermined, and thus finds that its contemporary actualization is not only the source of its internal dissonance but also its sense of endless crisis; the criticality that it presents is also that which by necessity it demonstrates as it cannot escape its own negativity, since “what is essential to art is that which in it is not the case [was an ihr nicht der Fall ist]” and “to think this not-being-the-case of art [nicht der Fall Seiende an der Kunst] is the compulsion [Nötigung] of aesthetics” [AT: 499/335]. So although Adorno would seem to be at the greatest remove from Blanchot over this issue of history, the historicity that underlies his sense of thinking is understood as an endless process of critique such that philosophy “is founded [ gestiftet] on the texts that it criticises,” which is to say that it is never able to shake off this constitutive negativity. It is precisely this sense of critique that both innervates and unsettles Blanchot’s own understanding of literature as that which “constitutes itself by testing [éprouvant], by contesting, through creation, its possibility,” which means that critique belongs to the movement by which literature comes to itself: it is “its own search [recherche] and the experience of its possibility.” But Blanchot then adds a qualification to this point, for insofar as critique is the process of both testing and contesting its own possibility, it is the “laborious process that opens up the darkness and is the progressive thrust of mediation, but that also risks being the endless recommencement that ruins every dialectic, procuring only failure and finding therein neither its measure nor its appeasement.” Critique thereby becomes eccentric and extravagant, without measure or conclusion, wandering beneath an endless

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empty sky, “like those holy priests of the wine-god, / who drifted from land to land in holy night,” in the words of Hölderlin, which Blanchot recalls on this point, and whose errant wandering answers the question of what poets are for in times of need.6 Adorno may not go so far in his understanding of aesthetics, but the relation of negativity and interpretation that critique brings to philosophy indicates the inescapably linguistic essence (sprachliches Wesen) of philosophy, which finds its expression in rhetoric, the gestures of language, which Adorno himself makes such full use of, particularly in relation to the dialectical inversions that rhetoric makes possible, and that “represents in philosophy what cannot be thought other than in language” [ND: 65/55]. Contrary to its position in artworks, in dialectics rhetoric is part of the content (Inhalt) of thought rather than its form, as it is that which exposes its actual relation to things. Thought that proceeds by way of these linguistic gestures is thus subject to their irreducible material ambiguity, the possibility and errancy of thinking through language, dia legein, which is why dialectics appears as an abstraction amidst the concrete, and vice versa [ND: 66/56–57]. At the end of the first chapter of Thomas l’Obscur Thomas returns to the shore and again sits down to look at the sea. There he sees a figure still swimming far off toward the horizon, and Starobinski has conjectured that the relation between the two figures can stand as a model for the relation between Blanchot the critic who remains on the shore, and Blanchot the writer of fiction who continues to swim out into the distance, but as the detail of this passage shows, it can perhaps better be understood in terms of the relation between either the critic or the writer and the work itself, in both its distance and its intimacy, and the experience this opens up: By dint of this spying, he discovered a man who was swimming very far off, half lost below the horizon, and whose remoteness prevented him from observing his movements. At such a distance there was little means of making a serious investigation and the swimmer endlessly escaped from view, only becoming visible again at the point where his existence could be definitively put in doubt. Thomas obstinately held to his position. As if his tired eyes were more piercing than eyes in good condition, he continued to follow every turn of the figure whom one could really believe had disappeared and who, even if he had been there, could only have passed for a worthless wreck. Th is absence, far from discomforting him, enlivened his curiosity again. Not only did he have the impression of always perceiving him very well, but of feeling close to him in an entirely intimate way and

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as if there could have been no other contact that could do more. He remained for many moments watching and waiting. There was in this contemplation something painful, something hard to bear that was like the feeling of an excessive freedom, of a freedom obtained by the breaking of every bond. His face clouded over and took on an unusual expression. [TP: 29; cf. TN: 13/57]

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Appendix: Thomas l’Obscur, Chapter 1

Thomas l’Obscur, première version, Chapter 1: Thomas sat down and looked at the sea. For some time he remained motionless, as if he had come there to follow the movements of the other swimmers and, although the fog prevented him from seeing very far, he stayed there obstinately, his eyes fixed on the bodies that advanced through the water with difficulty. Then, when a wave more powerful than the others reached him, he in his turn went down the sandy slope and slipped among the currents that quickly immersed him. The sea was calm and Thomas was in the habit of swimming for a long time without tiring. So there was nothing to disturb the efforts he made to support himself, although the goal that he was fixed on suddenly appeared very remote and he felt a kind of discomfort in going towards a region whose borders were unknown. What ordinarily allowed him not to fear tiredness was that he knew the way that he was going, that in crossing the water he rediscovered it as something familiar that he knew he could follow to the end without his strength coming to fail him. But today it was not the same. He had chosen a new route and, far from distinguishing the marker points that would have shown him the best path, he had difficulty recognising the water through which he slipped. Yet he made no effort to turn back. The fog hid the shore, and his hope was not in the possibility of reaching land again, but in carrying himself towards a 255

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more important and more difficult goal that he had still to make out. While up until now he had been struggling with a solitude that weighed upon him, not far from him he caught sight of a swimmer whose movements surprised him by their rapidity and their ease. It was a spectacle he would have wanted to admire at leisure. He was himself only feeling more of the fatigue that was slowing him down. But he also had a comforting feeling and he would have wanted to have enough strength to cry out and get another cry in response. So his voice attempted to raise itself above the noise of the waves that were tossing about in an endless swirling. He expected that the sound would lose itself in the roar that was deafening him, but on the contrary he was surprised by the distinct and vibrant cry that rang out amidst the whistling of the wind and that seemed to burst into a silence that it shattered. Nevertheless the swimmer ignored the call and his indifference appeared so incomprehensible that it was if he had been deleted from reality. Swimming then became an activity whose importance kept on growing for Thomas, although he had the impression that it was being practiced strangely. A cloud had descended upon the sea and the surface of the water was lost in a pale glow that seemed the only truly real thing. Very violent currents were shaking Thomas’s body, drawing his arms and legs in different directions, without giving him the feeling of being among the waves and of rolling in elements that he knew. The certainty that the water itself was missing imposed on his effort to swim the character of a tragic and at the same time non-serious exercise from which he drew nothing but discouragement. Perhaps it would have been sufficient that he gain control of himself to chase away these desolate thoughts, but his gaze could find nothing to catch hold of, and it seemed to him that he was contemplating the void with the absurd intention of finding some help there. Yet a boat came out of the fog, slowly at first and then disappearing at regular intervals into the darkness that consisted only of this disappearance, until it surged very close to Thomas such that he could have deciphered the inscriptions that shone along the hull if he had wanted to give himself the trouble. Was it because the boat was empty? He let it drift away with the indifference of having distinguished in this image an illusory promise and he continued to swim, a man who, having completely forgotten the danger, takes a sharp pleasure in what he can do. The imprudence of his behaviour became apparent when the sea, roused by the wind, broke loose with a violence that immediately seemed so formidable that it was difficult to follow its effects. One could be256

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lieve that the storm tossed the water to the point of scattering it into inaccessible regions and that the squalls of wind impetuously turned the sky upside down, but at the same time there was a silence and a calm that let him think that everything was already destroyed, and the expanse of the sea merged with one of those desert lands where the traveller ends by doubting his own existence. Thomas sought to move by freeing himself from the dull torrent that was invading him from every side. A piercing cold, as piercing as if winter had suddenly brought ice, paralysed his arms that seemed strange and heavy to him. The water turned around him in whirlpools. Was it really water? One moment the foam flew before his eyes as whitish flakes, the next it was the absence of water that seized his body and his limbs and violently drew them along. Thus he quickly had the disagreeable impression of being chained to an illusion whose character escaped him. He breathed more slowly and for a few moments held the liquid in his mouth that the squalls had driven against his head; but it was nothing but a tepid sweetness, a strange brew of a man deprived of taste. Then he perceived that, whether from tiredness, or for an unknown reason, his limbs gave him the same feeling of strangeness as the water in which they rolled. Every time he reflected on the way that his hands disappeared then reappeared it was in a state of complete indifference with regard to the future, with a kind of unreality that he didn’t have the right to comprehend, he was ready to believe that he would experience many difficulties that were impossible to predict before getting out of trouble. It did not discourage him; the feeling of danger was completely separate from the discomfort that caused this situation. What did he have to fear? But his case was no better, for although he could indefinitely hold himself in the water or in this bizarre element that had taken its place, there was something unbearable about swimming in this haphazard way with a body that served only—as he now realised—to let him think that he was swimming. Besides, this was not all. After a short time his skin appeared to dampen in an abnormal manner. Large patches of humidity covered his arms and chest. As he could not seriously examine what was occurring, he was content to attribute this impression to numbness and he let his arms float softly on the surface, as if he swam with a fluid body, identical to the water that it penetrated. This feeling was pleasant at first. Everything that he could have imagined to himself was what he pursued in swimming, a sort of dream in which he merged with the sea; the intoxication of leaving himself, of slipping into the void, of dispersing himself Appendix: Thomas l’Obscur, Chapter 1

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in the thought of water, made him forget the painful impression against which he struggled and that had taken possession of him like a nausea. And even when this ideal sea that he was more and more intimately becoming had in turn become the true sea in which he was as if drowned, he was not as moved as he should have been; instead he experienced a sense of relief as if he had finally discovered the key to the situation and as if it all narrowed down for him to continuing his endless journey with an absence of organism in an absence of sea. But what was childish in this vision of things was not resisted by events. He began to roll from one side to the other, like a drifting boat, in the water that served him as a body for swimming. The feeling of something very vague, similar to a sadness whose intensity prevented him from finding its origin, passed through his limbs. He said to himself that soon he could no longer seek a way out and he sensed how pathetic it was to struggle in order not to be carried away by the wave that was his arm. Indeed he tried very quickly to submerge himself, and his state of mind resembled that of one who would drown himself bitterly in himself. That would without doubt have been the moment to stop, he had hardly any strength to go further, and the cold was becoming unbearable. But a hope remained; he went on swimming as if he had become the fish interior to its own sea, as if at the heart of his restored intimacy he had discovered a new possibility for continuing to swim. Was there something he needed to do? He felt better; he had the agreeable impression of breathing with gills and of living in bubbles of invisible air that formed themselves from his depths. He even felt so completely rewarded that instead of holding himself there, he let himself be drawn by these transformations that he perhaps could have resisted, but whose initial success prevented him from weighing their consequences. What he saw was what came close to a more and more elementary existence, he was less exposed, better placed for going even further than he needed. He swam better, like a monster deprived of fins; under the giant microscope, he made himself into an enterprising mass of cilia and vibrations that indefatigably beat the water. The temptation took on an entirely unusual character when he no longer sought to swim in the drop of water but in a vague ideal region, which was here and not there, something like a sacred place that he would find in the very matter beyond matter. He had the secret thought that this place that was so well suited to him was enough for him to be there in order to be; it was like an imaginary hollow that he sank into because, before he was there, his actual imprint was already marked 258

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there. So he made a last effort to engage completely with it. It was almost easy, he encountered no obstacles, he had the impression that he united with himself in settling into this place where no one else could come, where he had to find a rest that no one could dispute with him. But the illusion did not last. Finally he had to return, and as the shore was very near, contrary to what he had thought, he found the way back easily. His feet touched bottom without difficulty at a place that was a kind of inaccessible cliff and that some of the swimmers used for diving. The tiredness had disappeared, and when the wind had finished drying the water that streamed over his body, there was no more trace of what he had come through. All the while he still retained the impression of ringing in his ears and of burning in his eyes, as might be expected after staying too long in the salty water. He realised this above all when, turning towards the endless sheet of water on which the sun was reflecting, he tried to see in which direction he had gone. He then had a real fog before his sight and he was ready to pick out anything in this cloudy void that his gaze searched feverishly to pierce. By dint of this spying, he discovered a man who was swimming very far off, half lost below the horizon, and whose remoteness prevented him from observing his movements. At such a distance there was little means of making a serious investigation and the swimmer endlessly escaped from view, only becoming visible again at the point where his existence could be definitively put in doubt. Thomas obstinately held to his position. As if his tired eyes were more piercing than eyes in good condition, he continued to follow every turn of the figure whom one could really believe had disappeared and who, even if he had been there, could only have passed for a worthless wreck. This absence, far from discomforting him, enlivened his curiosity again. Not only did he have the impression of always perceiving him very well, but of feeling close to him in an entirely intimate way and as if there could have been no other contact that could do more. He remained for many moments watching and waiting. There was in this contemplation something painful, something hard to bear that was like the feeling of an excessive freedom, of a freedom obtained by the breaking of every bond. His face clouded over and took on an unusual expression. [TP: 23–29] Thomas l’Obscur, nouvelle version, Chapter 1: Thomas sat down and looked at the sea. For some time he remained motionless, as if he had come there to follow the movements of the Appendix: Thomas l’Obscur, Chapter 1

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other swimmers and, although the fog prevented him from seeing very far, he stayed there obstinately, his eyes fixed on the bodies that floated with difficulty. Then, when a more powerful wave reached him, he in his turn went down the sandy slope and slipped among the currents that straightaway immersed him. The sea was calm and Thomas was in the habit of swimming for a long time without tiring. But today he had chosen a new route. The fog hid the shore. A cloud had descended upon the sea and the surface was lost in a glow that seemed the only truly real thing. Currents shook him, without giving him the feeling of being among the waves and of rolling in elements that were known. The certainty that the water itself was missing imposed on his effort to swim the character of a frivolous exercise from which he drew nothing but discouragement. Perhaps it would have been sufficient for him to gain control of himself to chase away such thoughts, but his gaze could find nothing to catch hold of, it seemed to him that he was contemplating the void with the intention of finding some help there. It was then that the sea, roused by the wind, broke loose. The storm tossed it, scattered it into inaccessible regions, the squalls turned the sky upside down and, at the same time, there was a silence and a calm that let him think that everything was already destroyed. Thomas sought to free himself from the dull torrents that were invading him. A piercing cold paralysed his arms. The water turned in whirlpools. Was it really water? One moment the foam flew before his eyes as whitish flakes, the next the absence of water seized his body and violently drew it along. He breathed more slowly, for a few moments he held the liquid in his mouth that the squalls had driven against his head; a tepid sweetness, a strange brew of a man deprived of taste. Then, whether from tiredness, or for an unknown reason, his limbs gave him the same feeling of strangeness as the water in which they rolled. This feeling seemed at first almost pleasant. He pursued in swimming a sort of dream in which he merged with the sea. The intoxication of leaving himself, of slipping into the void, of dispersing himself in the thought of water, made him forget every discomfort. And even when this ideal sea that he was ever more intimately becoming had in turn become the true sea in which he was as if drowned, he was not as moved as he should have been: there was without doubt something unbearable about swimming in this haphazard way with a body that served only to let him think that he was swimming, but he also experienced a sense of relief, as if he had fi nally discovered the key to the situation and that it all narrowed down for him to continuing his endless jour260

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ney with an absence of organism in an absence of sea. The illusion did not last. He was forced to roll from one side to the other, like a drifting boat, in the water that gave him a body for swimming. What way out was there? To struggle in order not to be carried away by the wave that was his arm? To go under? To drown himself bitterly in himself ? That would certainly have been the moment to stop, but a hope remained, he went on swimming as if at the heart of his restored intimacy he had discovered a new possibility. He swam, a monster deprived of fins. Under the giant microscope, he made himself into an enterprising mass of cilia and vibrations. The temptation took on an entirely unusual character when from the drop of water he sought to slip into a vague and yet infinitely precise region, something like a sacred place, so well suited to him that it was enough for him to be there, in order to be; it was like an imaginary hollow that he sank into because before he was there, his imprint was already marked there. So he made a last effort to engage completely with it. It was easy, he encountered no obstacles, he rejoined himself, he merged with himself in settling into this place where no one else could penetrate. Finally he had to return. He found the way back easily and his feet touched bottom at a place that some of the swimmers used for diving. The tiredness had disappeared. He retained an impression of ringing in his ears and of burning in his eyes, as might be expected after staying too long in the salty water. He realised this as, turning towards the endless sheet of water on which the sun was reflecting, he tried to tell in which direction he had gone. He then had a real fog before his sight and he could pick out anything in this cloudy void that his gaze pierced feverishly. By dint of this spying, he discovered a man who was swimming very far off, half lost below the horizon. At such a distance, the swimmer endlessly escaped him. He would see him, then see him no more, although he had the feeling of following his every turn: not only of always perceiving him very well, but of being close to him in an entirely intimate way and as if there could have been no other contact that could do more. He remained for a long time watching and waiting. There was in this contemplation something painful that was like the manifestation of an excessive freedom, of a freedom obtained by the breaking of every bond. His face clouded over and took on an unusual expression. [TN: 9–13/55–57] I have not attempted to give polished translations here but have opted for a more consistent and literal approach so as to provide a better basis of comparison between the two versions. Appendix: Thomas l’Obscur, Chapter 1

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Notes

Introduction: Abstract and Concrete Modernity 1. Jean Starobinski, “Thomas l’Obscur, chapitre premier,” Critique 229 (1966): 498. 2. Peter Osborne provides a very helpful overview of this notion in “The Reproach of Abstraction,” Radical Philosophy 127 (2004): 21–28. 3. See Andrew Benjamin, What Is Abstraction? (London: Academy Editions, 1996); Briony Fer, On Abstract Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). The dual aspects of aesthetic abstraction derive from Hegel and were developed at the same time by Worringer and Lukács as a means for understanding how materiality is controlled or suppressed, which would then lead into the tension between formalism and expression. 4. Maurice Blanchot, Le pas au-delà (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 8; tr. Lycette Nelson as The Step Not Beyond (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 1–2. 5. Good introductions to the many issues surrounding Hegel’s relation to modern art can be found in Stephen Houlgate, “Hegel and the Art of Painting,” in Hegel and Aesthetics, ed. William Maker (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 61–82; Robert B. Pippin, “What Was Abstract Art? (From the Point of View of Hegel),” in Hegel and the Arts, ed. Stephen Houlgate (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 244–70; Pippin, “The Absence of Aesthetics in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth- Century Philosophy, ed. Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 394–418; Martin Donougho, “Art and History: Hegel on the End, the Beginning, and the Future of Art,” in Hegel and the Arts, 179–215; and Benjamin Rutter, Hegel on the Modern Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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2010). The issue of the relation between abstraction in modern painting and abstraction in modern literature is of no greater significance to any twentiethcentury writer than it was to Beckett; see especially Lois Oppenheim’s extensive study, The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), and David Cunningham, “Asceticism against Colour, or Modernism, Abstraction and the Lateness of Beckett,” New Formations 55 (2005): 104–19, for a more Adornian perspective on Beckett’s use of abstraction. 6. Lydia Davis, “Note on When the Time Comes,” in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill, 1999), 504. 7. Starobinski, “Thomas l’Obscur, chapitre premier,” 502, 504. Alain Toumayan claims that Starobinski aligns this relation with that of a Hegelian reconciliation through estrangement, in which the self discovers itself by way of its passage through the other; see Toumayan, Encountering the Other: The Artwork and the Problem of Diff erence in Blanchot and Levinas (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004), 19–29. But despite opting for a language of negation and overcoming, Starobinski is careful not to subsume Blanchot’s writing to a philosophical treatise on self-recognition. Toumayan’s own reading of Thomas l’Obscur, however, assimilates it to the thought of Levinas, not just in terms of the il y a but also by making the encounter with the other an intrinsically ethical relation, which cannot ever be assumed for Blanchot, as such a relation is never given. Instead, this novel is primarily an inquiry into the possibilities of language, as I have described, which may or may not have ethical implications. Blanchot’s distance from Levinas’s thought has been carefully described by Paul Davies in “A Linear Narrative? Blanchot with Heidegger in the Work of Levinas,” in Philosophers’ Poets, ed. David Wood (London: Routledge, 1990), 37–69. 8. Starobinski remarks that this persistence is “one of the characteristic movements” of Blanchot’s “existential style”; see “Thomas l’Obscur, chapitre premier,” 506, although, as it lacks the concern with authenticity and truth that would make it existential, its style is more that of an endless and irrecuperable via negativa. 9. The phrase “highly abstract and extremely concrete” is used by Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 3, From Modernity to Modernism, tr. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2003), 50, to describe how things appear when the “predominance of abstraction in art goes together with the extension of the world of commodities and of the commodity as world.” (See also the comments made by Louis Althusser in his preface to the French translation of Das Kapital, reprinted in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, tr. Ben Brewster [London: New Left Books, 1971], 75.) Stewart Martin discusses Adorno’s thought on this point in “The Absolute Artwork Meets the Absolute Commodity,” Radical Philosophy 146 (2007): 15–25, but see also Osborne, “Aesthetic Autonomy and

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the Crisis of Theory,” New Formations 9 (1989): 31–50, and Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), 115–20. 10. Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013), 76–77. 11. The conjugation here between Immanuel Kant’s warning about thinking, which, like the “light dove in free fl ight cutting through the air, the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], A5/B9, 129), and Samuel Beckett’s call for a painting of impediment, in which what is painted “is what impedes [empêche] painting” (Beckett, Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn [London: John Calder, 1983], 136) offers a schema for this trajectory of modernist aesthetics. 12. Jean Paulhan, The Flowers of Tarbes: Or, Terror in Literature, tr. Michael Syrotinski (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 79. 13. This point has been consistently missed by scholars working on the study of everyday life who believe that Blanchot straightforwardly endorses Lefebvre’s work in its transformation of Marxism, whereas he is very clear in his disagreement, stating that Lefebvre is still indebted to a dialectical rhetoric of light and dark in his thinking of revolutionary moments. Michael Sheringham (Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006], 19), for example, claims that when Blanchot writes, “Against this movement there is nothing to say, except that it misses the everyday,” he is not only rejecting Georg Lukács’s views on everyday life—as “an anarchy of chiaroscuro [Helldunkels]” that is miraculously lit up by moments of clarity and transformation (see Lukács, Soul and Form, tr. Anna Bostock [London: Merlin Press, 1974], 152–53)—but in doing so he “follows Lefebvre.” But although Blanchot’s immediate target in writing this line is Lukács, his critique unavoidably infers that Lefebvre has also remained too close to this Manichean vision of chaos and order, for, despite his criticisms of Lukács, this model is largely retained by Lefebvre in his thoughts on the festival nature of the moment, which “imposes an order on the chaos of ambiguity. . . . Festival only makes sense when its brilliance lights up the sad hinterland of everyday dullness”; Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 2, Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, tr. John Moore (London: Verso, 2002), 356. Sheringham’s discussion of Blanchot in Everyday Life, 17–23, is so keen to recruit him to his reading of Lefebvre as a revolutionary thinker, an analyst of the everyday as a reservoir of anarchic energy and possibilities for the future, that he fails to note the extent to which the indeterminacy of the everyday evacuates such applications. See also Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2002), and Michael E. Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2000), both of whom start their inquiries with Blanchot’s apparent seal of approval on the category of the everyday.

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14. Marcel Duchamp, Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 74. 15. And this too is not beyond reversal, as is found in Hanns Eisler’s 1926 composition Zeitungsausschnitte [Newspaper Clippings], a piece for voice and piano comprised of personal ads from newspapers. It was this piece that led Adorno to remark in 1929 (long before his pronouncements on the possibility of poetry after Auschwitz) that “No one suspected that newspaper clippings were here declared as the true poetry of the time: that no true poetry is possible today, that our existence lies so cruelly in the dark, that is only what the newspaper texts wish to signify; in their tastelessness and confusion lies concealed what poetry more and more intends and what is really expressed today is their denial. Fully grasping the latent contents in its inadequacy to words is the function of music”; “Eisler: Zeitungsausschnitte. Für Gesang und Klavier, op. 11,” in MS5: 525. 16. Indeed, Marx describes the commodity as ein sinnlich übersinnliches Ding, “a sensible supersensible thing” [Cap: 165]. Discussions of the peculiarity of Marx’s notion of the commodity can be found in Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, tr. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 189, and, more broadly, in Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), chap. 4. 17. Beckett, Disjecta, 54, 173; see also Werner Hamacher, “Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-Language and Derrida’s Specters of Marx,” tr. Kelly Barry, in Ghostly Demarcations, ed. Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1999), 170–78. 18. Jean Hyppolite, Studies on Marx and Hegel, tr. John O’Neill (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 86–90, and Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, tr. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 179–86. 19. The combination of apparently shared interests alongside profound methodological disparities not only indicates the extremely rich potential for a cross-reading of Blanchot and Adorno but also indicates why this topic has thus far attracted very little critical engagement. The only attempt to directly compare the two writers has been by Vivian Liska, in “Two Sirens Singing: Literature as Contestation in Blanchot and Adorno,” in The Power of Contestation: Perspectives on Maurice Blanchot, ed. Kevin Hart and Geoffrey H. Hartman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 80–100, who discusses their responses to the story of Odysseus’s encounter with the Sirens, but such an approach fails to grasp their differences satisfactorily because their responses are not commensurable. For Adorno, the encounter with the Sirens is an allegory of the dialectic of enlightenment, while for Blanchot it is a narrative about the event of narrative itself; thus for one this tale is to be understood sociohistorically, while for the other it is to be approached in terms of the ontology of literature. These differences can only be understood if we do not attempt to directly contrast the two writers, but instead find a common ground upon 266

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which they can communicate, which is to be found in the broader questions of aesthetics and particularly in their responses to the problem of the artwork in post-Kantian thought. An alternative approach would be to take up their responses to the problem of the artwork after Auschwitz, as has been started by Michael Rothberg in Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) (and Michel Lisse in “Écrire ‘après Auschwitz?’ Maurice Blanchot et les camps de la mort,” Les lettres romanes [1995]: 121–38), although his extensive reading nevertheless treats Blanchot’s and Adorno’s thoughts independently. In general the motivations of those who discuss Blanchot tend to be antithetical to those who discuss Adorno, so when the two are mentioned they are placed in rather sketchy contradistinction. This has particularly been the case in the work of J. M. Bernstein, whose critiques of Blanchot from an Adornian perspective illuminate much more than they intend and thus will provide a useful counterpoint to what follows. 1. Autonomous Literature: The Manifesto and the Novel 1. Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review 144 (1984): 104–6, provides a clear analysis of the differing forces involved in the development of modernism, which leaves it perpetually at odds with itself: “European modernism in the first years of this century thus flowered in the space between a still usable classical past, a still indeterminate technical present, and a still unpredictable political future. Or, put another way, it arose at the intersection between a semi-aristocratic ruling order, a semi-industrialised capitalist economy, and a semi-emergent, or -insurgent, labour movement”— although, as Osborne has pointed out, Anderson’s analysis fails to address the manner in which modernity also exists as a qualitatively different category of history, that of the “new” as such, which designates the dialectical contemporaneity of an epoch to itself, its continually self-transcending presence and distance from itself; see Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and AvantGarde (London: Verso, 1995), Chap. 1. 2. Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant- Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), esp. 82–100. The richest analysis of the manifesto as an act of self-foundation can be found in Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant- Gardes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), who opens his study by remarking that The Communist Manifesto “is a text forged in accordance with Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, that philosophers should not only interpret the world but also change it.” 3. This point is discussed by Derrida in Spectres of Marx, 128–29, and Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2000), Chap. 4, who emphasizes the futurity that is mobilized by the Manifesto’s montage of styles. 4. Novalis, Schriften, vol. 2, Das philosophische Werke I, ed. Richard Samuel, Hans-Joachim Mähl, and Gerhard Schulz (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1981), Notes to pages 25–36

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672–73; Novalis, Philosophical Writings, ed. and tr. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 83–84. 5. The difficulties of unraveling Kant’s thoughts on this relation between organisms and artworks are manifold, and I have only hinted at their complexity here, for they represent the very core of his project in the third Kritik, which is to understand the nature and limits of reflective judgment as a principle that animates yet is merely regulative for thought. Organisms and artworks are significant because they make this problem explicit in the antinomy of teleological judgment: that we need to judge such objects as if they had a purpose even though we cannot make any claims that this is the case. It is precisely the limit of objectivity that thought comes up against here, and that is foreclosed by the prohibition on speculation, a limit that reflective judgment reveals to be unsustainable for the very reasons I have shown; that we cannot understand organisms or artworks except by analogy with our own thinking, which then involves us materially in their explication. Paul Guyer shows how the dialectical interrelation of speculation and judgment leads Kant to the postcritical thinking of the Opus postumum in “Organisms and the Unity of Science,” in Kant and the Sciences, ed. Eric Watkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 259–81, while Rachel Zuckert develops this dialectical reading in Kant on Beauty and Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), by reading reflective judgment as itself a form of purposiveness without purpose, which, although suggestive, only restates the relation rather than explicates it. To do so it is necessary to look more closely at how the figure of analogy (or hypotyposis) employed by Kant here tacitly indicates the opening of speculative thought within critical philosophy; see Howard Caygill, Art of Judgement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 364–80. For, as Rodolphe Gasché has shown, hypotyposis is not just a rhetorical tool for Kant, but is the transcendental mode of presentation by which the mind experiences itself as alive, through the way that its symbolic analogies present themselves in such a vivid and exemplary form that they appear to be real; see Gasché, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 207–17. 6. As J. M. Bernstein notes, Kant’s understanding of reflective judgment implies this meaningful but indeterminate relation, since the subjective feeling of pleasure and purposiveness aroused by works of fine art “must not be regarded as the sensation in an empirical representation of the object, nor as its concept, but must be regarded as dependent only on reflection and its form (the special action of the power of judgement), by means of which it strives to rise from intuitions to concepts in general” [CPJ: XII, 48]. But Bernstein then draws out the lines that will make this point into the basis for a materially grounded cognition: In such episodes we become aware of a potential for determinate meaning that we have not imposed but found, discovered, and it is just and only

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this potential for meaningfulness, this meaningfulness without meaning, that demonstrates that our meaningfulness, determinate cognising, is not an imposition, not a creation, not a sheer imputation to nature, but a continuous work of determining the indeterminately meaningful, and that this is what grounds or founds, in conjunction with the transcendental conditions of experience, the enterprise of human knowing in a world not of our own making. (Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006], 59, 75, after The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno [Cambridge: Polity, 1992], 44–65) He goes on to show that it is because this sense of material formation has been almost entirely subsumed into the culture of reified consumption that modern art has to proceed by way of a practice of rigorous negation and abstraction in order to try to retrieve those aspects of materiality that persist outside this reification. What he conspicuously fails to show is how this practice is also at work in the language of modernist writers, who are just as concerned with retrieving a sense of autonomous material meaning from out of the subsumption of language to exchange. (All too briefly, Bernstein touches upon this sense of literary materiality in “ ‘The Dead Speaking of Stones and Stars’: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. Fred Rush (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. 153–56, but the strength with which he rejects this dimension of modernist writing, as will be discussed later, forecloses this possibility.) There is nothing in his argument that would prevent its extension to include literature among the modernist practices he upholds, and much that would require it, since the primary form in which this material affi nity is conceived for Adorno is in language. The first part of this response (what might prevent literature from being seen in terms of the materiality of other modernist art practices) will be explored in Chapter 2; the more extensive positive part (the necessity of including literature because of the intrinsic relation between language and mimesis) will be examined in Part III. 7. Frederick Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-Examination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 197–200. While it exceeds the scope of this project, it is important to remember that, following Kant, the notion of the autonomous artwork was developed alongside equally significant discussions of autonomy in the sociopolitical (the individual) and biological contexts (the organism); see Jonathan M. Hess, Reconstituting the Body Politic: Enlightenment, Public Culture, and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), and Helmut Müller-Sievers, Self- Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature around 1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 8. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed. and tr. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford

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University Press, 1967), 187–89, translation slightly emended; hereafter cited as AE. 9. Novalis, Schriften, 2:104; Novalis, Fichte Studies, ed. and tr. Jane Kneller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3–4; see Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, ed. and tr. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 93–105. 10. Novalis, Schriften, 2:266; Novalis, Fichte Studies, 164–65; see Fichte, Science of Knowledge, 194. 11. Novalis, Schriften, 2:127; Novalis, Fichte Studies, 26; see especially Manfred Frank and Gerhard Kurz, “Ordo inversus: Zu einer Reflexionsfigur bei Novalis, Hölderlin, Kleist, und Kafka,” in Geist und Zeichen: Festschrift für Arthur Henkel zu seinem sechzigsten Geburtstag, ed. Herbert Anton et al. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1977), 75–97. 12. Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon, ed. and tr. David W. Wood (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 58, no. 384. It might be thought that Benjamin’s interest in this remark would come from the linguistic speculations of Kabbalistic writers, but such thinking of language derives from Plato’s Cratylus and made its way to Romantic and Idealist thought through the mystical writings of Jakob Böhme. For example, this understanding of the relation between vowels and consonants is also to be found in the work of F. W. J. Schelling; see Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, tr. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 32, and The Ages of the World, tr. Jason M. Wirth (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 52. Adorno will develop his own version of the relation between vowels and consonants in his understanding of the dialectic of rationality and mimesis inherent to the artwork, which will be discussed in Chapter 6, through his notion of the “language-like” quality of the artwork. 13. Benjamin was not unusual in taking up Goethe’s novel in this way, since by the end of the nineteenth century it had become a form of conceptual shorthand, as is evinced by the way that Max Weber, without directly referring to Goethe, uses the notion of a constellation of affinities in his attempt to explain the co-evolution of capitalism and the Protestant worldview; see Andrew M. McKinnon, “Elective Affinities of the Protestant Ethic: Weber and the Chemistry of Capitalism,” Sociological Theory 28 (2010): 108–26. 14. Although Benjamin’s reading of Goethe’s novel is crucial for the development of his own critical views, it largely focuses on only one aspect of the work: the figure of Ottilie. And it is from this reading that Benjamin develops his understanding of both the expressionless and material-content, for on a thematic level Ottilie appears as the mute embodiment of natural beauty, which disrupts the civilized harmony of bourgeois marriage by unconsciously forcing everyone to accommodate to her ways. Only at the end of the novel is this natural willfulness revealed in its truth, which is also its material destruction, through Ottilie’s death. While Benjamin discusses the inserted novella that acts as a structural caesura countering the effect of Ottilie, he fails 270

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to see that this opens up the dialectic of form and material to the interactions of both the natural and the cultural, for in his desire to focus on Ottilie he neglects to pay close attention to the other characters, who (although they fail) seek to counter her natural force. Only as such can the novel be understood as comprising a study of not just affinities but elective affinities. Of course this is only another reading, as Goethe has made the novel almost impossibly intricate, with each point seeming to speak to and yet counter each other point. For a more Adornian reading, see Christina Lupton, “The Made, the Given, and the Work of Art: A Dialectical Reading of Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften,” New German Critique 88 (2003): 165–90. 15. I have examined Hölderlin’s poetics of the tragic word in more detail in William S. Allen, Ellipsis: Of Poetry and the Experience of Language after Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Blanchot (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 123–52. 16. Theodor W. Adorno and Alban Berg, Briefwechsel 1925–1935, ed. Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 51; tr. Wieland Hoban as Correspondence, 1925–1935 (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 33–34. 17. See Adorno, “The Opera Wozzeck,” tr. Susan H. Gillespie, in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 624–25; “On the Social Situation of Music,” tr. Wes Blomster and Richard Leppert, in Essays on Music, 402; Philosophy of New Music, ed. and tr. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 30, 181; Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, tr. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 46; Introduction to the Sociology of Music, tr. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1967), 74–75; Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, tr. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992), 215; and Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, tr. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 6. What is remarkable is that this performance would be memorable for Benjamin as well, for in a letter he wrote to Adorno ten years later, after hearing of Berg’s death, he made the following comments: “You know that whenever we talked about music, a field otherwise fairly remote from my own, it was really only when his work was under discussion that we reached the same level of intensity as we usually do in our discussions on other subjects. You will certainly still remember the conversation we had following a performance of Wozzeck” [CC: 119]. As Adorno points out, though, Benjamin compared Berg’s opera to the work of Karl Kraus in its treatment of historical materials; see “The Opera Wozzeck,” in Essays on Music, 620, and Alban Berg, 25–26. 18. Simon Goldhill captures the double-sidedness of this assertion of authority well in his The Invention of Prose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 43: “The power of prose stems from its ability to make its own rhetorical strategies seem natural and transparent. The authority of ‘the bare statement of fact’ is the most brilliant rhetorical invention of prose”; 50: “If, when you are innocent, it is no longer enough to say ‘I am innocent, I didn’t do it,’ the corollary of rhetoric’s training is the failure of the simple statement of Notes to pages 50–54

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fact—which releases the deep-seated anxiety that language can be a trap in which you can be manipulated and humiliated.” While any statement may appear incontrovertible, it is only such for as long as there is no further statement that bears the possibility of contesting it by virtue of its own incontrovertibility. See also Michal Peled Ginsburg and Lorri G. Nandrea, “The Prose of the World,” in The Novel: Forms and Themes, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 244–73, for a concise overview of these issues in relation to particular examples from the history of the novel, and Leslie Kurke, Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), for a history of the folk background of early prose that emphasizes its elements of indirection and variegation. 19. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 387. 20. For the new translation, see Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, vol. 1, Manuscripts of the Introduction and the Lectures of 1822–1823, tr. Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 115, 206, 426, 431. 21. Hegel, Aesthetics, 89, 150. 2. The Obscurities of Artistic Innovation 1. Leslie Hill discusses this notion as that of “the extreme contemporary,” for in such an understanding “to be contemporary at all, has also to be that which is beyond the contemporary”; see Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997), 223–24. 2. In “Fragment, Fascination, Damaged Life: ‘The Truth about Hedda Gabler,’ ” in The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern, ed. Max Pensky (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 154–82, Bernstein uses Blanchot as a counter for his reading of Adorno and in doing so claims that Blanchot hypostasizes exteriority into a “noumenal substrate,” a transcendental condition of meaning, and that consequently his “modernism” is one that “ontologizes” language such that it is independent of sociohistorical concerns. These claims rely on the assumption that the experience of language is immaterial and thus detached from the world, an assumption that Bernstein makes without reference to the pervasive negativity that marks Blanchot’s understanding, which would render any such detachment impossible. 3. See Bernstein, “Melancholy as Form,” in The New Aestheticism, ed. John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2003), 167–89, which despite its title does not treat the question of literary form, linguistic or otherwise, but reads Philip Roth’s American Pastoral in straightforwardly allegorical terms. Bernstein’s response to Blanchot echoes that of Fredric Jameson in A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), 183–88, who does not actually read Blanchot but contents himself with sketchy 272

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and inaccurate generalizations, but nevertheless finds Blanchot’s “greatness” (which he finds as unsatisfactory as Bernstein does) in the same singleminded pursuit of “meaninglessness” that Bernstein focuses on. The significance of this parallel is that although Bernstein and Jameson both draw from the same body of dialectical theory, their thoughts on the relation of materialism to aesthetics are entirely opposed, since, broadly speaking, Jameson sees the autonomy of (modernist) aesthetics as an ideological suppression of material, while Bernstein sees this same aesthetic autonomy as activating the political (and epistemological) potential of material, except, it seems, in the case of literary materialism. 4. Adorno, “Die Kunst und die Künste,” in Ohne Leitbild: Parva Aesthetica, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, GS 10.1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 447; tr. Rodney Livingstone as “Art and the Arts,” in Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 382. See also Blanchot’s comments in “Le mal du musée” [Am: 52–56/41–45]. 5. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Anmerkungen zum Ödipus,” in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Friedrich Beißner (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1943–85), 5:202. The dürftiger Zeit or time of need features in the seventh stanza of the elegy “Brod und Wein.” 6. Blanchot’s review of the French translation of Philosophie der neuen Musik first appeared in May 1963, and its argument intersects with a debate he was currently having with the various authors involved in the doomed Revue internationale project. In particular, it reflects the difficulties felt by the participants in relation to the notion of fragmentary writing, with the German and Italian writers being resistant to this idea. On the project and its failure, see Blanchot, Political Writings, 1953–1993, tr. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 39–55; Christopher Fynsk, Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot’s Exilic Writing (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 235–48; and Roman Schmidt, Die unmögliche Gemeinschaft: Maurice Blanchot, die Gruppe der rue Saint Benoît und die Idee einer internationalen Zeitschrift um 1960 (Berlin: Kadmos, 2009). As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy point out, Schlegel encountered a similar level of resistance to the notion of the fragment when he was producing the Athenäum in the 1790s; see The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, tr. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 63, 133. Blanchot mentions Adorno again twenty years later when he assents to the “absolute correctness” of Adorno’s dictum about the possibility of writing lyric poetry after Auschwitz, to the degree that he feels that this is applicable to prose as well: “there can be no récit-fiction about Auschwitz . . . every récit from now on will be from before Auschwitz”; see “After the Fact,” tr. Paul Auster, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill, 1999), 494–95. See also Blanchot, “Intellectuals under Scrutiny,” tr. Michael Holland, in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 223, where he similarly endorses Adorno’s Notes to pages 66–70

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rewriting of the categorical imperative as the demand to “Think and act in such a way that Auschwitz may never be repeated ” [cf. ND: 358/365; M: 181/116]. 7. This point has been developed by Max Paddison in Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), but despite this excellent study there has been very little crossover between musical and philosophical readings of Adorno’s work. This omission is deeply problematic, as it is essential to Adorno’s idea of the negative dialectics of conceptuality and nonconceptuality within critical theory that it is grounded in specific material instances of natural-historical expression, for which he sees aesthetics in general and music in particular as exemplary. Thus, without understanding how the development of his thought is grounded in the study of actual musical experiences, it is impossible to grasp the extent or nature of its critique; for example, Adorno’s later works often silently quote from his earlier musical analyses in developing their images. Studies of the overlap between Adorno’s musical and philosophical studies can be found in Michael Spitzer, Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), and Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 8. This precedes by four years the point that Adorno would make in his letter to Benjamin on the relation of high art to popu lar art: “Both bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change (but never, of course, simply as a middle term between Schoenberg and American film). Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up” [CC: 130]. 9. Adorno, “Berg and Webern— Schönberg’s Heirs,” in MS5: 449. 10. Adorno, Alban Berg, 3. Cf. “Alban Berg: Oper und Moderne,” in MS5: 654, 668–69. Interestingly enough, these same thoughts were preoccupying Robert Musil as he sought to explicate the form of his early narratives. In 1936 he wrote some notes for a forward to a projected reissue of his novellas in which he spoke of “the decision to choose the ‘maximally charged path,’ the way of the smallest steps, the way of the most gradual, unremarkable transitions”; see Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Prosa und Stücke, Kleine Prosa, Aphorismen, Autobiographisches, Essays und Reden, Kritik, ed. Adolf Frisé (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), 972. 11. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” in Musikalische Schriften 1–3, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, GS 16 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 537; Adorno, Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, tr. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992), 319. 12. As Adorno states, “Mediation for Hegel never means . . . a middle element [ein Mittleres] between extremes, instead mediation takes place in and through the extremes themselves” [DSH: 257/8–9].

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3. Dead Transcendence: Blanchot, Paulhan, Kafka 1. Blanchot, Le pas au-delà (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 9; tr. Lycette Nelson as The Step Not Beyond (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 2. In an undated draft of a letter to Évelyne Londyn, Blanchot makes this point with surprising directness: “It is true that there was an evolution in my political practice: this evolution unfolded itself (in part) through historical events, the rise of Hitler, the war in Spain (the récit ‘L’Idylle’ marked the importance that this had for me), 1940, the resistance. But it unfolded itself more profoundly through the necessities of literary experience. The long ordeal that was Thomas l’Obscur changed me metaphysically and politically, in a radical manner, and to the degree that Faux pas is a theoretical response to Thomas l’Obscur I can absolutely reject the influence of Maurras and you can see that he is, literarily and philosophically, at the antipodes of my inclinations”; Éric Hoppenot and Dominique Rabaté, eds., Cahiers de l’Herne: Maurice Blanchot (Paris: L’Herne, 2014), 166. See also the more extensive comments Blanchot made in a letter to Roger Laporte in 1984, included in Nancy’s Maurice Blanchot: Passion politique (Paris: Galilée, 2011), 61. 2. It should be made clear that although Paulhan was very impressed by Blanchot’s reading of his work, he did not agree with it, finding its atmosphere too negative. Michael Syrotinski, Defying Gravity: Jean Paulhan’s Interventions in Twentieth- Century French Intellectual History (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), 77–104, and Kevin Newmark, “Practically Impossible: Jean Paulhan and Post-Romantic Irony,” Parallax 4, no. 4 (1998): 65–78, offer invaluable guides to Blanchot’s relation to Paulhan. 3. The citation from Franz Kafka’s story on the hunter Gracchus is of critical importance for Blanchot, as it highlights the role of chance in the faux pas of dying [PF: 15/7]. However, the phrase appears not to be Kafka’s but Brod’s: When “Der Jäger Gracchus” first appeared in the posthumous collection edited by Brod in 1931, Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer, it contained the following line: “Dann geschah das Unglück.” But the critical edition of Kafka’s writings indicates that not only was the story a construction of Brod’s, it being an amalgamation of four separate and untitled fragments, but also that this line was originally left incomplete, so that it only reads, “Dann geschah. . . .” This only emphasizes the point made by Blanchot that the disaster is an aporia of language; see Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1993), 1:313; Kafka, “The Hunter Gracchus,” in The Great Wall of China and Other Short Works, tr. Malcolm Pasley (London: Penguin, 1991), 51. 4. Hill, Blanchot, 74: “As with the work of other writers, Blanchot’s strategy is twofold: it is first to generalise the essential proposition of the text to its fullest possible extent; and second to radicalise that argument to the point where it becomes consumed by its own impossibility.” 5. Kevin Hart, “From the Star to the Disaster,” Paragraph 30, no. 3 (2007): 93. Notes to pages 95–99

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6. Blanchot, “Discours sur la patience (en marges des livres d’Emmanuel Lévinas),” Le nouveau commerce 30–31 (1975): 31. 7. Blanchot, “Notre compagne clandestine,” in Textes pour Emmanuel Lévinas, ed. François Laruelle (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1980), 85; “Our Clandestine Companion,” in Political Writings, 1953–1993, tr. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 150. 8. Jean Wahl, “Sur l’idée de transcendance,” in Existence humaine et transcendance (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1944), 34–56. It should be pointed out that Wahl’s ideas about a transformation of transcendence were not thought through particularly well, and that the respondents to his 1937 lecture, who included Heidegger and Levinas as well as Karl Jaspers, Raymond Aron, Karl Löwith, and Gabriel Marcel, were especially critical of this. Nevertheless, Levinas continued to use the terms transascendence and transdescendence, most significantly in Totalité et infini, which was dedicated to Wahl, where he makes clear his view that transcendence “is necessarily a transascendence,” since it only occurs by way of the infinite demands of the other, which calls me outward and upward from myself; see Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 35. This follows from the point made earlier in “La réalité et son ombre,” where transdescendence is understood solely in terms of the degradation of the truth of being in art; see Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” tr. Alphonso Lingis, in Th e Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 137. This division of transcendence along ethical and aesthetic lines is a characteristically Levinasian point, which the current discussion of Blanchot will put in question. While Levinas suggests in his later works that the call of illeity generates an abyssal recoil into the il y a (supporting Blanchot’s remark about transdescendence) so that the two movements are reciprocally tied, the issue of the role of language in this relation and its affect on the nature of transcendence remains. The most useful studies of the differences between Blanchot and Levinas are by Michael Holland, “ ‘Let’s Leave God Out of This’: Maurice Blanchot’s reading of Totality and Infinity,” in Facing the Other: The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Seán Hand (Richmond: Curzon, 1996), 91–106, and Davies, “Difficult Friendship,” Research in Phenomenology 18 (1988): 149–72. 9. In De l’evasion and De l’existence à l’existant Levinas used excendence as his favored term in order to indicate the manner in which transcendence is to be reconsidered as an escape from being. As he stated in the preface to Existence and Existents, tr. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), xxvii, its “studies, begun before the war, were continued and written down for the most part in captivity. The stalag is evoked here not as a guarantee of profundity nor as a claim to indulgence, but as an explanation for the absence of any consideration of those philosophical works published, with so much impact, between 1940 and 1945.” Indeed, the publication of his wartime notebooks has substantiated this comment, as the last published work to be considered in any 276

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depth is Jankélévitch’s L’alternative from 1938. No mention is made of Blanchot until 1948; see Levinas, Carnets de captivité: Suivi de écrits sur la captivité et notes philosophiques diverses, ed. Rodolphe Calin and Catherine Chalier (Paris: Grasset, 2009), 188. The references to Aminadab and Thomas l’Obscur that appear in De l’existence à l’existant are only in footnotes and thus would seem to have been added after the war, although significantly they are the only substantial footnotes. But Levinas had read Thomas l’Obscur when it was published in 1941, as Blanchot had personally sent him a copy while he was in a prisoner-ofwar camp in Rennes, as the letter from October 1941 recently published in Cahiers de l’Herne has shown; see Hoppenot and Rabaté, Cahiers de l’Herne, 307–9. So it may have been the case that Levinas did not discuss Blanchot in his wartime notebooks out of discretion, considering Blanchot’s role in hiding Levinas’s wife and daughter, but it may also have been that his books were taken away when he was transferred to the labor camp in Fallingbostel in June 1942, where most of the notes were written. 10. Christophe Bident points out that Blanchot’s initial title for Faux pas was “Digressions”; see Maurice Blanchot: Partenaire invisible (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1998), 225. Blanchot later recalled how the volume was produced by accident rather than intention, since he had no copies of his articles himself— they had however been gathered up by Dionys Mascolo, something Blanchot discovered with surprise and some annoyance— and that consequently he felt the collection “was truly a faux pas,” which in French has the more literal meaning of a mis-step, rather than the English usage of it for a social mistake; see Blanchot, Pour l’amitié (Paris: Fourbis, 1996), 9–12; tr. “For Friendship,” in Political Writings, 134–35. In saying this he would seem to be limiting the extent to which he may be held responsible for the construction of the book, which includes a mismatched array of articles on figures from the extremes of French politics. But this also means that the opening essay assumes a stronger position, as it is seemingly the only piece written with the book in mind. 11. The correlation between Blanchot’s writings and Wahl’s ideas was sufficiently clear for Sartre to have pointed it out in his dismissive review of Aminadab in 1943: “the wisdom of Blanchot seems to belong to those ‘transdescendences’ of which Jean Wahl has spoken in relation to Heidegger” [S1: 138]; see “Aminadab, or the Fantastic Considered as a Language,” in Literary and Philosophical Essays, tr. and ed. Annette Michelson (London: Hutchinson, 1955), 69. 12. Beckett, Disjecta, 139, and the letter to Duthuit from May 26, 1949, in Beckett, Letters, vol. 2, 1941–1956, ed. George Craig and Dan Gunn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 153 and 156. 13. For example, Levinas, On Escape, ed. Jacques Rolland, tr. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 64, 66, 71. 14. As Derrida has shown in Parages, ed. John P. Leavey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 61ff, 124ff, and 221ff, an intrinsic part of Blanchot’s approach to literature is his treatment of it as a mode of topological research— a Notes to pages 100–9

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study of spaces and borders, parts and wholes, interiorities and exteriorities— a point that I have developed further in Allen, “The Absolute Milieu: Blanchot’s Aesthetics of Melancholy,” Research in Phenomenology 45, no. 1 (2015): 53–86, as well as in the chapters to follow, to show that this is not just a formal inquiry into the ontological status of such spaces but also an inquiry into their irreducible if anomalous materiality and its aesthetico-cognitive implications. 15. Marlène Zarader, L’ être et le neutre: À partir de Maurice Blanchot (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2001), 91–92. My examination of Blanchot and Heidegger in Allen, Ellipsis: Of Poetry and the Experience of Language after Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Blanchot (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), concerned exactly this relation between literature and the possibility of phenomenology and as such forms a counterpart to the current examination of the relation between literature and negativity in Adorno and Blanchot. 16. Jean-Luc Marion’s thoughts on the icon are best represented in In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, tr. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 104–27. As is clear, Marion leans heavily on the work of Levinas to develop this notion, and so Blanchot’s criticisms of Levinas on these points apply equally to Marion’s work, in particular his profound reservations about the language of immediate overpowering and submission used to characterize the encounter with the other, for which he substitutes the impersonal and indirect language of the neutre [ED: 36–37/19–20]. Hart likens Blanchot’s understanding of literature to that of an icon in The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 103. Although elsewhere in this book (153) Hart is careful to distinguish between Blanchot’s and Marion’s thoughts, on this point of the icon, which is clearly indebted to Marion, he is much more affirmative: the literary works that Blanchot studies “are icons of the Outside.” The same point is made in Hart, “The Profound Reserve,” in After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy, ed. Leslie Hill, Brian Nelson, and Dimitris Vardoulakis (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 49–50, although this piece is both more emphatic (literature is “the icon of the Outside”) and more qualified (Blanchot is an iconoclast and an anti-iconoclast); see also Hart, “Without Derrida,” European Legacy 12, no. 4 (2007): 425: “all of Blanchot’s criticism could be collected under the title The Verbal Icon” (after Wimsatt’s New Critical collection). I should add that, despite my disagreement on this point, I am in no way indisposed to Hart’s theological readings of Blanchot, which I find to be some of the richest and most insightful available. Interestingly, attempts have also been made to link Adorno’s thought with negative theology (see James Gordon Finlayson, “On Not Being Silent in the Darkness: Adorno’s Singular Apophaticism,” Harvard Theological Review 105, no. 1 [2012]: 1–32, but also, and more substantially, Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas, tr. Geoffrey Hale [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005]), although the strength of any analogy with apophatic language is undermined by the resolutely secular 278

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and materialist focus of Adorno’s thought. As with Blanchot and Derrida, the mere presence of what appears to be an apophatic form of language does not override the irreducible differences that arise from the fact that their works are not theological—that is, directed toward an experience of the divine, but rather atheist; remaining with a world that lacks a unifying order or presence. What is of interest here, and is brought out by the resemblances between Blanchot’s and Adorno’s approaches to language and that of the apophatic, is what such a language would imply if it were no longer part of a negative theology but were insistent within the material, which means considering both aspects of the demand to think the unthinkable, or say the unsayable, without sacrificing one to the other. 4. An Image of Thought in Thomas l’Obscur 1. Holland expresses a widely held view that the repetitive nature of Blanchot’s writing in the postwar period drove him toward “an increasing exhaustion of the space of narrative” in which, “in an obsessive, dirge-like way, he meditated on being, nothingness and death,” which in turn led to a paralysing aporia of language; see The Blanchot Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 103–6. Bident has detailed how Blanchot’s distinctively repetitive style became subject to both criticism and admiration by younger French writers and critics; see Maurice Blanchot, 521–30. The key critical work (which Blanchot “rejected, but respected”) is by Henri Meschonnic, “Maurice Blanchot ou l’écriture hors langage,” Les cahiers du chemin 20 (1974): 79–116. 2. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 63. 3. Georges Bataille, “De l’existentialisme au primat de l’économie,” Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 11:291–94; tr. Jill Robbins as “From Existentialism to the Primacy of Economy,” in Robbins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 167–69; hereafter cited as EPE. Overviews of this essay and its background can be found in Robbins, Altered Reading, 96–99, and Patrick ffrench, After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community (Oxford: Legenda, 2007), 116–23. It is worth recalling that Bataille’s essay came out at the same time as Blanchot’s “La littérature et le droit à la mort”; in fact, they appeared in alternating issues of Critique: Blanchot’s article coming out in issues 18 and 20, and Bataille’s in issues 19 and 21. 4. That is, Thomas’s thought is displaced to such an extent in his encounter with the night that it appears as if the night had arisen from this displacement, rather than vice versa. In doing so, Blanchot reveals the way that the night invades thought with the instability of fiction, which distorts it with these hypotheses that are then the source of its displacement. The night is thus exposed as this instability, which provides a clue to the pervasive use of the hypothetical “as if,” which for Blanchot is that which suspends the relation of knowledge by exposing thought to an unknowing. For it is not the case that such a hypothesis arises from a position of knowledge to which it leads back once it is verified, since what is hypothesized cannot be confirmed, and, as a Notes to pages 112–18

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result, thought becomes suspended by this hypothetical other, which is itself never grounded, as it only ever leads to further hypotheses. (This use of suspension, or epochē, is very close to that found in the writings of the classical Skeptics, whom Blanchot had studied for his 1930 mémoire.) Thus there is no circularity of interpretation here, as de Man claimed; instead, fiction unleashes an errant thinking that undermines its own positions, as it can only layer one hypothesis with another and so becomes more and more displaced, opening a temporality closer to Klossowski’s reading of the Eternal Return as a perpetual overwriting, or obliteration, as will be indicated later; see Paul de Man, “Impersonality in the Criticism of Blanchot,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (London: Routledge, 1983), 74–78. 5. See also Sartre’s review of Blanchot’s Aminadab in the same volume, which uses this line as its epigraph [S1: 122]. 6. Hill puts this point clearly in Blanchot, 60: “For the night before night that confronts Thomas in the darkness is both irreducible to the word night and yet its necessary condition of possibility. The night ‘itself’ is both prior to the word night and the word’s most original inspiration; yet while the other, darker night, to which the word night pays silent homage, cannot itself be incorporated within language, the—impossible— attempt to name that night before night is nevertheless, in Blanchot’s account, what constitutes the purpose of literature as such.” 7. In addition to its musical and linguistic meanings, syncopation refers to the sudden interruption of blood to the brain that results in a blackout or heart attack; for Nancy the significance of this is that consciousness comes to “feel” itself on such occasions, when it is absent, suggesting that thought in coming up against such a limit finds its possibility grounded in its impossibility, and thus that the notion of “limit” is itself undermined to the same extent; see Nancy, “The Sublime Offering,” tr. Jeffrey Librett, in A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 222–32, and Nancy, The Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus, tr. Saul Anton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 10–11. Yves Gilonne has developed a rhetorical analysis that seeks to show how the figure of the sublime provides the hidden unity of Blanchot’s writing, which reveals itself through certain tropes (terror, the neutre, fragmentation, exteriority) that manifest a fascination with limitlessness; see Gilonne, La Rhétorique du sublime dans l’œuvre de Maurice Blanchot (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008). But this analysis is limited by the decision to only address Blanchot’s critical writings and a failure to consider how and why the sublime might not occupy such a role, given that the rhetorical unity of writing is something Blanchot questions from a perspective that is as far from the sublime as it is from Romantic thought in general. 8. It would appear to be for these reasons that Nancy has spoken of Blanchot as “Kant’s most rigorous commentator”; see Nancy, Discourse of the Syncope, 138–39. 280

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9. Gilles Deleuze, Diff erence and Repetition, tr. Paul Patton (London: Athlone, 1994), 162–64, 168–70, 191–200. In Adorno’s terms, sharply distinguishing itself from the perceived flaws of Benjamin’s reading in the prologue to his Trauerspiel study, “Th is realm of images constitutes the complete opposite of the traditional Platonic realm. It is not eternal, but historical-dialectical; it does not lie in clear transcendence beyond nature, but dissolves darkly into it; it is not inapparent truth, but paradoxically promises its unreachability in opposition to its appearance; it does not open itself to Eros, but radiates in its collapse. In the historical collapse of the mythical unity of unmediated existence; in the mythical dissociation of the historically existing”; see Adorno, Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, GS 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 181; tr. Robert Hullot-Kentor as Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 127. 10. Deleuze, “La littérature et la vie,” in Critique et clinique (Paris: Minuit, 1993), 16; tr. Daniel W. Smith as “Literature and Life,” in Essays Critical and Clinical (London: Verso, 1998), 5. 11. As both Derrida and de Man have insisted, the text of the Analytic of the Sublime is fundamentally riven by its inability to give an account of itself without such literary or material subreptions, which suggests that the structure of Kant’s argument, and thus of the critical project as a whole, is decisively ruptured by this failing. Consequently, the significance of the sublime would appear to lie in the fact that, as de Man states, it “cannot be grounded as a philosophical (transcendental or metaphysical) principle, but only as linguistic principle”; see Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 78. In saying as much he is alluding to the conflict between apprehension and comprehension that arises in the face of the absolutely great, to which he finds a parallel in the phenomenology of reading (as I have also indicated in regard to Thomas l’Obscur), picking up the point that Derrida had made when he asked, “does not the distance required for the experience of the sublime open up perception to the space of narration? Does not the divergence between apprehension and comprehension already appeal to a narrative voice?”; see Derrida, “Parergon,” in The Truth in Painting, tr. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 142. 12. Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance, ed. Henri Mondor and Lloyd James Austin (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–85), 1:313. Blanchot is notably critical of the structure of Mallarmé’s drama, claiming that the final form is less radical than its earlier versions insofar as it retreats into a more classically Hegelian model of consciousness and negativity. In the earlier notes, however, it is not Igitur who is the protagonist but the night, of which Igitur “is that part that the night must ‘reduce to the state of darkness’ in order to become again [redevenir] the liberty of the night” [EL: 116/115]; see Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 449. Notes to pages 123–28

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13. As Blanchot writes, the “récit is not the relating of an event, but that event itself, the approach of that event, the place where it is called to occur, an event that is yet to come and through whose power of attraction the récit can hope as well to be fulfilled. . . . The récit is movement towards a point, not only unknown, ignored, foreign, but such that it does not seem to have, prior to and outside of this movement, any sort of reality, so imperious however that it is from it alone that the récit draws its attraction, in such a way that it cannot even ‘begin’ before having reached it, but however it is only the récit and the unpredictable movement of the récit that supplies the space where the point becomes real, powerful, and attractive”; Blanchot, Le livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 13; tr. Charlotte Mandell as The Book to Come (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 6–7. 14. Michel Foucault, “The Prose of Actaeon,” tr. Robert Hurley, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 1998), 127. Studies of this text are not common, but Scott Durham provides a very helpful reading in “From Magritte to Klossowski: The Simulacrum, between Painting and Narrative,” October 64 (1993): 16–33; the more mystical aspects of the tale are discussed in Ian James, Pierre Klossowski: The Persistence of a Name (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), 142–60, who looks at the relation to Jung, and Hill, Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 130–44, who examines the relation to Augustine’s eidola. 15. Ovid, Metamorphoses: A New Verse Translation, tr. David Raeburn (London: Penguin, 2004), 102. 16. Pierre Klossowski, “Diana at Her Bath,” tr. Stephen Sartarelli, in Diana at Her Bath and The Women of Rome (Boston: Eridanos, 1990), 35–38. This notion of the demon would seem to owe much to Diotima’s discussion of Eros as such an intermediary figure or daimon in Plato’s Symposium (202e), although without the latter’s unifying role. 17. Le bain de Diane is thus an essential precursor for Klossowski’s thoughts on the relation of memory and forgetting in the Eternal Return, which would later be important for Blanchot and Deleuze; see Klossowski, Nietz sche and the Vicious Circle, tr. Daniel W. Smith (London: Athlone, 1997), 55–73, and Klossowski, “Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody,” in Such a Deathly Desire, tr. Russell Ford (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 99–122. 18. Deleuze, “Klossowski or Bodies-Language,” tr. Mark Lester, in The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 296. 19. Klossowski, “Of the Simulacrum in Georges Bataille’s Communication,” tr. Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons, in On Bataille: Critical Essays, ed. Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 147–55. 5. Indifferent Reading in Aminadab 1. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, tr. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), §§19–23. This book was first 282

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published in 1929, and portions of it were translated into French in Henry Corbin’s Heidegger collection of 1938, Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique? If we also recall that Blanchot’s introduction to Heidegger’s thought came via Levinas, who had been present at the Davos conference where Heidegger defended his interpretation of Kant, then his awareness of this work cannot be doubted. But, as he does not discuss it, it is a matter of conjecture as to what he actually gleaned from Heidegger’s reading, although the manner in which he approaches literature by way of a transcendental critique grounded in an analysis of the finitude of existence suggests that it was instrumental. 2. Blanchot explained to Bataille in 1948 that the new version of Thomas l’Obscur was not the result of a casual revision, but arose out of “the desire to see across the thickness of the first books . . . the very small and remote book that appeared to me to be the kernel”; cited in Bident, Maurice Blanchot, 287. 3. As Bident has noted, “Aminadab is the first ‘récit’ published by Blanchot” because of the way that the narrative is composed and the persistent focus of its episodes; see Maurice Blanchot, 204ff. It is this that distinguishes it from Thomas l’Obscur, but between the appearance of the two novels Blanchot had also met Bataille and begun his study of Paulhan, two encounters of enormous significance for his writing; see also note 12 below. 4. I have examined how the relation between the textual and the narrative space becomes transformed in L’attente l’oubli in Allen, “To Articulate the Void by a Void: Aporetic Writing and Thinking in L’attente l’oubli,” Word and Text 5 (2015): Special Issue on Blanchot’s Spaces. 5. Mallarmé, Correspondance, 2:301. 6. Hill, “Blanchot and Mallarmé,” MLN 105 (1990): 889–913, and Holland, “From Crisis to Critique: Mallarmé for Blanchot,” in Meetings with Mallarmé in Contemporary French Culture, ed. Michael Temple (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998), 81–106, are the best introductions to Blanchot’s readings of Mallarmé. 7. See Anne-Lise Schulte Nordholt, Maurice Blanchot: L’ écriture comme expérience du dehors (Geneva: Droz, 1995), 193–225; Marie-Claire RoparsWuilleumier, “On Unworking: The Image in Writing according to Blanchot,” tr. Roland-François Lack, in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (London: Routledge, 1996), 138–52; and Georges Didi-Huberman, “De ressemblance à resemblance,” in Maurice Blanchot: Récits critiques, ed. Christophe Bident and Pierre Vilar (Tours: Farrago, 2003), 143–67, for readings of Blanchot’s later work on images. 8. Starobinski, “Thomas l’Obscur, chapitre premier,” 513. Blanchot spells out this relation of the critical to the fictional in more post-Kantian terms in Lautréamont et Sade (Paris: Minuit, 1963), 13; tr. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall as Lautréamont and Sade (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 5: Critique is no longer the exterior judgement that places a value on the literary work and pronounces, after the fact, on this value. It has become Notes to pages 136–44

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inseparable from its inner workings [intimité], it belongs to the movement by which it comes to itself, is its own search [recherche] and the experience of its possibility. . . . “Critique,” in the sense in which we understand it, would already be closer (but the approximation remains deceptive) to the Kantian meaning: just as the critical reason of Kant is the interrogation of the conditions of possibility of scientific experience, so critique is tied to the search for the possibility of literary experience, but this search is not only a theoretical search, it is the way [sens] in which literary experience constitutes itself, and constitutes itself by testing [éprouvant], by contesting, through creation, its possibility. The word “search” is a word that should not be understood in its intellectual meaning, but as action within and in view of the creative space. 9. The quotation from Henri Michaux is from his poem “L’espace aux ombres,” in Face aux verrous (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 190; “Space of the Shadows,” in Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927–1984, ed. and tr. David Ball (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 189, which played a key role not only in Blanchot’s essay but also in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, tr. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 216–20, which was the occasion for Blanchot’s review in L’entretien infini. 10. Readings of this novel are surprisingly rare, but worthwhile introductions can be found in Foucault, “The Thought of the Outside,” tr. Brian Massumi, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, 147–69; Ann Smock, “ ‘Où est la loi?’: Law and Sovereignty in Aminadab and Le Très-Haut,” SubStance 14 (1976): 99–116; Hill, Blanchot, 55–68; and Jérémie Majorel, “Portraits avec visage absent: Aminadab (1942) de Maurice Blanchot,” Alea 12, no. 1 (2010): 97–106; see also David Uhrig, “La dimension du subjonctif dans Aminadab de Maurice Blanchot,” in L’ épreuve du temps chez Maurice Blanchot, ed. Éric Hoppenot (Paris: Éditions complicités, 2006), 91–102; Christopher A. Strathman, “Aminadab: Quest for the Origin of the Work of Art,” in Clandestine Encounters: Philosophy in the Narratives of Maurice Blanchot, ed. Kevin Hart (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 91–118; and Sartre’s early review, “Aminadab, or the Fantastic Considered as a Language” [S1: 122–42]. 11. In an earlier paper I examined the strange structure of Kafka’s parables in relation to the problem of critical reading developed in the prologue to Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study; see Allen, “Melancholy and Parapraxis: Rewriting History in Benjamin and Kafka,” MLN 123, no. 5 (2008): 1068–87. 12. The most detailed examination of the name “Aminadab” can be found in Holland, “Qui est l’Aminadab de Blanchot?” Revue des sciences humaines 253 (1999): 21–42. Pierre Madaule recalls in his preface to the re-edition of the first version of Thomas l’Obscur that he had written to Blanchot in 1989 about this name and was told that “Aminadab is like the guardian of the ‘Obscure Night’ ” 284

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[TP: 13], suggesting, metonymically, that this novel is in some way an anteroom to his first novel. 13. In glossing the regard touff u in this way I am suggesting that Blanchot is in part allegorizing the relation found in reading itself, which is what de Man explored in his late work on “material vision” as a mode of radically noncognitive, nonphenomenal “vision” that arises in response to the disruptive materiality of a text; see Aesthetic Ideology, 80–90, 126–28. De Man developed this notion in his reading of the Kantian sublime, where it refers not only to what takes place out of the failure to comprehend the absolutely great but also to what happens in our reading of Kant’s text itself, as it fails to give an account of its own production and instead exposes the “form” of sheer materiality in the text itself, which could then be termed a (material) intuition of the (material) absolute. Gasché provides a critical analysis of this difficult notion in The Wild Card of Reading: On Paul de Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 71–83, while a more sympathetic response can be found in Andrzej Warminski, “ ‘As the Poets Do It’: On the Material Sublime,” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Tom Cohen et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 3–31. 14. For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Blanchot’s writings show that the presentation (Darstellung) of literature to itself reveals not the autodemonstration of reason, as the early Romantics believed, but a manifestation suspended in the pas of the neutre, of which thought is a part; see The Literary Absolute, 123–24. 15. I have used Émile Bréhier’s translation of Plotinus (Ennéades [Paris: Société d’Édition, 1924]), as this is the version that would have been available to Blanchot. 16. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, tr. Alan Bass (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), 66, 172. 6. The Language-Like Quality of the Artwork 1. Derrida, “Fichus,” in Paper Machine, tr. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 173–76; Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, tr. Manfred Jacobson and Evelyn Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 614–15. 2. The most useful discussions of Adorno’s understanding of mimesis can be found in Michael Cahn, “Subversive Mimesis: Theodor W. Adorno and the Modern Impasse of Critique,” in Mimesis in Contemporary Theory: The Literary and Philosophical Debate, ed. Mihai Spariosu (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1984), 27–64; Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, tr. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 281–93; and Tom Huhn, “Thoughts beside Themselves,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–18. Although drawing from biological, anthropological, and psychoanalytic Notes to pages 152–65

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theories about the development and interrelation of language and emotion, the understanding of mimesis in Horkheimer and Adorno’s work departs from such sources through its dialectical approach to natural-history, which undermines any straightforward sense of phylo- or ontogenetic development. 3. This point was made by Benjamin: “Because it is mute, fallen nature mourns. Yet the inverse of this proposition leads even deeper into the essence of nature; its mourning makes it mute. In all mourning there is a tendency to speechlessness and this is infinitely more than the lack of ability or desire to communicate. That which mourns feels itself thoroughly known by the unknowable” [GS1.1: 398/OGT: 224; cf. GS2.1: 155/SW1: 72–73]. 4. Roger Caillois, “La mante réligieuse: De biologie à la psychoanalyse,” Minotaure 5 (1934), 26 (reprinted in a modified form in Caillois, Le mythe et l’ homme [Paris: Gallimard, 1938], 72); tr. Claudine Frank and Camille Naish in Caillois, The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 79. Adorno’s review of a later version of Caillois’s article is in Vermischte Schriften I, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, GS 20.1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 229–30; he also discussed Caillois in a letter to Benjamin in September 1937, where he made clear his deep disagreements: Caillois’s work is characterized, he writes, by “that anti-historical, indeed crypto-fascistic, faith in nature which is hostile to all social analysis, which eventually leads him to a kind of ‘national community’ based on biology and imagination.” This comes about, as he goes on to show, by Caillois’s failure to introduce biology into history in the same way that he has done for the reverse, thus failing to fully carry out a dialectical critique of both and leaving an uncritical, reified form of biological history. In fact, even the positive aspect of Caillois’s essay, the introduction of imaginative history into zoology, is for Adorno no more than a crudely materialistic “version of one of Freud’s worst theories, that of sublimation.” Benjamin wrote back to say that he agreed with Adorno’s criticisms on the first point, about the political characteristics of Caillois’s work, but was less sure about the second, the materialist revision of sublimation, but elucidated on this no further [CC: 212–13, 219]. Of course, Benjamin’s feelings about Caillois are evident from the remarks that Klossowski recalled much later, when he is said to have observed that the actions of the Collège de Sociologie, of which Caillois was a founding member, were at risk of slipping into a “pre-fascist aestheticism”; see Klossowski, “Between Marx and Fourier,” in On Walter Benjamin: Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 368. Michael Weingrad provides a very useful overview of the views of Horkheimer and Adorno on Klossowski and Caillois in “The College of Sociology and the Institute of Social Research,” New German Critique 84 (2001): 129–61. 5. See also Adorno, “Spätstil Beethovens,” which begins with a description of the “inedible” character of Beethoven’s late works [MS4: 13/564]. 6. Caillois, “Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire,” Minotaure 7 (1935): 108–9 (also in Callois, Mythe et l’ homme, 108–9); tr. Edge of Surrealism, 100; 286

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hereafter cited as MPL. For Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s description of nocturnal space, see Phenomenology of Perception, tr. Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012), 296. 7. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 155, 171, 183. 8. This epistemological approach to understanding aesthetic experience is taken by Christoph Menke in The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, tr. Neil Solomon (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), who pursues the idea that the experience of artworks precipitates a crisis of reason by using Derrida’s reading of Bataille to understand Adorno’s aesthetics as an experience of negativity, while adopting an Adornian version of Habermas to understand Derrida as a semiotic theorist of discursive validity. Although the former reading has some pertinence, this is only developed at the expense of understanding the complex sociohistorical materiality of artworks, and although the latter reading may have the advantage of explicating Derrida in terms of critical rationality, it fails to address the emancipatory possibilities that are inherent in artworks’ singular expressions of truth. For a thorough critique, see Lambert Zuidervaart, Social Philosophy after Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 18–38, who shows how Menke does justice to neither the objectivity of artworks nor the implications of their autonomy. The difficulty of coming to terms with both of these aspects is addressed by Bernstein in “Why Rescue Semblance? Metaphysical Experience and the Possibility of Ethics,” in The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, ed. Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 177–212, and “ ‘The Dead Speaking of Stones and Stars’: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,” which are emblematic in this regard in that they seek to balance the material and cognitive dimensions of aesthetics by focusing on the socially constructed materiality that the artwork negotiates and thereby critiques. But this balance remains problematic in the face of the explicit tension that is central to Adorno’s understanding of aesthetics (a tension that he focuses on most directly through his notion of Sprachähnlichkeit), which cannot find in the artwork anything like a settling of its cognitive-material dissonance without betraying its singularity. I have developed this point further in a reading of the visual-auditory, natural-historical tensions of another kind of artwork, the Hungarian film Kárhozat (Damnation: Béla Tarr, 1987); see Allen, “The Cracks in the Surface of Things: On Béla Tarr, Rancière, and Adorno,” Screening the Past 39 (2015). Further discussions of this problem can be found in Osborne, “Adorno and the Metaphysics of Modernism,” in The Problem of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1989), 23–48; Martin, “Autonomy and Anti-art: Adorno’s Concept of Avantgarde Art,” Constellations 7, no. 2 (2000): 197–201; Gerald L. Bruns, “On the Conundrum of Form and Material in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66, no. 3 (2008): 225–35; and Jarvis, “What Does Notes to pages 171–74

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Art Know?” in Aesthetics and the Work of Art: Adorno, Kafka, Richter, ed. Peter de Bolla and Stefan Uhlig (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 57–70. 9. See also Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course, 1965–1966, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, tr. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 180, 209. Although influenced by the writings of Benjamin and Weber, which can both be referred back to Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften, Adorno takes an approach that is more materialist, by examining the actual historical conditions for similarity, and more critical, by seeking to interpret these similarities. Perhaps his aversion to the pursuit of a “language-mysticism,” which he finds in Benjamin as much as in Heidegger, is at the heart of his unwillingness to focus on linguisticality outside of nonlinguistic spheres, although it may also be the necessity of a dialectical approach that would insist that what is underway in the nonsensuous similarities of language and writing to the world can only be brought out by way of these interrelations to the world, rather than through language alone, for only thus can what is known in the relation of similarity be brought out in a conceptually intelligible form so that it can be subject to critique. It should also be added, by way of clarification, that this thought of the critical-materialist understanding of language and mimesis separates Adorno’s notion of linguisticality from Gadamer’s discussion of the essentially dialogical basis of understanding, which he terms Sprachlichkeit. 10. In a letter to Kracauer in May 1930, Adorno complained about Benjamin’s prologue to the Trauerspiel study, and in particu lar its “blatant, historically oblivious, and in the end veritably mythological Platonism, which not by accident must take frequent recourse to phenomenology.” According to Adorno, Benjamin apparently later conceded these points in conversation with him; cited in Gary Smith, “Thinking through Benjamin,” in Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aesthetics, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), xxvii and xli. However, this did not prevent Adorno from recognizing the major significance of Benjamin’s study, as he taught courses on it in 1931–32, which provided the link between his first public lectures on the actuality of philosophy and the idea of natural-history, as well as suggesting the template for his reading of Kierkegaard; see “Adornos Seminar vom Sommersemester 1932 über Benjamins Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels: Protokolle,” Frankfurter Adorno Blätter 4 (1995): 52–77. 11. A provisional examination of these issues in relation to music has been attempted by Paddison in “The Language-Character of Music: Some Motifs in Adorno,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 116, no. 2 (1991): 267–79, and “Mimesis and the Aesthetics of Musical Expression,” Music Analysis 29 (2010): 126–48, which emphasize the way that linguisticality is a question of form by treating the relation between universals and particulars in terms of the relation between semantics and syntax, hence the significance of Berg’s microtransitions, which blur their a priori distinction by developing semantics immanently, and thus critically, from syntax.

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12. Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, 80; translation slightly emended. 13. As Hullot-Kentor remarks in his notes to Ästhetische Theorie, Adorno is also referring to Beckett with this phrase, to the gesture of “thereness” found in the expression comment c’est [AT: 370, cf. 201/133]. See also the remark from Adorno’s July 1965 lecture course, where he states that philosophy “is also more and more remote from how it really and actually is now, comment c’est, as Beckett calls it” [M: 178/114]. 14. In relation to Kafka’s stories, Adorno insists that the reader should pursue “the incommensurable, opaque details, the blind spots. That Leni’s fingers are connected by a web or that the executioners look like tenors is more important than the excursus on the Law.” As he goes on to show, such gestures “are the traces of experience that become covered over by signification,” for the “gesture is the ‘So it is’ [‘So ist es’], while language, whose configuration should be truth, as broken, is untruth.” Thus, these gestures need to be interpreted, for only then will the image of fate sedimented within them light up; see “Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka,” in Prismen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, GS 10.1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 259–60; tr. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber as “Notes on Kafka,” in Prisms (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), 249; see also “Die Idee der Naturgeschichte,” in Philosophische Frühschriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, GS 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 365; tr. Robert Hullot-Kentor as “The Idea of Natural-History,” in his Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 268 [M: 57/35]. 15. The reference to the rhinoceros repeats that in Minima Moralia twenty years earlier: “In existing without any purpose recognisable to men, animals hold out, as if for expression, their own names, utterly impossible to exchange. This makes them so beloved of children, their contemplation so blissful. I am a rhinoceros, signifies the figure of the rhinoceros” [MM: 259/228]. 16. “Origin [Ursprung] does not mean the becoming of that which has arisen [Entsprungenen], but that which arises from becoming and passing away. The origin stands in the flow of becoming as a whirlpool [Strudel] and in its rhythms pulls the material of development [Entstehungsmaterial] into itself. That which is original is never recognised in the naked and obvious existence of the factical; its rhythms only stand out in a dual insight. On the one hand, it needs to be recognised as restoration and re-establishment, on the other hand, and to the same extent, as incomplete and unclosed. In every original phenomenon the form under which an idea will constantly confront the historical world determines itself, until it is completely laid out in the totality of its history. Thus the origin is not lifted out of actual findings but is concerned with its pre- and post-history” [GS1.1: 226/OGT: 45–46]. Samuel Weber is particularly good on this complex notion; see his Benjamin’s -abilities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 134–38.

Notes to pages 182–88

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17. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 431, and Aesthetics, 787. 7. The Possibility of Speculative Writing 1. Adorno, “Zu Subjekt und Objekt,” in Stichworte: Kritische Modelle 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, GS 10.2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 756–57; tr. Henry W. Pickford as “On Subject and Object,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 257. 2. See, Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 268–75; much of this analysis is repeated in Bernstein, “Mimetic Rationality and Material Inference: Adorno and Brandom,” Revue internationale de philosophie 227 (2004): 7–23. Material inference implies that statements bear inferences that are not purely logical but depend on concepts that involve irreducible empirical content. This limits the ability for such statements to be explicated through chains of syllogisms, and instead unavoidably refers them to their particular exemplifying instances, which alone can explicate their conditions. Bernstein expands this notion in two directions: first, by embedding it within Adorno’s notion of aesthetic affinity, such that the material axis of a concept derives from the actual mimetic relation it embodies; and second, by referring to Kant’s understanding of reflective judgment as intransitive, he demonstrates the unavoidable ethical commitments such material inferences convey. This model of conceptuality has a complexity that is materially grounded and intrinsically motivating, which he summarizes in the slogan “no predicative identification without non-predicative identification”; Bernstein, Adorno, 274. While this crystallizes the epistemological aspect of Adorno’s thought, it fails to address the autonomy of language in the dialectic of mimesis and rationality, which has the effect of disrupting and thereby explicating the ontological relation of thought to its objects—no material inference without material interference, we might say. Conversely, I have not addressed the ethical import of the mimetic relation, for which Bernstein offers a strong introduction, although Deborah Cook has criticized this reading from a Marxist perspective by claiming that he neglects the dimension of possibility inherent to negative dialectics—that is, that rethinking the material relations of thought does not just lead to a greater relation to things aesthetically and ethically but also opens up the dimension of what is not yet, not even within the objects themselves, precisely because of their objectification; see Cook, “From the Actual to the Possible: Nonidentity Thinking,” Constellations 12, no. 1 (2005): 21–35, and Adorno on Nature (Durham: Acumen, 2011), 74–86. While this point is implicit in Bernstein’s argument, it is not sufficient for it to remain so, and by developing her critique Cook substantiates the position I am developing here of pointing out the manner in which the linguistic reconfiguration of conceptual thinking bears an intrinsic aspect of intervention and innovation. This is the utopian dimension 290

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of Adorno’s thinking that so many commentators fight shy of, but without which there could be no poiēsis, modernist or otherwise. 3. Ulla E. Dydo and William Rice, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises 1923–1934 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 17. Stein filled notebook after notebook with linguistic experiments, from which works would then be extracted for publication. Dydo’s book charts the way that this process developed, in which the sentence “a hole is a true” is simply one example among many drawn from the pages of her notebooks, and as such Dydo does not in this instance list its date or context. This experimentation highlights the hermeneutical difficulties of how we are to approach such works when they are not conceived as artworks. 4. Novalis, Schriften, 2:412; Philosophical Writings, 23; see also Bernstein, Adorno, 336: “the only unconditioned of rationality is its universal conditionedness.” 5. See Adorno, “Zu Subjekt und Objekt,” 747; “On Subject and Object,” 250. 6. It may be helpful to compare Adorno here with de Man’s understanding of rhetoric, in which the material and conceptual aspects of language are brought together without reconciling them; in doing so the text is granted an instability in which it speaks itself otherwise, not just allegorically but as a (parapraxic) gesture, with the ambivalent result that “to the extent that is necessarily misleading, language just as necessarily conveys the promise of its own truth. This is also why textual allegories on this level of rhetorical complexity generate history”; de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 277. And this sense of history “is therefore not a temporal notion, it has nothing to do with temporality, but it is the emergence of a language of power out of a language of cognition”; de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 133— a language of actual, if enigmatic, intervention, which for Adorno makes things “of which we do not know what they are” by “producing what is blind, expression, out of reflection, through form” [AT: 174/114]. Although both Adorno and de Man find this experience of temporality at the heart of the phenomenology of reading and both see this as an encounter with the illegible, any further comparison between them would come apart at this point. For while Adorno’s path veers toward the historical concreteness that is the basis for this illegibility, de Man is more occupied with the aporetic effects that such an illegibility has on our understanding of reading in general. However, it would be a mistake to believe that de Man’s work is lacking in a political or ethical context for this aporia, even if it is not articulated in terms of a negative dialectics, since the radical finitude encountered in his understanding of material vision is precisely an encounter with an inarticulable other, which is what places such stringent demands on the practice of reading, as my discussions of Blanchot have shown. The extreme opacity of language’s inner “machinery” indicates its distance from the human, which underlies the feeling Notes to pages 192–97

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that de Man sees language, especially in regard to irony, in terms of a blind and alien determinism, as Bernstein’s criticisms suggest, but such a notion of machinery is not necessarily determinist or abstracted from the vicissitudes of historical concreteness [PAS: 162–63]. However, this does not lessen the distance between language and things, or language and thought, since for de Man they remain strictly different in kind; see Menke’s afterword, “ ‘Unglückliches Bewußtsein’: Literatur und Kritik bei Paul de Man,” to the German version of Aesthetic Ideology, Die Ideologie des Ästhetischen, ed. Christoph Menke, tr. Jürgen Blasius (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 265–99. 7. Kafka, The Diaries, 1910–1923, ed. Max Brod, tr. Joseph Kresh and Martin Greenberg (London: Penguin, 1972), 38 (19 February 1911). 8. In fact, the same conclusion is reached in Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel—that intellectuals have failed to transcend the Tierreich, but for him this is a result of their failure to sublate negativity into action; see Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, ed. Raymond Queneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 93–94. However, as we have seen, for Blanchot the opposite is the case—that it is because the writer endures the contradictions of negativity that he is able, like the revolutionary, to find the possibility of literature in the right to death, in the fact that the seizure of everything leads to nothing, and vice versa, and that this slippage between possibility and impossibility cannot be settled insofar as this is the “work” of literature. 9. As Hector Kollias has pointed out in “A Matter of Life and Death: Reading Materiality in Blanchot and de Man,” in After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy, ed. Leslie Hill, Brian Nelson, and Dimitris Vardoulakis (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 123–36, it is on this singularly ambiguous reading of the materiality of language that Blanchot’s thought approaches and yet remains distinct from the seemingly similar thought of materiality in de Man’s later works. This is also the point that Peter Bürger’s critique of Blanchot fails to reach in The Thinking of the Master: Bataille between Hegel and Surrealism, tr. Richard Block (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 39–55. For although he offers a very thoughtful reading he fails to see how far Blanchot’s transformation of the dialectic extends, since he feels that it only leads to the externalization of the writer into language, which he rightfully describes as being no better than the decadent self-alienation of the bourgeois that arises as the result of the emancipation of the master in Hegel’s dialectic, who is now only able to entertain its struggles through narcissistic illusions. If this were as far as Blanchot’s rethinking of Hegel extended, then this would be a fair criticism, but the manner in which the work negotiates both the dissolution of determinate meaning and its recapitulation as material ambiguity—that is, as the conditions of (im)possibility of meaning in general—lays the groundwork for the natural-historical critique that can be addressed by and to the work. The fact that such a critique is not pursued by Blanchot, but by Adorno, does not diminish this point, as its possibility is intrinsic to the scope of his writings, which only strengthens the argument of 292

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this book for drawing out these implications of his thought by way of Adorno’s more sociohistorically grounded critique. 10. This passing remark conceals a significant point, for Hölderlin’s use of parataxis is not a development that is innovative by itself. As Erich Auerbach has shown, parataxis is a mode common to vernacular poetry as such and can be found throughout the oral traditions of the Middle Ages and as far back as the structure of sentences in the Old Testament; see Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, tr. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 105, 109–10, 118. Despite its age parataxis remains a mark of modernity insofar as it arises as a form out of the writing down of these vernacular phrases, and thus it retains a sense of concreteness and immediacy, which as has been noted is distinctive of the modernity of prose. It is this point that is then taken up in the work of Wlad Godzich and Jeffrey Kittay, The Emergence of Prose: An Essay in Prosaics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 11. Hölderlin, “Reflexion,” in Sämtliche Werke, 4:233. 12. Robert Savage provides an extensive reading of this essay and its background that emphasizes this notion of the polemic; see Hölderlin after the Catastrophe: Heidegger, Adorno, Brecht (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2008), esp. 106–11. 13. And on the next pages: “All metaphysical experiences—I would like to say this here in a propositional style [lehrsatzartig]— are fallible . . . only what can be refuted, what can be disappointed, what can be wrong, is open in the way that I have spoken of, which means it is that which matters above all. It is in the concept of openness, as that which is not already subsumed under the identity of the concept, that the possibility of becoming disappointed lies” [M: 219–20/141]. Christian Skirke, “Metaphysical Experience and Constitutive Error in Adorno’s ‘Meditations on Metaphysics,’ ” Inquiry 55, no. 3 (2012): 307–28, suggests that the constitutive nature of error in metaphysical experiences resides in the facility for seeing things literally, i.e., in their objective particularity despite insufficient conceptual explanation. 14. Sandra Richter provides a very useful study of the development of this term in A History of Poetics: German Scholarly Aesthetics and Poetics in International Context, 1770–1960 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), which shows how far Adorno was from mainstream German literary criticism. Although Sprachkunstwerk was coined by Johannes Minckwitz in 1868, the key works in its history are by Theodor Meyer, Das Stilgesetz der Poesie (1901), which formalized both Sprachkunstwerk and Sprachlichkeit (“linguisticness”), and Wolfgang Kayser, Das sprachliche Kunstwerk (1948). It is notable that these ideas are devoted to the study of poetry, that they pursue a linguistic formalism akin to that of New Criticism, and that, following Heidegger, they come to adopt an ontological bearing. For a critical overview, see Klaus L. Berghahn, “Wortkunst ohne Geschichte: Zur werkimmanenten Methode der Germanistik nach 1945,” Monatshefte 71, no. 4 (1979): 387–99. While Adorno expresses doubts about the Notes to pages 206–15

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pertinence of Sprachkunstwerk, he also speaks highly of Meyer’s work on more than one occasion, precisely because it shows how the linguistic form of poetry is autonomous but, as Adorno notes, differs from Lessing’s aesthetics, as it “does not require completion [Erfüllung] through sensuous representation [Vorstellung]; it is concrete in language and through it is infiltrated with the nonsensuous, in accordance with the oxymoron of non-sensuous intuition [unsinnlicher Anschauung]” [AT: 150/98; cf. NL: 82–83/NL1: 68]. 15. I have provided a detailed introduction to the enigmatic nature of Roussel’s work in Allen, “A Semblance of Life: Raymond Roussel’s Speculative Prose,” MLN 129, no. 4 (2014): 955–92. 16. Adorno, “Die Kunst und die Künste,” 447; “Art and the Arts,” 382. This is a significant point, as Adorno had not always made this distinction so firmly, for thirty-five years earlier he had written positively, albeit in the past tense, about the “aesthetic dignity” of the linguistic artwork (sprachlichen Kunstwerk), which “alone preserved the unity of word and thing [Sache] against scientific duality”; see “Thesen über die Sprache des Philosophen,” in Philosophische Frühschriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, GS 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 370; tr. Samir Gandesha and Michael K. Palamarek as “Theses on the Language of the Philosopher,” in Adorno and the Need in Thinking: New Critical Essays, ed. Donald Burke et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 38. 17. Adorno, “Musik, Sprache und ihr Verhältnis im gegenwärtigen Komponieren,” in Musikalische Schriften 1–3, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, GS 16 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 651; “Music, Language, and Composition,” tr. Susan H. Gillespie, in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 115. 18. Both current translations of “Der Essay als Form” normalize Adorno’s language in this sentence: Shierry Weber Nicholsen translates it as “is classified a trivial endeavor,” while Robert Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will say it “is classed among the oddities”; see The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 93. Given the quality of these translators’ works generally it has to be noted that fidelity to Adorno’s language is extraordinarily difficult to maintain, precisely because this level of dissonance is embedded at the level of almost every sentence. Nicholsen was one of the first to point out that Ästhetische Theorie can be approached by way of Adorno’s statements about writing in “Der Essay als Form”; see “Toward a More Adequate Reception of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: Configurational Form in Adorno’s Aesthetic Writings,” Cultural Critique 18 (1991): 33–64, but some of the most interesting work on this idea can be found in Martin, “Adorno’s Conception of the Form of Philosophy,” Diacritics 36, no. 1 (2006): 48–62, and Sarah Pourciau, “Ambiguity Intervenes: Strategies of Equivocation in Adorno’s ‘Der Essay als Form,’ ” MLN 122, no. 4 (2007): 623–46. It should be recalled that this term occurs in Aristotle’s definition of metaphor, which is described as the movement in which a thing is given an 294

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“other name” (onomatos allotriou)—that is, one that is not appropriate to it but belongs to something else; see Aristotle, Poetics 1457b7. “Allotria” also notably appears in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, tr. John Woods (New York: Vintage, 1997), 81, where Adrian Leverkühn’s studies are described as being marked by his engagement in what others would dismiss as Allotria, translated by Woods as “tomfoolery.” 8. Echo Location: Beckett’s Comment c’est 1. Adorno read L’ innommable in German in 1962 and made substantial notes on it, which he was still thinking of turning into an essay before he died. This would have appeared as the final essay in the projected fourth volume of Noten zur Literatur, echoing the position of his essay on Fin de partie that had appeared at the end of the second volume. As these notes indicate, his enthusiasm for L’ innommable was such that he felt it surpassed Beckett’s dramatic works, not just formally and thematically but also in terms of the antinomy of its final lines, which captured the impossibility and necessity of such an artwork [cf. AT: 333/224, 474/320]. However, these notes also include the remarkable statement that the significance of L’ innommable derives from the fact that “it comes closest to the conception of how it will really be after death (the Innommable dreams it)—neither spirit nor time nor symbol. This is precisely the Beckettian no-man’s-land. With that the evidence [Evidenz] (the Kafkan moment): the title of the next book, Comment c’est, is perhaps more valid for this.” Such a thought is thus neither spiritual nor religious but is rather the “archetype of a materialist metaphysics,” “the illusionless,” Adorno writes, “comment c’est,” suggesting that he was beginning to see how even L’ innommable could be surpassed; see Rolf Tiedemann, “ ‘Gegen den Trug der Frage nach dem Sinn’: Eine Dokumentation zu Adornos Beckett-Lektüre,” Frankfurter Adorno Blätter 3 (1994): 69; tr. Dirk Van Hulle and Shane Weller as “Notes on Beckett,” Journal of Beckett Studies 19, no. 2 (2010): 176–77. 2. As Beckett produced the English translation himself, How It Is has an equal status with Comment c’est, but the differences between the two versions comprise much more than would ordinarily be understood as a translation, thus it is necessary to think of the two texts as equally original: being two versions of the same work from the same pen. The German version, Wie es ist, came out in 1961 as a bilingual French/German edition and was also produced by Beckett but in collaboration with Elmar Tophoven, and as such it cleaves more closely to the French “original.” Thus while the transition from the French to the German text is more conventional, the English version emerges as a full-scale rewriting; as such I will not be comparing the English text to the French version, although I will continue to provide parallel page references. 3. The novel’s development is discussed in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 461–63, 495, 800, and Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 252–55. Of the many studies available the most useful are those Notes to pages 217–25

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that are less theoretically freighted—for example, Cohn, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1962), 182–207, and J. E. Dearlove, Accommodating the Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Nonrelational Art (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1982), 85–106; but see also the philological research of Anthony Cordingley, e.g., “Beckett’s Philosophical Imagination: Democritus versus Pythagoras and Plato in Comment c’est,” Comparative Literature 65, no. 4 (2013): 383–407. 4. Ursula K. Heise gives the best reading of Comment c’est to date in “Erzählzeit and Postmodern Narrative: Text as Duration in Beckett’s How It Is,” Style 26 (1992): 245–69, by providing an extensive analysis of this narrative/ temporal disparity between the voice and the text. 5. de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 90. 6. Notebook “ÉTÉ 56,” 28, in the Beckett Collection at the University of Reading (these notes have been transcribed and included in the critical-genetic edition of the novel; see Beckett, Comment c’est, How It Is, and L’ image: A Critical- Genetic Edition, ed. Édouard Magessa O’Reilly [London: Routledge, 2001], 200). The situation of this word on the page provides less clarity rather than more, for directly following it Beckett cites two lines from Victor Hugo’s L’ homme qui rit (from chapters 8 and 9 of the first book of the second part), quotations that are by or about the character of Barkilphedro, a courtier of the Machiavellian type: “Être un ver, quelle force!,” and on the next line, “Une haine est toute la haine. Un éléphant que hait une fourmi est en danger.” Although Hugo’s novel would seem to be a surprising point of reference for Beckett, the link is between the power of the worm or the ant and the possibilities inherent in the most meagre, as had been indicated in Molloy (Paris: Minuit, 1951), 29, a decade earlier: “dans ce peu quelle puissance il y avait,” rather than in the bitter intrigues of Barkilphedro. As if to emphasize this point, Beckett cites the first quotation again five pages later, in what looks like a summary of key phrases. But it should also be noted, as Benjamin wrote, that the “vain activity of the intriguer was regarded as the undignified counterimage of passionate contemplation” [GS1.1: 320/OGT: 141]. However, the notion of an inner descent is central to Beckett’s thinking from as early as his 1930 essay on Proust, so that it not surprising to find “auto-speliology” [sic] being used in the early typescript of Watt in relation to Arsene’s suggestion that Watt should plumb the depths of his mind; see Chris Ackerley, “The Geology of the Imagination: Towards an Excavation of Watt,” Journal of Beckett Studies 13, no. 2 (2004): 152. But the manner in which this is reconceived as ontospeleology remains to be thought. 7. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A319/B376, 398. John Sallis discusses this passage in his Spacings of Reason and Imagination in Texts of Kant, Fichte, Hegel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 4–9. Conversely, Bataille makes use of Marx’s figure of “old mole” to develop a thought of base materialism contrary to the lofty aspirations of Surrealism; see “The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefi x Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist,” tr. Donald M. Leslie, in 296

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Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 34–35. 8. Adorno’s notes on L’ innommable suggest that time “disintegrates” (zerfallt) through its writing such that the space of the narrative is “only” space; see Tiedemann, “ ‘Gegen den Trug der Frage nach dem Sinn,’ ” 67; “Notes on Beckett,” 176. For Adorno everything in Beckett’s work revolves around the question of “a topography of nothingness,” the question of what nothingness actually consists in: to think it so that “it is at the same time not only nothingness, even as it is completed negativity” [M: 211–12/135–36]. 9. For Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 59–63, the instability of this narrative structure has an inherent relation to pain as it commands a response, which leads to a socialization of the subject because it is coercive, but I would argue that this is only one aspect of its instability, which also includes a relation to the accidents of its material affinities. See Cunningham’s response to this point in “ ‘We Have Our Being in Justice’: Formalism, Abstraction and Beckett’s ‘Ethics,’ ” in Beckett and Ethics, ed. Russell Smith (London: Continuum, 2008), 21–37, and Eva Płonowska Ziarek, The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 171–86. 10. See Daniela Caselli, Beckett’s Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2005), 148–82. As Caselli points out, the existence of a figure condemned to “an unsurveyed marsh of sloth” goes back to Beckett’s earliest writings; see Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (New York: Arcade, 1992), 121. 9. The Negativity of Thinking through Language 1. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, tr. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 9. 2. Adorno takes up this reading in his critique of the notion of ideal meaning in Husserl by claiming that this notion takes on the role and normative force of exchange-value in the logic of the commodity fetish; see Adorno, Against Epistemology, a Metacritique: Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, tr. Willis Domingo (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 62–78. But, as Roger Foster makes clear in Adorno: The Recovery of Experience (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 96–99, this is not just to advert to a form of sociological reductionism, but to indicate that the idea of abstract meaning does not arise out of nowhere, nor does it operate in isolation from the world. Rather, its value and significance only exist insofar as there is already a place for such abstraction in the world through the role of exchange-value, which also operates by denying its origin in the contingencies of production and purporting to be the value of the thing itself. 3. Paulhan, “Aytré, Who Gets Out of the Habit,” in Progress in Love on the Slow Side, tr. Christine Moneera Laennec and Michael Syrotinski (Lincoln: Notes to pages 234–45

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University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 77–96. Although it was written around 1910, this story, which Blanchot does not hesitate to call a récit, was not published until 1921. John Culbert explicates much of the background to the story of Aytré in “Slow Progress: Jean Paulhan and Madagascar,” October 83 (1998): 71–95. 4. In the words of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Witz is a sudden and heterogeneous synthesis, an idea that is both critical and reflexive and involves “the synthesis not only of an object but of a subject as well.” In this respect it is the power hidden in the heart of the transcendental schematism and the creative force of speculative knowledge. The suddenness of its appearance is the basis of its fragility as an insight, instead of its immediacy as they claim, and its “fleeting, almost formless character” thereby presents a demand that writing must somehow balance through its work to avoid reifying its apparently spontaneous quality; see The Literary Absolute, 53–54. 5. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaïscher Torso Apollos,” in The Poetry of Rilke, tr. and ed. Edward Snow (New York: North Point, 2009), 222–23. 6. Blanchot, Lautréamont et Sade, 13; tr. Stuart and Michelle Kendall as Lautréamont and Sade, 5, citing Hölderlin’s elegy “Brod und Wein.”

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———. “Reality and Its Shadow.” Translated by Alphonso Lingis. In The Levinas Reader, edited by Seán Hand, 130–43. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. ———. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Liska, Vivian. “Two Sirens Singing: Literature as Contestation in Blanchot and Adorno.” In The Power of Contestation: Perspectives on Maurice Blanchot, edited by Kevin Hart and Geoffrey H. Hartman, 80–100. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Lisse, Michel. “Écrire ‘après Auschwitz’? Maurice Blanchot et les camps de la mort.” Les lettres romanes (1995): 121–38. Lukács, Georg. Soul and Form. Translated by Anna Bostock. London: Merlin Press, 1974. Lupton, Christina. “The Made, the Given, and the Work of Art: A Dialectical Reading of Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften.” New German Critique 88 (2003): 165–90. Majorel, Jérémie. “Portraits avec visage absent: Aminadab (1942) de Maurice Blanchot.” Alea 12, no. 1 (2010): 97–106. Mallarmé, Stéphane. Correspondance. Edited by Henri Mondor and Lloyd James Austin. Paris: Gallimard, 1959–85. ———. Oeuvres complètes. Edited by Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry. Paris: Gallimard, 1951. Mann, Thomas. Doktor Faustus. Translated by John Woods. New York: Vintage, 1997. Marion, Jean-Luc. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Translated by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. Martin, Stewart. “The Absolute Artwork Meets the Absolute Commodity.” Radical Philosophy 146 (2007): 15–25. ———. “Adorno’s Conception of the Form of Philosophy.” Diacritics 36, no. 1 (2006): 48–62. ———. “Autonomy and Anti-art: Adorno’s Concept of Avant-garde Art.” Constellations 7, no. 2 (2000): 197–201. McKinnon, Andrew M. “Elective Affinities of the Protestant Ethic: Weber and the Chemistry of Capitalism.” Sociological Theory 28 (2010): 108–26. Menke, Christoph. The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida. Translated by Neil Solomon. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998. ———. “ ‘Unglückliches Bewußtsein’: Literatur und Kritik bei Paul de Man.” In Die Ideologie des Ästhetischen, by Paul de Man, edited by Christoph Menke, translated by Jürgen Blasius, 265–99. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge, 2012. Meschonnic, Henri. “Maurice Blanchot ou l’écriture hors langage.” Les cahiers du chemin 20 (1974): 79–116. 308

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Index

Ackerley, C., 296 Adorno, G., 161 Aesop, 54, 55 Althusser, L., 264 Anderson, P., 267 Aristotle, 54, 157, 294–95 Auerbach, E., 293 Bachelard, G., 139, 171, 284 Bartók, B., 80 Bataille, G., 17, 91, 100–3, 105, 107, 115–16, 119, 120, 128, 129, 132–33, 134, 143, 147, 203, 279, 283, 287, 296–97 Baudelaire, C., 244 Beaumarchais, P.-A., 148 Beckett, S., 15, 23, 84, 103, 134, 185, 190, 215, 219, 221, 223–40, 264, 265, 266, 277, 289, 295–97 Beethoven, L., 198, 286 Beiser, F., 269 Benjamin, A., 263 Benjamin, W., 17, 27, 32, 37, 40, 46–53, 67, 75, 77, 79, 81, 83, 86, 88, 123, 161, 179–80, 181, 182, 187, 196, 210, 220, 223, 230, 240, 243, 244, 247–50,

270–71, 274, 281, 284, 285, 286, 288, 289, 296, 297 Berg, A., 52–53, 80, 84–86, 181, 271, 274, 288 Berghahn, K. L., 293 Bernstein, J. M., 27, 61–66, 192–93, 198, 206, 207, 267, 268–69, 272–73, 287, 290, 291, 292 Bersani, L., 297 Bident, C., 277, 279, 283 Bloch, E., 75 Böhme, J., 269 Brecht, B., 65, 80 Brod, M., 275 Bruns, G. L., 287 Buber, M., 182 Bürger, P., 292 Cahn, M., 285 Caillois, R., 169–72, 285 Camus, A., 116, 128, 129, 134, 147 Caselli, D., 297 Caygill, H., 268 Celan, P., 164, 169 Cohn, R., 295–96 Cook, D., 290

313

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Corbin, H., 283 Cordingley, A., 296 Culbert, J., 298 Cunningham, D., 264, 297 Davies, P., 264, 276 Davis, L., 6, 264 Dearlove, J. E., 296 Deleuze, G., 91, 123, 124, 132, 281, 282 De Man, P., 61–64, 67, 89, 92, 157, 230, 280, 281, 285, 291–92, 296 Derrida, J., 100, 157, 161, 266, 267, 277, 279, 281, 285, 287 De Sade, D. A. F., 203–4, 208 De Vries, H., 278 Diana/Actaeon, 126, 129–32 Didi-Huberman, G., 283 Donougho, M., 263 Duchamp, M., 18, 266 Durham, S., 282 Duthuit, G., 103, 277 Dydo, U. E., 291 Eckhart, M., 102 Eisler, H., 81, 266 Fer, B., 263 ffrench, P., 279 Fichte, J. G., 42–44, 45, 64, 200, 270 Finlayson, J. G., 278 Flaubert, G., 47 Foster, R., 297 Foucault, M., 129, 282, 284 Frank, M., 270 Freud, S., 286 Fynsk, C., 273 Gadamer, H.-G., 288 Gardiner, M. E., 265 Gasché, R., 268, 285 Gebauer, G., 285 George, S., 47, 88 Gilonne, Y., 280 Ginsburg, M. P., 272 Godzich, W., 293 Goehr, L., 274 Goethe, J. W., 27, 48–52, 83, 86, 270–71, 288 314

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Goldhill, S., 271–72 Gracchus, 109, 129, 208, 275 Guyer, P., 268 Hamacher, W., 266 Hart, K., 99, 100, 112, 275, 278 Hegel, G. W. F., 2, 3, 4, 6, 20, 21, 23, 24, 27, 45, 46, 55–56, 61, 77, 82, 87, 88, 93, 95, 104, 106, 110, 121, 136, 137, 140, 141, 142, 143, 157, 160, 174, 184, 188, 190, 194, 195–205, 207, 208, 211, 233, 234, 242, 243, 247, 263, 272, 274, 282, 290, 292 Heidegger, M., 93, 102, 104, 106, 110, 111, 113, 121, 136–37, 141, 142, 157, 209, 278, 282–83, 288, 293 Heise, U. K., 296 Hejinian, L., 56 Heller, A., 17 Heraclitus, 6–7, 245 Hesiod, 126, 133 Hess, J. M., 269 Highmore, B., 265 Hill, L., 59, 272, 275, 280, 282, 283, 284 Hindemith, P., 81 Hölderlin, F., 47, 50, 52, 53, 68, 69, 160, 209–14, 242, 243, 253, 271, 273, 293, 298 Holland, M., 276, 279, 283, 284 Hoppenot, É., 275, 277 Horkheimer, M., 56, 71, 77, 82, 165, 167, 168, 170, 286 Houlgate, S., 263 Hugo, V., 296 Huhn, T., 285 Hullot-Kentor, R., 289, 295 Husserl, E., 93, 111, 112, 297 Hyppolite, J., 24, 266 Igitur, 127, 129, 224, 281 James, I., 282 Jameson, F., 272–73 Jankélévitch, V., 277 Jarvis, S., 265, 287–88 Joyce, J., 14, 186, 188

Index

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Kafka, F., 67, 86, 96, 100, 105, 108–9, 137, 144, 146–47, 172, 183, 185, 187, 199, 203–4, 224, 233, 242, 275, 284, 289, 292, 295 Kant, I., 2, 14, 27, 32, 37–46, 51, 82, 85, 86, 88, 89, 97, 120–24, 126, 136–37, 142, 155, 157, 167, 174, 178, 179, 183, 198, 209, 214, 233–34, 265, 268–69, 280, 281, 283, 284, 285, 290, 296 Keenan, T., 266 Kierkegaard, S., 79, 93, 100, 101, 102, 138, 288 Klossowski, P., 92, 115, 123, 129–32, 172, 280, 282, 286 Knowlson, J., 295 Kojève, A., 95, 202, 203, 292 Kollias, H., 292 Kracauer, S., 17, 82, 88, 288 Kraus, K., 271 Krauss, R. E., 171, 287 Kurke, L., 272 Lacoue-Labarthe, P., 273, 285, 298 Laporte, R., 275 Lautréamont, 5, 144 Lefebvre, H., 17–20, 264, 265 Lessing, G. E., 61, 64, 294 Levé, E., 56 Levinas, E., 94, 99–100, 101, 103, 104, 110, 116, 119, 139, 143, 264, 276–77, 278, 279, 283 Liska, V., 266 Lisse, M., 267 Londyn, É., 274 Lukács, G., 17, 24, 42, 65, 75, 77, 79, 81, 218, 244, 247, 263, 265 Lupton, C., 271 Madaule, P., 284–85 Majorel, J., 284 Mallarmé, S., 3, 47, 63, 68, 69, 87, 92, 103, 127–28, 135, 137, 139–43, 146, 148, 154, 155–56, 180, 189, 203, 224, 242, 281, 283 Mann, T., 70–71, 73, 295 Marcuse, H., 42 Marinetti, F., 31 Marion, J.-L., 91, 112–13, 278

Martin, S., 264, 287, 294 Marx, K., 3, 17, 22–24, 32–35, 42, 47, 53, 55, 190, 202, 203, 233, 245, 247, 265, 266, 267, 290, 296 Mascolo, D., 277 McKinnon, A. M., 270 Menke, C., 287, 292 Merleau-Ponty, M., 171, 287 Meschonnic, H., 279 Meyer, T., 293–94 Michaux, H., 145, 284 Minkowski, E., 171 Müller-Sievers, H., 269 Musil, R., 41, 274 Nancy, J.-L., 91, 120, 121, 124, 273, 275, 280, 285, 298 Newmark, K., 275 Nicholsen, S. W., 294 Novalis (Hardenberg, F.), 27, 32, 35–36, 43–47, 50, 56, 60, 105, 142, 194, 206, 233, 267–68, 270, 291 Odysseus, 266 Oppenheim, L., 264 Osborne, P., 14, 15, 263, 264–65, 267, 287 Paddison, M., 274, 288 Pascal, 138 Paulhan, J., 13, 16, 86, 91, 94–99, 101, 104, 106, 107, 110, 113, 137, 148, 167, 186, 203, 206, 244, 245–46, 265, 275, 283, 297–98 Perec, G., 78, 175 Perloff, M., 31, 32, 267 Picasso, P., 66–67 Pippin, R. B., 263 Plato, 54, 123, 124, 133, 156, 179, 270, 281, 288 Plotinus, 156–57, 285 Pourciau, S., 294 Proust, M., 14, 213, 250, 296 Puchner, M., 267 Rancière, J., 42 Richter, S., 293 Rilke, R. M., 187, 249, 298 Index

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315

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Rimbaud, A., 244 Robbins, J., 279 Ropars-Wuilleumier, M.-C., 283 Roth, P., 272 Rothberg, M., 267 Roussel, R., 215, 294 Rutter, B., 263 Sallis, J., 296 Sartre, J.-P., 101, 109, 115–16, 118, 119, 128, 129, 134, 139, 147, 203, 207, 277, 280, 284 Savage, R., 293 Schelling, F. W. J., 270 Schiller, F., 27, 32, 41–42, 44, 269 Schlegel, F., 40, 43, 45, 46, 48, 61–63, 65, 73, 86, 100, 142, 220, 244, 273 Schmidt, R., 273 Schmitt, C., 70 Schoenberg, A., 70–72, 74, 76, 79–89, 182, 193, 274 Schulte Nordholt, A.-L., 283 Sheringham, M., 265 Skirke, C., 293 Smock, A., 99, 284 Sohn-Rethel, A., 245 Spitzer, M., 274 Starobinski, J., 1, 10, 144, 253, 263, 264, 283

316

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Stein, G., 15, 27, 189, 194, 215, 291 Stillers, R., 138 Strathman, C. A., 284 Stravinsky, I., 80 Syrotinski, M., 275 Tarr, B., 287 Toumayan, A., 264 Uhrig, D., 284 Valéry, P., 141 Verlaine, P., 139 Wahl, J., 94, 99–100, 102, 109, 122, 276, 277 Warminski, A., 285 Weber, M., 75, 270, 288 Weber, S., 289 Webern, A., 80 Weill, K., 80 Weingrad, M., 286 Weiss, P., 177 Worringer, W., 263 Zarader, M., 111, 278 Ziarek, E. P., 297 Zuckert, R., 268 Zuidervaart, L., 287

Index

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Perspectives in Continental Philosophy John D. Caputo, series editor

John D. Caputo, ed., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. Michael Strawser, Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard— From Irony to Edification. Michael D. Barber, Ethical Hermeneutics: Rationality in Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation. James H. Olthuis, ed., Knowing Other-wise: Philosophy at the Threshold of Spirituality. James Swindal, Reflection Revisited: Jürgen Habermas’s Discursive Theory of Truth. Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Postmodern. Second edition. Thomas W. Busch, Circulating Being: From Embodiment to Incorporation— Essays on Late Existentialism. Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics. Second edition. Francis J. Ambrosio, ed., The Question of Christian Philosophy Today. Jeffrey Bloechl, ed., The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate, eds., Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology. Trish Glazebrook, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science. Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy. Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. Second edition. Dominique Janicaud, Jean-François Courtine, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Paul Ricoeur, Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate.

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Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt. Introduction by Joseph W. Koterski, S.J. Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies. Translated with an introduction by Thomas A. Carlson. Jeffrey Dudiak, The Intrigue of Ethics: A Reading of the Idea of Discourse in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Robyn Horner, Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology. Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus: Søren Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility. Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith. Edith Wyschogrod, Jean-Joseph Goux, and Eric Boynton, eds., The Enigma of Gift and Sacrifice. Stanislas Breton, The Word and the Cross. Translated with an introduction by Jacquelyn Porter. Jean-Luc Marion, Prolegomena to Charity. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Peter H. Spader, Scheler’s Ethical Personalism: Its Logic, Development, and Promise. Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For. Translated by Jeffrey Bloechl. Don Cupitt, Is Nothing Sacred? The Non-Realist Philosophy of Religion: Selected Essays. Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Translated by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. Phillip Goodchild, Rethinking Philosophy of Religion: Approaches from Continental Philosophy. William J. Richardson, S.J., Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought. Jeff rey Andrew Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning. Jean-Louis Chrétien, Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response. Translated with an introduction by Anne Davenport. D. C. Schindler, Han Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth: A Philosophical Investigation. Julian Wolfreys, ed., Thinking Diff erence: Critics in Conversation. Allen Scult, Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger: An Ontological Encounter. Richard Kearney, Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers. Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language: Toward a New Poetics of Dasein. Jolita Pons, Stealing a Gift: Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms and the Bible. Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man. Translated by Mark Raftery-Skehan.

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Charles P. Bigger, Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor’s Metaphysical Neighborhood. Dominique Janicaud, Phenomenology “Wide Open”: After the French Debate. Translated by Charles N. Cabral. Ian Leask and Eoin Cassidy, eds., Givenness and God: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion. Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. Edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. William Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba, eds., The Phenomenology of Prayer. S. Clark Buckner and Matthew Statler, eds., Styles of Piety: Practicing Philosophy after the Death of God. Kevin Hart and Barbara Wall, eds., The Experience of God: A Postmodern Response. John Panteleimon Manoussakis, After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy. John Martis, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe: Representation and the Loss of the Subject. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image. Edith Wyschogrod, Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy’s Others. Gerald Bruns, On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy: A Guide for the Unruly. Brian Treanor, Aspects of Alterity: Levinas, Marcel, and the Contemporary Debate. Simon Morgan Wortham, Counter-Institutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University. Leonard Lawlor, The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life. Clayton Crockett, Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory. Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, and Raphael Zagury-Orly, eds., Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida. Translated by Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith. Jean-Luc Marion, On the Ego and on God: Further Cartesian Questions. Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner. Jean-Luc Nancy, Philosophical Chronicles. Translated by Franson Manjali. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. Translated by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith. Andrea Hurst, Derrida Vis-à-vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis. Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body. Translated by Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet, translated by David Wills. Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed. Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner and others. Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology. Translated by Scott Davidson.

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Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus. Translated by Richard A. Rand. Joshua Kates, Fielding Derrida. Michael Naas, Derrida From Now On. Shannon Sullivan and Dennis J. Schmidt, eds., Difficulties of Ethical Life. Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? Translated by Sebastian Rand, Introduction by Marc Jeannerod. Claude Romano, Event and World. Translated by Shane Mackinlay. Vanessa Lemm, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics, and the Animality of the Human Being. B. Keith Putt, ed., Gazing Through a Prism Darkly: Reflections on Merold Westphal’s Hermeneutical Epistemology. Eric Boynton and Martin Kavka, eds., Saintly Influence: Edith Wyschogrod and the Possibilities of Philosophy of Religion. Shane Mackinlay, Interpreting Excess: Jean-Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomena, and Hermeneutics. Kevin Hart and Michael A. Signer, eds., The Exorbitant: Emmanuel Levinas Between Jews and Christians. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba, eds., Words of Life: New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology. William Robert, Trials: Of Antigone and Jesus. Brian Treanor and Henry Isaac Venema, eds., A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur. Kas Saghafi, Apparitions— Of Derrida’s Other. Nick Mansfield, The God Who Deconstructs Himself: Sovereignty and Subjectivity Between Freud, Bataille, and Derrida. Don Ihde, Heidegger’s Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives. Suzi Adams, Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation. Richard Kearney and Kascha Semonovitch, eds., Phenomenologies of the Stranger: Between Hostility and Hospitality. Michael Naas, Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media. Alena Alexandrova, Ignaas Devisch, Laurens ten Kate, and Aukje van Rooden, Re-treating Religion: Deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy. Preamble by Jean-Luc Nancy. Emmanuel Falque, The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection. Translated by George Hughes. Scott M. Campbell, The Early Heidegger’s Philosophy of Life: Facticity, Being, and Language. Françoise Dastur, How Are We to Confront Death? An Introduction to Philosophy. Translated by Robert Vallier. Foreword by David Farrell Krell. Christina M. Gschwandtner, Postmodern Apologetics? Arguments for God in Contemporary Philosophy. Ben Morgan, On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self.

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Neal DeRoo, Futurity in Phenomenology: Promise and Method in Husserl, Levinas, and Derrida. Sarah LaChance Adams and Caroline R. Lundquist, eds., Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering. Thomas Claviez, ed., The Conditions of Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics on the Threshold of the Possible. Roland Faber and Jeremy Fackenthal, eds., Theopoetic Folds: Philosophizing Multifariousness. Jean-Luc Marion, The Essential Writings. Edited by Kevin Hart. Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object- Oriented Theology. Foreword by Levi R. Bryant. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus II: Writings on Sexuality. David Nowell Smith, Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetics. Gregory C. Stallings, Manuel Asensi, and Carl Good, eds., Material Spirit: Religion and Literature Intranscendent. Claude Romano, Event and Time. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Frank Chouraqui, Ambiguity and the Absolute: Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty on the Question of Truth. Noëlle Vahanian, The Rebellious No: Variations on a Secular Theology of Language. Michael Naas, The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida’s Final Seminar. Jean-Louis Chrétien, Under the Gaze of the Bible. Translated by John Marson Dunaway. Edward Baring and Peter E. Gordon, eds., The Trace of God: Derrida and Religion. Vanessa Lemm, ed., Nietzsche and the Becoming of Life. Aaron T. Looney, Vladimir Jankélévitch: The Time of Forgiveness. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, eds., Carnal Hermeneutics. Tarek R. Dika and W. Chris Hackett, Quiet Powers of the Possible: Interviews in Contemporary French Phenomenology. Foreword by Richard Kearney. Jeremy Biles and Kent L. Brintnall, eds., Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion. William S. Allen, Aesthetics of Negativity: Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy. Colby Dickinson and Stéphane Symons, eds., Walter Benjamin and Theology. Don Ihde, Husserl’s Missing Technologies.

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