Blanchot and the Outside of Literature 9781501345241, 9781501345272, 9781501345265

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Blanchot and the Outside of Literature

Blanchot and the Outside of Literature William S. Allen

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © William S. Allen, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image: Photograph of Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect (1975) © Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, DACS London 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.



Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Allen, William S., 1971- author. Title: Blanchot and the outside of literature / William S. Allen. Description: New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018039003| ISBN 9781501345241 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501345265 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Blanchot, Maurice--Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PQ2603.L3343 Z528 2019 | DDC 843/.912--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018039003 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4524-1 PB: 978-1-5013-6303-0 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4526-5 eBook: 978-1-5013-4525-8 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

In a sense, and to express myself very simply, that which has made ‘me’ write is the thought (and the anxiety) of impossible death, the silent clash of death as finitude, as power, and the infinity of dying, the eternity of that through which time risks abolishing itself. Maurice Blanchot to Pierre Madaule, 2 March 1981

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements  ix Abbreviations  xi

Introduction: The two slopes  1

PART ONE: Contingency and contagion 1 Black water  23 2 Sickness in words  47 3 The right to death  71

PART TWO: The aporetic imperative 4 The absolute milieu  95 5 Unmade in its image  123 6 White noise  143 7 To articulate the void  159 Afterword  177 Notes  189 Index  215

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Some of these chapters have appeared elsewhere in earlier forms: Chapter 4 appeared as ‘The Absolute Milieu: Blanchot’s Aesthetics of Melancholy’, Research in Phenomenology 45.1 (2015): 53–86; Chapter 5 appeared as ‘Unmade in its Image: The Spacing of the Sentence and the Exposure of Thought in Blanchot’, Textual Practice (2016); Chapter 6 appeared as ‘White Noise, Écriture Blanche’, Angelaki (2018), special issue on Sonic Encounters with Blanchot; and Chapter 7 appeared as ‘To Articulate the Void by a Void: Aporetic Writing and Thinking in L’Attente l’oubli’, Word and Text 5 (2015): 52–67, special issue on Blanchot’s Spaces. My thanks to Brill and the Taylor and Francis Group for permission to reprint them here. I must also express my profound gratitude to the staff at Bloomsbury, especially Haaris Naqvi and Katherine De Chant, for their exemplary work in bringing this book to print.

ABBREVIATIONS

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

Maurice Blanchot, L’Amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971); tr. Elizabeth Rottenberg as Friendship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

AO

Blanchot, L’Attente l’oubli (Paris: Gallimard, 1962); tr. John Gregg as Awaiting Oblivion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).

CQ

Blanchot, Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1953); tr. Lydia Davis as ‘The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me’, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1999).

DH

Blanchot, Le Dernier Homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1957); tr. Lydia Davis as The Last Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

ED

Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980); tr. Ann Smock as The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

EI

Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969); tr. Susan Hanson as The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

EL

Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955); tr. Ann Smock as The Space of Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).

FP

Blanchot, Faux pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1943); tr. Charlotte Mandell as Faux Pas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

K

Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979); tr.

xii

ABBREVIATIONS

Robert Hullot-Kentor as Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). LV

Blanchot, Le Livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959); tr. Charlotte Mandell as The Book to Come (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

MS

Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe, essai sur l’absurde (Paris: Gallimard, 1942); tr. Justin O’Brien as The Myth of Sisyphus (London: Penguin, 1955).

ND

Adorno, Negative Dialektik, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972); tr. E. B. Ashton as Negative Dialectics (New York: Seabury Press, 1973).

PD

Michel Foucault, ‘La pensée du dehors’, in Dits et écrits 1954– 1988: I, 1954–1969, eds Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jacques Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 1994); tr. Brian Massumi as ‘The Thought of the Outside’, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 1998).

PF

Blanchot, La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949); tr. Charlotte Mandell as The Work of Fire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

PG

G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, eds Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Reinhard Heede (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1980); tr. A. V. Miller as Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).

PP

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945); tr. Donald A. Landes as Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2012).

SZ

Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977); tr. Dennis Schmidt and Joan Stambaugh as Being and Time (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010).

TA

Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Le temps et l’autre’, in Le Choix, le monde, l’existence (Grenoble: Arthaud, 1947); tr. Richard A. Cohen as Time and the Other (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987).

TH

Blanchot, Le Très-Haut (Paris: Gallimard, 1948); tr. Allan Stoekl as The Most High (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996).

TO

Blanchot, Thomas l’Obscur, nouvelle version (Paris: Gallimard, 1992); tr. Robert Lamberton as ‘Thomas the Obscure’, in The

ABBREVIATIONS

xiii

Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1999). UDT

Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in Gesammelte Schriften I, eds Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974); tr. John Osborne as The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1977).

Introduction: The two slopes

Problem: with what means could one attain a severe form of highly contagious nihilism: one that teaches and practices voluntary death with scientific conscientiousness? NIETZSCHE, 18881

If Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach is the starting point for any philosophy that would call itself materialist, insofar as it bears the minimal requirement to negotiate the relation between interpreting the world and changing it, then what does this mean for literature? To some degree, the question is less pertinent for literature since, in material terms, it is already part of the world and its changes, but this is only to register its basic unreflexive form. Otherwise, the imperative of the eleventh thesis remains as pressing for the writer as it does for the thinker. Thus, literature is not so much engaged in the task of demonstrating its materialism but rather of developing its ramifications through its exploration of the relation between interpretation and intervention. ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it’ (Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert, es kömmt darauf an, sie zu verändern).2 Marxist scholars have long struggled with the reading of this thesis as its form is ambiguous: is the point to drop interpretation in favour of change, or is it to ensure that interpretation should henceforth involve change, or, indeed, is it that interpretation is itself a form of change that needs to realize itself? There may be other readings, but all have to do with the dialectical relation between thought and the world, and, more precisely, with its role and status in the world, which is also a problem for literature. In looking at the ways that literature relates to the world it is reasonable to take account of whether the text seeks to operate directly or indirectly. This involves understanding the writer’s position, and whether they are seeking to develop a commentary or reflection, however slight, but either way the writer comes up against the question of how their writings exist in the world. This is not just to ask after the political

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or realistic status of a text but to enquire into its material-­linguistic status as an interpretation that is also an intervention; what does this mean for the text, what is its situation in the world? The writer and their work are always already in the world, and in history, and whatever they do, however minimal, will be part of that world and its changes, so how does the writer proceed? This argument is central to Sartre’s 1947 essay Qu’est-­ce que la littérature? and the answer that arises to its titular question is that literature needs to realize itself through prose as a form of action, to become engagé, committed, to and with the world, such that it is no longer merely interpreting it. Unfortunately Sartre does not provide an account of what is meant by this action in terms of how it relates to the peculiar kind of work that already goes on in literature. To find a critical analysis of the possibilities that arise from literature’s place in the world it is instead necessary to turn to Sartre’s contemporary, Blanchot. Although Blanchot is not a materialist in the Marxist sense, his works contain a sustained analysis of the materiality of literature by way of its opaque and elusive status in relation to historical thought and action. But his response to Sartre has extraordinary implications as he finds that literature bears its own imperative and this involves the right to death, which would seem absurdly paradoxical; how can the eleventh thesis imply death? In fact, for Blanchot, the implication is unavoidable, for any attempt to consider the implications for literature of the eleventh thesis inevitably involves mortality as materialism ultimately implies a right to death, a right that literature not only explores but actualizes, and it is as such that it both interprets the world to its fullest extent, and changes it. Understanding what this right means occupies Blanchot throughout his career, but one of the most extensive and pointed examinations occurs in the novel that he finished at the time that Sartre was writing his essay, a novel that is also his most political work of fiction, Le Très-Haut. If the nature of the relation between literature and the world is at issue, then this might seem to refer to the role of rhetorical structures and figures, but these do not go far enough on their own to explicate its material status. For if we are concerned with structure then this only alludes to the ability of literature to develop an account that performs its own necessity and thereby imposes itself. And if we are concerned with figures, then this simply reposes the question in terms of whether their force comes from their linguistic form or the ideas they convey. This constitutive lack of clarity in the nature of a figure, its linguistic-­conceptual ambivalence, is critical as it indicates that it is both concrete, insofar as it is drawn from the material (of the world), and effective, insofar as it is drawn from the material (of the world). It is in this way that the figures and structure of literature are not only interpretations and interventions but are also their own pedagogy, such that literature can teach its own methods and thus has the ability to be reflexive and innovative. Hence, literature is not merely material in its existence in the world; instead

Introduction: The two slopes

3

it is literal, which is to say that it is both literal in the sense of being of the letter in its contingent materiality, and literal in its effective transformation of the text into actuality that then imposes itself. (Thus this is not the naïve and ideological literalism that assumes a direct relation between language and the world, which is merely determined in contradistinction to the supposedly indirect relation of figural language.) Literature is what is literally there; it is both concrete and speculative, and this means that it is both there and not there. Such a description is used by Adorno to define the work of art, and what he calls its ‘metaphysical experience’, which is not a spiritual experience but rather the concrete experience of utopia, the experience, here, of what is not here [ND: 366/373]. As he explains elsewhere, this point raises a very important consideration, which is that of the contradictory nature of this experience, for on the one hand, the idea of utopia ‘cannot be conceived at all without the elimination [Abschaffung] of death’. This thought lies behind all utopian longing but it is also a thought that, when considered more carefully, is terrifying. On the other hand, ‘what goes beyond the identification of people with existing social relations in which they are extended is the identification with death’. What this implies is that there can be no utopia ‘where the threshold of death is not at the same time considered’, and necessarily this means that the thought of utopia bears a very difficult burden. But, in more conceptual terms, it also means that the essence of utopia ‘is in determinate negation, in the determinate negation of that which merely is, and in concretizing itself as something false it always points at the same time to what should be’.3 Consequently, the literal operates by appearing as what is while also imposing itself as what is not (yet), and in this ambivalence lies its force and its elusiveness, to which Blanchot gives expression in titling his response to Sartre’s essay, ‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’. But Adorno adds another point to this analysis that is attuned more closely to his thinking of the work of art, for metaphysical experience is also an experience of contingency, since it is an experience of what is there but as that which could be otherwise, that which lacks necessity and thereby appears free (that is, both gratuitous and liberated). This experience may thus be one of error in that things may be taken otherwise, but this error ‘constitutes the model of experience, of a concept, which ultimately would be that of the thing itself’, for in doing so it ‘grants the interior of objects as what is at the same time removed from them’ [ND: 366–67/373–74]. It is for this reason that the further one goes in this enquiry, the greater the impression becomes that one is removed from the way things ‘really’ are into what might be, that the passage to the (concrete) exterior is instead into the (abstract) interior. But what is also true is that these moments of contingency are also moments of non-­existence, and hence, for literature to operate as a material exploration of change is for it to be involved intimately with the actuality of death, in its negativity and its disastrous errancy.

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Blanchot and the Outside of Literature

I The location of literature is peculiarly uncertain: when we are involved in a work, whether as readers or writers, where are we? And what is the nature and status of this location in relation to the world? Equally, if the work does not remain merely literature but reaches out beyond itself, insofar as it has effects, then what is this outside of literature, is it one that (subjectively) belongs to it, or one that (objectively) does not? But if literature is not simply in the world, then how does it relate to it, or does it not do so in any familiar or recognizable form? The radical dislocation that arises here affects both thought and language and presents a considerable challenge to the writer or reader who would approach it. Blanchot’s works comprise one of the most extensive and intensive studies of these issues in modern thought and in this book I will examine how the issues of exteriority and interiority in literature come together by reading two of his most challenging texts, Le Très-Haut and Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas. The former is his most worldly work of fiction and the latter his most introspective and together they provide a way of understanding how these aspects converge and diverge, and thus how they appear as two slopes of literature. Blanchot used this image of two slopes in his 1948 article ‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’ and although he makes clear that he is not simply distinguishing between poetry and prose, or realism and fantasy, the exact meaning of this image remains unclear, as indeed does the title of this essay [PF: 318/330ff]. But what is apparent is that Blanchot’s understanding of language and literature is subtly complex and operates in a quasi-­dialectical manner, for the image of the two slopes shows that the movement of the negative in this dialectic is never settled but endlessly ambivalent. This book will show how this ambivalence arises, and what it implies, and what will emerge is an awareness of its philosophical nature insofar as it affects the relation between subject and object, material and ideal, active and passive, and life and death. Ambivalence becomes the mode that Blanchot uses to approach ontology, which will radically reconfigure what is meant by being and logic, and also affect his understanding of aesthetics and politics. Ambivalence is not mere vacillation but a rigorous oscillation and indifference that arises from the persistent negation of position. And in these two narratives in particular Blanchot provides an analysis of ambivalence that is also accompanied by its experience, which thus has implications for any philosophical attempt to think through the materiality of existence, insofar as it illuminates the relation between literature and the right to death, which is exposed in the aporia of the act of suicide. The two slopes are oriented around the force of negativity in language, which is to be understood in terms of death insofar as it is death that brings about the appearance of language through the loss of the object, but it is

Introduction: The two slopes

5

also death that is found in the impossibility of language to fully appear. Each of these aspects becomes exposed to the other side, without however converging on it, leading to an endless ambiguity about the presence of meaning. While this indicates how Blanchot’s thinking begins from a Hegelian thought of negation and passes through a moment of irreducible materialism, the key part of this movement is its inability to resolve itself in either direction. Furthermore, this aporia is marked by the equally impossible presence of death, which only renders this linguistic problem more challenging, since this death is no less real for the fact that it does not fully appear or disappear but is endured and imparted by the writer as a fatal sickness of meaning. This sickness is partly what is being addressed when Blanchot speaks of a right to death, a right that literature itself bears but that is, in being exercised, unavoidably ambivalent, and also unavoidably existential as it is the very possibility of existence to posit itself that is at stake. The nature of this sickness and how it takes place in scepticism and melancholy, alienation and suicide, will be shown in the following pages, all of which give evidence of the profound difficulties to which thought is exposed through language. Consider the revolutionary slogan, ‘Liberty or Death!’ On the face of it this appears to be a statement of implacable resolve: I will fight for my freedom unto death. But were I to be killed, then I would lose my freedom and this resolve would be hollow. Instead, what occurs in this slogan is a drastic raising of the stakes: since I have shown myself willing to die for my beliefs there is no turning back. Everything is now at stake, there is an immediate and absolute upping of the ante that leaves no room for compromise. What this means is that death is no longer at the end of life but is coextensive with it, death becomes a fact of life, as we say, in that it could occur anywhere, at any time. Because I have declared myself ready and willing to die at any moment, death itself becomes trivial or banal, as is found in uprisings or war zones, for example, where death becomes an everyday affair. This might appear nihilistic, in that death has lost its value in being made part of the everyday but this is only part of the claim. The revolutionary who pronounces the desire for liberty or death has placed themselves at such an extreme that the claim for the one permeates the other. Just as death now inflects each moment of life as its negation, so does the reverse take place. When death is no longer simply the end point of life but part of its everyday existence, then that existence is radically changed. This is why such revolutionaries are frightening and alienating figures, as they have placed themselves at a distance from the ordinary range of human values and embraced an extreme without reserve. In doing so, the difference between liberty and death becomes immaterial as the consequences of the claim are less important than its fact, and as such the nature of liberty and death themselves change, revealing a different kind of world. If the claim initially appears as all or nothing, then it quickly transforms into all and nothing, insofar as both outcomes are the same at this extreme,

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and this leads to its further transformation as all is nothing. But again, this is not nihilism, as the status of the two terms has changed utterly in being so removed from ordinary values. What is exposed is a netherworld beyond their simple alternation or negation, a world that presents itself absolutely and also removes itself leaving neither a presence nor an absence. It is thus that Blanchot takes up this revolutionary claim in drawing out the relation between literature and the right to death, for when this right is claimed it inserts an absolute disorientation into human actions and values, a disorientation that is also to be found in literature when it is pushed to these extremes [PF: 309/319]. To claim the right to death is to claim the life that lives on in it, not just in Hegel’s terms, but to a more extreme degree that is found particularly in the works of Mallarmé and Kafka. For in making this claim in literature the writer raises the stakes of the work to the same extraordinary degree as the revolutionary, so that the difference between the success and failure of the work, its presence and absence, or creation and destruction, becomes indiscernible. While this extremity may seem rare, Blanchot’s insight was to have seen that it is inherent to the act of literature and that it is necessary to proceed from this point to understand what it involves and affects: the nature and status of the life that lives on when all is nothing. Mallarmé’s reading is especially significant as it demonstrates how the stakes of this claim realize themselves, not just in the literary act but also and necessarily in the life of the writer, and it is thus that this claim will be discussed through the problem of suicide as an extreme act of contingency. On the other side, in the direction of Kafka’s works, lies the decay of meaning and value, which is exposed in Le Très-Haut through its pervasive corruption of sense that reveals the underside of contingency as uncontrollable contagion, for once this claim has been actualized it cannot be withdrawn or curtailed but comes to affect everything. As Blanchot’s works change in the 1950s these slopes are transformed into a more neutral rendering as fragmentation and noise as their disruption is refined into a more formal and microscopic chiaroscuro of presence and negation. As a result, the implications of this claim bear upon the very possibility of language’s relation to the world. Within the history of modernism the publication of Hofmannsthal’s Brief in 1902 is often taken as marking the most pointed realization of this disruption of language and thought. As is related in the letter, its author experienced a progressive failure of language beginning with abstract terms, which then led to an inability to hold conversation, and finally to a complete failure to read or write due to a loss of faith in the powers of language to describe the world or express meaning. Significantly, this letter is fictional and purports to be written by Philip Chandos to Francis Bacon and is dated carefully to August 1603. Given that this crisis of language is taken to be an experience of modernism, this backdating is remarkable, and all the more so for its precision and its

Introduction: The two slopes

7

relocation from Hofmannsthal’s Vienna to England. Bacon is of course real, and was the pre-­eminent figure of Renaissance rationalism in England, as is emphasized in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung, but Chandos is fictional. What Hofmannsthal appears to be suggesting by this framing is that the crisis occurring in modern European thought, in the context of urbanism and industrialization, has its roots in the empiricism of early scientific thinking and the ungrounding that this entailed for any attempts to guarantee the place of thought within the world. What is of interest is that there is a contemporary account that exactly marks this crisis to which Hofmannsthal had given fictional form. Around 1603, a young student working at Cambridge wandered into the rooms of one of his fellow students and idly leafed through his books, only to come across an open volume that threw his mind into convulsions as ‘he began upon the perusal of it to move strange Questions to himself, and even to doubt whether the to pan, the whole Frame of things, as it appears to us, were any more then a mere Phantasm or Imagination. The Emprovement of this Conceit (as he would profess) rendred all things so unpleasant to him, that his Life became uncomfortable.’ This scholar was Joseph Mede and the book he had come across was apparently a volume of the writings of Sextus Empiricus.4 The works of the early Sceptics had only been rediscovered a century or so earlier and were crucial to the decentring of Renaissance thought. Not only does this suggest that the crisis of modernity that Hofmannsthal had addressed is part of a long-­running sceptical undercurrent (as Fritz Mauthner realized in his response to the Brief ) but also that the development of modern philosophical thinking in the Renaissance is linked to a profound alienation that cannot be ameliorated.5 This alienation is not just due to the emergence of secular and scientific thinking, but arises through the introspection that such secular doubts provoke. But if the turn to interiority leads to alienation, then there is a radical disorientation at work, especially if this occurs by way of writing. Thus the status of the argument that Blanchot is making about the two slopes can also be understood by way of the history of negativity in language. Such a concern might lead to an enquiry into apophatic language, which sought to respond to the difficulties of discussing transcendence through a language of predications by composing a negative language. In this way the limitations encountered by an attempt to say that god ‘is’ something are removed through an extensive exercise of denial and cancellation, which thereby alludes to what is not asserted. Hence, the negativity at work here is part of a broader affirmative approach, a dialectic that uses the negative to say something about that which exceeds the scope of predicative language. Such a tradition has formed a major part of European thinking, but with the re-­introduction of sceptical thinking in the Renaissance this use of negativity began to be rethought. In these enquiries the same problem was being negotiated, that of the limits of language, but in this case there was no

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Blanchot and the Outside of Literature

positive solution but only the awareness that, insofar as language was unable to ground itself or provide definitive certainty, there was no ultimate grounding for knowledge. Thus, the apophatic discovery was broadened to the status and possibility of linguistic assertion in general and the consequent implications for knowledge, and it is this discovery of a gaping aporia where the ground for knowledge had been sought that led to the crisis of Renaissance thinking. A particularly important example can be found in the essays of Montaigne, who developed the humanist implications of scepticism to their current modern extent while pursuing the relation between philosophical introspection and writing. Towards the middle of the most important of these essays, the Apologie de Raimond Sebond, and just before his realization of the power of the exclamation ‘what do I know?’, Montaigne notes in reference to the Sceptics: I can see why the Pyrrhonian philosophers cannot express their general conception in any manner of speaking; for they would need a new language. Ours is wholly formed of affirmative propositions, which to them are utterly repugnant [du tout ennemies].6 These lines were written around 1575 and mark the discovery of a fundamental problem, for the implications of sceptical thought are such that they would require a new kind of language that would be entirely different to affirmative language. This is not a demand for a newly-­rethought apophatic approach, but for a language that is wholly removed from affirmation as such. In the face of this problem Montaigne’s writings would inspire Bacon and Descartes to attempt to circumvent its implications through the development of a method, scientific or philosophical, that would guarantee certainty, but which only conceals the basic fideism, or the Thomist rational faith, at its heart. Foucault, characteristically, recognized this background to the peculiarity of Blanchot’s thinking and writing and started his 1966 essay with the problem of a language that can refute itself and so cannot find hope in either reflection or fiction. That is, in neither of the two slopes of language is there a guarantee that it can overcome this problem of self-­negation. While this essay is one of the most astute of the first assessments of Blanchot’s works, it is necessary to separate Foucault’s insights from his claims about literature uncovering the being of language, as he terms it, terms that he would abandon after this essay. For what Foucault realized is that Blanchot, over many works that cut across narrative and critique, reached a language that cannot be subsumed to either fiction or reflection and in so doing found the space of a writing that is not affirmative or negative but is rather neutral. It is as such that the apparent aporia of the two slopes is transformed into an understanding of how they lead into each other without converging, and thus reveal another kind of literary space, which is understood to be exterior

Introduction: The two slopes

9

insofar as it is outside the range of thought or experience. This exteriority and its ‘thought’ have unfortunately become hypostatized in many readings of Blanchot subsequent to Foucault’s essay, which has only limited the possibility of realizing the radical nature of Blanchot’s thinking on this issue. The outside is not a space, it cannot be thought or experienced in any form, it is sheer exteriority and so cannot be used or attained, nor is it outside in the sense in which this is distinguished from the inside. Hence, it cannot be subsumed to any apparently similar concept or theme like the body, the unconscious, materiality, capital, god, the other, and so on. It is also not exterior in the manner in which transcendence, or indeed, immanence, is sometimes taken to be. This is not just to valorize it further in an apophatic catalogue of things that are not, since it is quite specific, as it is related to the elusive opacity of the negative that undermines linguistic certainty. Foucault starts with the problems raised for subjectivity by the Cretan liar paradox, which inheres in all cases of reflexive speaking, where the contradiction of speaking and speaking about speaking undermine the position of the subject and the status of the discourse. Hence, in place of the subject who speaks, and a medium that communicates meaning, there is only the ‘spreading out of language in its raw state [être brut], an unfolding of pure exteriority’ [PD: 519/148]. Thus, ‘the event that gave rise to what we understand in the strict sense by “literature” is only of the order of interiorization for a superficial gaze; it is far more a question of a passage to the “outside” ’ [PD: 520/148]. Foucault’s subsequent assumptions – that literature operates as a meta-­discourse, and that the reflexivity of thinking (in contrast to that of speaking) leads to interiorization and a folding back of thought onto itself, as well as his epochal perspective, in which Western fiction today is no longer burdened by the illusions of mythology or rhetoric and the subject itself disappears – do not undermine his thinking of the outside but they need to be noted. As to what this ‘outside’ may entail, Foucault refers to a dispersal of language into a void that speaks endlessly, which he describes as ‘forming a network in which each point, distinct from the others, at a distance from even its closest neighbours, is situated in relation to all in a space that simultaneously holds and separates them’ [PD: 520/149]. This dispersal is not material or historical or semiotic and unfortunately he calls it ‘the being of language’, which ‘only appears for itself with the disappearance of the subject’. Such Heideggerian essentialism is profoundly misleading given Blanchot’s criticisms of an ontological approach to language, but in the next lines Foucault goes on to say that we can perhaps ‘have access to this strange relation’ through a form of thought, the very thought that he will call ‘the thought of the outside’. What is significant about this thought, and what has often been overlooked (even by thinkers as sympathetic and sophisticated as Deleuze), is that it is two-­sided, as it is both the thought that arises from this dispersal of language and holds

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Blanchot and the Outside of Literature

itself outside all subjectivity so that it appears as the outside of its limits, and that which stands on the threshold of all positivity as the void into which its immediate certainties slip as soon as they are glimpsed [PD: 521/149–50].7 On the one hand this thought is of the outside in that it comes from outside the limits of experience, and on the other hand it is the thought of its own failure as it comes up against the outside as its own limits. As a ‘thought’ it is at the limits of its own expression; both marking its inability and arising as that which appears in the place of this inability. Foucault then sketches out the history of this ‘thought’, dismissing the apparent similarity to negative theology as false and instead naming Sade and Hölderlin as the first writers to introduce its disturbing and unending disorientation into European thinking. From this point he quickly passes through the familiar lineage of Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Artaud, Bataille, and Klossowski, and culminates with Blanchot, who is perhaps, he writes, not merely another witness to this thought, ‘rather he is for us this thought itself [cette pensée même]’ [PD: 522–23/151]. Charitably, it is possible to say that such a personal acclamation is simply part of the form of an article written for an issue of a journal dedicated, for the first time, to Blanchot, particularly in terms of the combined absence of Blanchot as a figure alongside the disturbing presence of his writings, but it can now only appear as excessive. But the significance of Blanchot’s writings for Foucault’s argument is soon made clear, as the problematic double-­aspect of this thought means that it cannot be addressed in writing in the mode of reflection or as fiction, unless each are converted into something that constantly contests and undermines itself by way of the disruption of the outside. It is here that Foucault’s essay becomes more helpful, by showing how difficult it is for reflection to accede to this disruption without turning it into another thought, or for fiction to expose itself to its own undermining without simply becoming a narrative of such: Irresistibly, reflection tends to repatriate it to the side of consciousness and of developing it into a description of living or the ‘outside’ to be sketched as an experience of the body, of space, of the limits of the will, of the ineffaceable presence of the other. The vocabulary of fiction is just as perilous: in the thickness of its images, sometimes in the simple transparency of the most neutral or hastiest figures, it risks setting down readymade meanings that, in the form of an imagined outside, weave the old web of interiority together again. PD: 523/152 In doing so, he makes apparent what is at stake in the formulation of the two slopes, and how it takes place within Blanchot’s narratives, how both the modes of reflection and fiction are transformed without becoming assimilated, and what this means for the idea of writing giving rise to a

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thought of the outside, that is, one that can encompass the elusive and obtrusive double-­sidedness that occurs at the limits of linguistic experience. Blanchot’s writings would then involve a form of thinking that was not philosophical, as well as a form of writing that was not literary, but that constituted an experience that is as precise and rigorous as it is descriptive and expressive. As such, the distinction between the conceptual and the material in his writings becomes as indeterminate as that between its politics and aesthetics, and it is this that forms their singular, and neutre, strength.

II There is an obvious inter-­connection between scepticism, alienation, and melancholy but there is equally an obvious non-­coincidence. These negative moods may or may not also relate to sickness and to suicide, but what interests me here is their intensity and dislocation. While these moods have often been discussed, along with others like boredom, nihilism, homesickness, nostalgia, anxiety, despair, ennui, pessimism, and so on, it is not my aim to distinguish between them in order to establish a taxonomy but to address their inner sense. This may occur in different forms and to different degrees but all are focused on a profound unease in one’s relation to the world. The variety of these forms speaks to the difficulty of determining this unease, because, as a breakdown in relation, it eludes easy assimilation and yet it seems to introduce a wide range of possible modes. It is this sense of resistance and evasion that is important, and it can be understood not just philosophically and artistically but also politically. In Blanchot’s case, it is apparent that his scepticism towards political, aesthetic, and metaphysical discourse derives from his scepticism about language and literature. As a result, the latter scepticism constitutes the basis of his approach to political and philosophical issues. In this way these negative moods are the basis of a negative critique, an experience of dissociation that begins to constitute its own dis-­course, as Blanchot calls it, a negative, pathological discourse with which to discuss issues of pathology.8 Alienation and melancholy form their own political analysis and commentary through their distance and intensity, and, in this way, are not to be redressed but rather recognized as the modes of their resistance to assimilation. Just as Adorno discussed the way that artworks develop a negative critique of society through their resistance to form, through their ugliness and dissonance, which thereby becomes an analysis of the world and their distance from it, so too can this discussion be made in relation to the ugly and dissonant forms of human experience, which form their own fractured and disoriented modes of expression (much like the ‘damaged life’ that Adorno reflected on in Minima Moralia, although Blanchot seeks to convey as well as to study these modes). This is not to valorize such modes, nor to reify them as deviations from apparent norms,

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which is why the variety of their forms will not be systematically parsed, but to recognize that the same effective and concrete critique that takes place in artworks also occurs in the broken forms of human experience. It is for this reason that Blanchot’s 1948 novel, Le Très-Haut, will be the focus of the first part of this book as it is his most extensive discussion of the issue of pathology, and it is no accident that it is also his most political narrative. Indeed, Blanchot makes this situation quite clear by making it difficult to discern the difference between the revolution and the epidemic that engulfs the city in this work. As will become apparent the aspects of this metaphysical (that is, one that is profoundly and inseparably sensible and conceptual, material and ideal) disorder give rise to his political perspective, which is part of the novel’s manifold resistance to form. The fact that his later writing, as is found in Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas for instance, seems more abstract and austere should not be taken as a retreat from this perspective but as its intensification, as an exploration of the microstructure of derangement in order to understand the kind of space and time that its singular situation exposes. Understanding this microstructure reveals the nature of the relation that is found in language and thought at such a degree of exposure, which is intrinsic to any understanding of how any kind of broader relation, historical or critical, ethical or communal, may develop. It is of significance that the development of this changed understanding should take place through a transformation of language, which follows from this exposure of thought, as Blanchot moves towards a new fragmentary form of writing and thinking of time and relation. Thus the aesthetic and philosophical aspects of these works cannot be separated from a political thinking, even as these terms are reformulated through the radical scepticism to which he subjects them. It is as such that the study of pathology and its variations gives rise to its own vocabulary of contingency and contagion that are as philosophical as they are political, as artistic as they are critical, and that enable these negative moods to be seen as their own dis-­course. But for Blanchot’s thought to be political it must not only offer an analysis of the world but also some form of praxis in relation to this analysis. The analogy with artworks indicates how pathology operates as a negative critique but it is only when we consider how the work of literature fails that its move into some kind of praxis can be discerned. This failure arises in the rhetoric of the work, which manifests the materiality of its style, through which the work fails to realize itself as wholly fictive and enters into the world. This effect can also be seen in the way that the contingency of the work leads to contagion, the inability to remain unaffected by its pathology, which leads to Blanchot’s understanding of contingency in terms of the disaster. This would be a form of revolutionary praxis to an absolute degree but one that operates almost invisibly, all and nothing, as it were, arising suddenly but also imperceptibly, which means that its effects can never be predicted or controlled. This is not anarchic to the extent that it is existential,

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that is, it exposes the void of meaninglessness at the heart of human existence and thus the deception involved in any attempts to cover it over, as well as the impossibility of not doing so. Thus the two slopes of Blanchot’s critique form its praxis as well as its analysis. The world that literature presents occurs not through its presence but indirectly, through its presentation of an absent world. But this effort is always incomplete as it is sabotaged by its failure to occupy this imaginary position, that is, it is limited by its own appearance as real. This is not just a discovery about literary projects but also all revolutionary statements and programmes, which take on the same absolute issue. In saying as much it can be seen that Blanchot’s approach to literature is always also a political approach, a claim about the nature of the relation of thought and language to the world. It is thus that Henri Sorge, the narrator of Le Très-Haut, is drawn into both written and political activities. His world is undecidably political and literary: he keeps a journal that describes his activities and it is not clear how far this journal coincides with the text of Le Très-Haut itself, and thus how far what we read is Sorge’s account of what has happened, or whether what has happened is simply Sorge’s account. Equally, his engagement with the disturbances spreading through the city is just as unclear: are these actually occurring, if so, why are their effects so uncertain? Is the actual presence of the revolution or the plague somehow dependent on Sorge’s own position in relation to them, which never ceases to be ambivalent? Being a writer in such situations bears this ambivalence as writing harbours the same potential devaluation of values that war, epidemic, or revolution brings, and so each side becomes a distorted reflection of the other (as in Georges Simenon’s La Neige était sale, which was published at the same time as Le Très-Haut). Consequently, Nietzsche’s assessment that nihilism is the situation in which the highest values devalue themselves is that which inheres in writing as well as in revolutions or epidemics.9 Hence, the title of Le Très-Haut bears a critical edge, what happens when the very sense of the ‘highest’ is lost, when there is a corrosive debasement of all sense? This ambivalence is the form of Blanchot’s realism, which indicates how the novel exceeds itself by not being fictional enough, and why it ends on the point of departure that occurs when Sorge finds that he can now speak. Thus the novel exists in the same relation to the world as the revolution does to the city, as it is a disaster that changes everything but leaves everything intact, but it is also its experience and its pathological theory and analysis. However, it is not clear how these slopes are coordinated: which one is the material devaluation and fictive breakdown, and which is the reflected commentary and tracing. After all, the revolution or epidemic provides its own material discourse, its own ‘journal’ of the events, but in a mode that is not available to be read in the same way, just as, conversely, Sorge’s thoughts are drawn into incoherence and contingency. Literature, like the epidemic, becomes its own means and end, and thus a means without end, just as the

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epidemic only communicates and expresses itself, it is existence as mediation, a relation without terms. In this way, literature becomes pervasive to the world but has no outside that would compare to it, that would translate it into something else, and it is as such that the highest is devalued and converted into a contagion of ambivalence. Like the revolution, literature is absolute but not transcendent, instead it occurs as a different order of meaning within and without meaning, and so with a different relation to materiality and history. It is this mode that comes to take on the name of the image, and later the neutre. In Blanchot’s reading, nihilism is an idea that negates itself but in doing so does not lead to mere emptiness or nonsense, instead it exposes the abyss of its own impossibility, the impossibility of thinking through the negation of all values and aims and holding to this thought without making it into a further position, insofar as nihilism necessarily implies a doctrine of this negation and thus the possibility of its overcoming. Nihilism comes to be the name for this thought of its own impossibility and as such is an impossible experience that only yields to vertigo [EI: 225/149–50]. To live this experience, which Blanchot will also call to live an event as image, is to live through a form of the intense disorientation that is inherent to the situation of the last man. As is well known, Blanchot suggested to Bataille in 1941, in relation to his then ongoing work, that he pursue his understanding of inner experience as if he were the last man, a comment that feels like it arose almost by accident but then took on more substance, and it seems that it came to sit more heavily on Blanchot’s works than on Bataille’s. The suggestion is problematic since the last man is, in Kojève’s terms, the one at the end of history, when history has ceased to exist since it has completed itself, but in saying as much the last man is, turning to Nietzsche’s interpretation, the one on this side of the end, he is the last, and thus the one most immersed in the emptiness of secular existence. The last man is the one who marks the transition to what lies beyond but also the one who is most immersed in the nihilism of the here and now, the devaluation and dissembling of meaning, which reduces him to the pettiness and complacency of the most contemptible: ‘The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His kind is ineradicable, like the flea beetle; the last man lives longest.’10 The last man is the ambivalent mirror image of the Übermensch, and so to pursue inner experience as if one were the last man would be to enter into endless contestation and evacuation, which constitutes the expérience of interiority, in a situation that is already of the greatest ambivalence and nihilism. Hence, as Bataille realized, ‘if I were the last man, the anguish would be the most insane imaginable! I could in no way escape, I would remain before [devant] infinite annihilation, thrown back into myself, or again: empty, indifferent.’11 This would be an experience in which the nihilism of the last man was reflected back on itself in its inner experience, a thought, as

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Blanchot later remarked in precisely paradoxical terms, of ‘almost infinite nihilism’. This is the nihilism of fiction, he writes, referring to one of Bataille’s favourite texts, Le Bavard by Louis-René des Forêts from 1946, when it is ‘maintained as close as possible to its void and to the ambiguity of this void, provoking us not to immobilize ourselves in the certainty of nothingness (this would be too easy a repose) but to tie ourselves, in our passion for the true, to non-­truth’ [A: 139/119]. Adorno makes a very similar comment in relation to Beckett, where, faced by the slight difference between nothingness and what has come to rest, the necessity for consciousness is not to overcome this no-­man’s-­land between the borders of being and nothingness but to extricate from it what does not fall under the power of its opposite [ND: 374/381]. This unstable non-­position makes it possible to understand the status of Sorge, who is implicitly figured as the last man, which also establishes a connection to Blanchot’s later récit (or narrative) of that name. For, as the narrator of Le Très-Haut, he becomes a vector of the dissembling of meaning as it goes ever further towards the limit of its own impossibility. It is as such that Le Très-Haut leads to Le Dernier Homme but with the concomitant reduction in the narrative that this thought and experience entails, as will be shown. This reduction is the result of the transformation from the baroque oscillation of the two slopes to the enigmatic simplicity of the neutre, in which the difference between the two slopes can no longer be discerned even as its ambivalence remains as a resistance to formation in thought or in time, in politics or in aesthetics. Although varied, Blanchot’s writings are impressively coherent. This coherence is not that of a unified body of thought that derives from an underlying principle but is their integral focus, which is often unremarked as readers emphasize the fragmentarity and worklessness with which he is generally associated. But it is just as important to grasp the consistent and singular focus of his ideas, and the way that these are developed across the fields of fiction, critique, and theory. Despite the widespread recognition of his importance, the manifold nature of his written research has impeded Anglophone scholars from developing the sustained enquiry that would unfold the implications of his work. It is this enquiry I will be starting here, and it is crucial to begin with Blanchot’s fiction, since it is from this that the formal and conceptual innovations that characterize his later works will come.12 By examining how his fictional works develop it is possible to see how his thinking leads into a combined political, aesthetic, and philosophical study of the anomalies of literary experience, which constitutes his unique and lasting significance. By approaching his works piecemeal and attending only to the critical essays, it becomes impossible to understand the origins and implications of his way of writing. Equally, it is only by understanding the inter-­relations between fiction and critique that his philosophical analyses can be seen to be operating in a political as well as an aesthetic mode. This is not to assert that there is a system uniting his works, but

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Blanchot and the Outside of Literature

rather that the effects of his thinking of language cannot be limited to any one field and so develop into a manifold exploration of the enigmatic force of ambivalence. This book will cover the period of Blanchot’s career between Le TrèsHaut and L’Attente l’oubli, a period in which he moved from the novel to the récit and then to the development of a more innovative fragmentary style. It thus covers the period of greatest change in Blanchot’s writings, although I can only sketch out one possible trajectory of his work. It is also a period of great change in French society with far-­reaching transformations in the political and cultural spheres that begin to put pressure on Blanchot’s relation to the world. After the war he left Paris and lived on the south coast for ten years in relative isolation and with considerable productivity, but then the situation changed and he returned to Paris and to a more explicit engagement in political affairs. Blanchot’s relation to politics has long been a source of contention and part of the thought that is developed here is to show that his work is political through and through, and that he did not so much return to politics in 1958 but found a new way and a new imperative for thinking and writing politically. By considering Le Très-Haut in depth it is apparent how his thinking of politics is a consistent part of his work but that a transformation occurs in this thinking during the years of the Fourth Republic. Just as the development of fragmentary writing in the late 1950s was not simply a result of external pressures but arose out of his working through of the aporias of writing, so too does the development of a more politically engaged form of writing come about because of internal changes in his thought. These changes relate to the issues of resistance and contestation and take shape through his understanding of the nature and status of contingency and its effects on any kind of relation. It is thus that, when the political climate changed with the worsening of the Algerian war and the return of de Gaulle, he found the possibility of response in the development of a form of writing and thinking that focused this notion of radical refusal. This is not a trajectory that is always explicit in his thought, although it is much more so than is commonly supposed, but this is because the political aspect of his thinking is not separate from its aesthetic and philosophical aspects. All these aspects are oriented towards the issues and problems that arise from a realization of the ambivalence of literary meaning, which is undecidably aesthetic, philosophical, and political in its implications. This trajectory can be linked to the development of his thinking of the neutre, from which it is not separate, but the manifold nature of this development needs to be drawn out to show how its effects take in a thinking of materiality, of the disaster, of impossibility, of the outside, and so on. Only once this is done can the full impact of the thought of the neutre be understood, which involves his changing understanding of writing and politics and also the beginning of a change in his understanding of dying, for in many ways this trajectory can be given form in the change from an understanding of

Introduction: The two slopes

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voluntary death as impossible to one in which its aporia is realized differently. (Part of the necessity of this rethinking comes from the problem of negotiating Heidegger’s profound rethinking of death and his equally profound failure to think politically.) It is this last revision that is at the root of his changing understanding of writing and politics, as the resistance and contestation of thought that occurs in the contingency of death gives rise to a different form of discourse. The situation of Blanchot’s changing thought and writing in the 1950s to some degree repeats and extends what had happened twenty years earlier when, as he explained in a letter to Roger Laporte in 1984, the division (partage) between the writing that he did during the day and that which went on at night may have exposed him to a political failing (faute), but it also ‘hastened a kind of conversion in me by opening me to waiting and to the comprehension of the overwhelming changes that were being prepared’. Although the division in his writing in the 1950s is not as critical as it had been earlier, it nevertheless follows from his understanding of the two slopes. Indeed, it could be said that he finds a way to approach the political by turning back to the distinction between writing in the day and writing in the night. It is the irresolvable tension and divergence between the two modes of writing that provides the basis for his rethinking of the political and the literary as intimately but discordantly interwoven. The ‘conversion’ that he mentions is a turning towards these slopes as that which always turns away, hence the political exigency of waiting, of not assuming that one can immediately pass into action, which is thus a demand for thought. Intriguingly, Blanchot refers to Badiou’s reading of Mallarmé on this point, probably from Théorie du sujet, where the resistance and abstraction of Mallarmé’s poetics implies an equally powerful political demand to provoke a revolutionary event, although Badiou emphasizes the political ambivalence of this resistance, which can be as conservative as it is radical. If Blanchot sees himself in Badiou’s description of Mallarmé, then it is because ‘the one who is bound to writing must deprive himself of all the assurances that a pre-­established political thought can provide’.13 This is the risk and the challenge of any thought that would expose itself to the neutre, since a new kind of political thinking that is removed from any prior framework necessarily enters into a future that cannot be known or secured in advance. At the midpoint of this period, in December 1953, Blanchot reviewed a book by Dionys Mascolo on communism, and although he was very positive he ended the review by asking whether it was possible to move beyond the dialectic in which the individual was torn between the common world of needs and the private world of values. This had been the question at the heart of Mascolo’s work as it sought to combine the revolutionary imperative of satisfying social needs alongside the necessity of maintaining personal values. In order to push this question further Blanchot turned to the sphere of aesthetics:

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The poetic work, the artistic work, if it speaks to us of something, speaks to us of what is removed [à la écart] from any value or rejects all valuation, and proclaims the exigency of (re)beginning that loses and obscures itself as soon as it is satisfied in value. Nietzsche wanted to transmute all values, but this transvaluation (at least in the most visible, all too well-­known, part of his writings) seemed to leave the notion of value intact. It is without doubt the task of our age to move towards an entirely other affirmation. A difficult task, essentially risky. It is to this task that communism recalls us with a rigour from which it itself often shrinks, and it is also to this task, in the region that would be proper to it, that ‘artistic experience’ recalls us. A remarkable coincidence. A: 113–14/97 It is clear that Blanchot is considering the possibility of a radical political refusal on the basis of what he has learned from the refusal of the work of art, which is not to say that this is a way of aestheticizing politics but of understanding that the intense regard for materiality and contingency that arises in the practice of art and literature exposes a possibility for thought that can be related to politics. (It is of note that this article was written just after Celui qui was published and after the majority of the pieces that went to constitute L’Espace littéraire were written, two of his densest works, but also after the work of writers like Barthes and Beckett was to draw him back into the world of contemporary critique.) A thought that is related to nihilism but bears a wholly different kind of valency, not the active nihilism that Nietzsche pursued but a thought that takes on the force and status of nihilism without becoming negative or positive. It is unsurprising then that he would turn in the next few months to a more considered investigation of nihilism by way of Camus’s L’Homme révolté. In his transition from Le Mythe de Sisyphe to L’Homme révolté Camus had sought to distinguish between Sisyphus’ affirmation of his situation and the negation that constitutes the position of the rebel. But Blanchot finds that this distinction does not hold, for in both cases the nature of affirmation and negation is more complex and inevitably leads into its inverse, which thereby affects the ability of each position to separate itself from nihilism. But, on closer analysis, the figure of Sisyphus provides an image of precisely that different kind of affirmation he had been discussing, a mode in which his affirmation of his situation, his endless revolution and adherence to the material affirms nothing, being the flux and reflux of indecision on the basis of which nothing begins, but everything begins again without beginning or end, a Yes that takes from us even the certainty of nothingness and is like the secret kernel of the No, when it is no longer that which denies by a pure and decisive force but is that which cannot deny itself. EI: 268/179

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It is thus that the seeds of the rebel’s refusal can be found in the decentring of Sisyphus’ existence, which is to be understood as a form of the relation that inheres between the artist and the work. However, the discovery of the preponderance (Vorrang) of the material, in Adorno’s words, also brings with it a need for change, a need that, as Blanchot writes, must first overcome the reader’s ‘determination [acharnement] to remain themselves in the face of what they are reading’ [EL: 207/198]. It is because literature can bring about changes in its expérience by way of changes in its form, and vice versa, that it provides a model for political change, which is why these changes arise in Blanchot’s fictional writings before passing into his critical works. The discovery of contingency, its sheer, accidental facticity, leads to a sense of materiality as always ambivalent, as it could always have been otherwise, but this lack of necessity is uncontainable and affects everything. This is the disaster that writing uncovers, and is found wherever artistic, political, and philosophical endeavours, in pushing themselves to their inherently sceptical and nihilistic limits, converge on the contagious pathology of meaning and sense. A pathology that is as much of life as it is of thought.

PART ONE

Contingency and contagion

1 Black water

Thus, to take nihilism seriously is to kill oneself [se suicider], to cease completely to act and – consequently – to live. But the radical Sceptic does not interest Hegel, because, by definition, he disappears by killing himself, he ceases to be, and, consequently, he ceases to be a human being, an agent of historical evolution. Only the Nihilist who remains alive is interesting. KOJÈVE, 19371

About halfway through Le Très-Haut Sorge is beaten up by the police. His injuries exacerbate his already weak condition and for much of the rest of the novel he is confined to his room. Since his apartment is in a block that has been requisitioned as a clinic to deal with the epidemic coursing through the city, it is not difficult for him to find care. Eventually the nurse who has been looking after him, a large woman in drab shapeless clothes, comes to live in his apartment and the two develop a kind of relationship. This nurse, called Jeanne Galgat, seems to be suffering from her own problems, for although she is generally very reserved she has occasional outbursts that indicate that she has conceived an obsessive love for Sorge. While much of the novel has been concerned with Sorge’s relation to the revolutionary Bouxx, and the concomitant struggles between the law and the uprising, the last two chapters are focused on his relation to Jeanne. Central to this sequence is a black stain, which had earlier appeared on the wall of his apartment and on his sister’s dress, but now appears in much more dramatic forms. Although it would be too much to associate this stain with the black bile of melancholia, its liquid presence is so remarkable in these last two chapters that it has to be considered as its own form of material expression or resistance. Just as the activities of the revolutionaries formed a discourse around the law, so too does this stain become a kind of counterforce to the law and the State, precisely because of its anomalous appearance. As such,

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and rather than focusing on the fatal denouement to the novel, I will look at what occurs in the pages preceding it, and how the transformations of Sorge’s experience prefigure but also exceed this last moment: I crouched in a corner, she was tearing herself apart, crying and screaming. And while I was looking at her, suddenly seeing her stiffen again, half naked, but also rigid and impassive as if she had only reprimanded me for I know not what fault from the heights of her authority as a registered nurse, I noticed that a thick black water was flowing drop by drop from her body, a water like that which had percolated through the walls once before. Perhaps more than water: a forerunner coming from a thing still intact and yet ready to liquefy, something seeping and hesitant, rising up to the light and corrupting it and, like an odour, spreading, drifting, stagnant, then rising up again like the spirit of a cold, thick, black water. TH: 216/225 It is evident that the distinction between literal and metaphorical meaning is being placed under pressure here, but this pressure itself arises as a symptom of the sickness in question. Indeed, sickness as such is that which occurs across the distinction between the physical and the symbolic, which is what gives rise to its strength and virulence. Nevertheless, it is difficult to know what to make of this scene and it is not explained subsequently in any way, quite the opposite, for just afterwards are found the lines: ‘This happened around noon. When the water withdrew, the room was visible again: the room, the splendour of noon, the shocked [scandalisé] silence of hovering and whirling flies. Then the days returned.’ The black water would appear to be a form of putrefaction, the medium through which the corruption and decay of a body is conveyed. And as black water it is emphatically opaque and material, thick, cold, and inhuman; not the rich intimacy of sweat or tears but something alienating and undefined. Sickness passes through a population by way of carriers, communicative media that may or may not demonstrate that they are carrying an infection. Sickness is then unfixed in its location or distribution as its passage is to a large extent hidden, and in making itself known it manifests its contamination. While its appearance is thus a bad sign, the lack of an appearance is not necessarily a good sign. The black water can then be understood as not only a symptom of sickness but as emblematic of the form of sickness as such. Indeed, it would seem that all sicknesses partake of this auto-­metaphoricity insofar as they are signs of their own appearance (even if they do not appear) and in doing so indicate their relation to language as a structure to be communicated and interpreted. But sickness can only be read in the full sense of the word by means of a medium that can operate with an equivalent level of materiality and fluidity. It is as such that the notion of corruption becomes critical, since what occurs through infection and contamination can only be taken as corrupting from

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the point of view of the unity of the body. But when a structure is exposed to an element of contingency that estranges it, then the concomitant effects within the structure, the breakdown and adjustment of its parts that are its corruption, are the way that it comes to read and respond to the infection. Hence, while this corruption is illegible and damaging from the point of view of the system, it is also a form of alienation and resistance to the whole that expresses its own autonomous materialization. Blanchot’s point in developing this understanding is to indicate that the possibility of corruption can never be eliminated from language, and nor can its presence be entirely determined. And as language is exposed to these contingent elements, it is not possible to know if the consequences of these changes will be legible, or if they will make themselves apparent otherwise. Thus, literature becomes an experiment with this receding edge of legibility where the difference between reading and responding becomes impossible to decide. While sickness clearly has political implications, given its anomalous status, it also draws out the way in which the contingent can never be excluded or included in any system but remains opaque and elusive. Whether in terms of language or thought the conditions of understanding are constantly vulnerable to these disturbances, which are not only empirical. This transformation thus has its effects on what is to be understood as sovereignty, as that which purports to be the legislative force of autonomy, as is made clear by Blanchot’s title for this novel. But it also has its effects on the manner in which the development of the system is understood, insofar as sickness does not operate cumulatively or teleologically as it recognizes no aim other than its own propagation and does so by way of its own schisms and mutations. The modes by which readers and writers can come to approach this counterforce will be developed in what follows but for the moment it can be said that something of the nature of this parallel corrupted mode of response can be found in literature and thinking, but that it necessarily reconfigures the form of critique and reflection in these modes. As Sorge is told earlier, ‘the sickness also has to live, you understand, the illness has to work in the depths, slowly, endlessly, to have the time to transform what it touches, to make of each a tomb and to keep this tomb open. It has to be! [Il le faut!] That’s how history gets infected’ [TH: 164/169].

I Philosophy has long associated itself with a kind of therapy, with attempts to diagnose ailments and propose remedies, to alleviate ignorance and prejudice, and in doing so to offer advice on how to find and lead the ‘good life’. It is thus that it is linked to a medical approach that involves understanding pathologies in order to provide ways to relieve or prevent

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them. A pathology is not simply an absence of health but its own form of life, which can be directly illustrated by the diverse ways in which illness and disease form alternative modes of experience. It is not just that the body becomes obtrusive and painful, or that perception or mobility may be substantially altered, but that the experience of being in the world becomes strange and uncertain as if it were subjected to a bodily scepticism or alienation. There is a profound loss of familiarity, but also an exposure to a different kind of material existence, and a different awareness of space and time. While this state may be pathological in relation to the persistence of the organism as a whole, it is not abnormal as it is far from uncommon and constitutes a different norm of existence, as Georges Canguilhem points out, rather than the absence of norms. Disease is not a negative dimension of health but ‘a new dimension of life’ in which possibilities that were available in health are removed and replaced with different possibilities. But, as Canguilhem makes clear, the difference between the healthy and the pathological organism is that the former has a greater ability to adapt and to create new norms of behaviour, whereas the latter operates within a narrower field of existence and a more limited range of possibilities, although in stating this he is still taking the perspective of the organism.2 The significance of pathology lies in this experience of alienation but also in the fact that it comes from an encounter with radical, material contingency. In Merleau-Ponty’s words, in discussing the case of Johann Schneider who was injured by a landmine in 1915, ‘Schneider’s trouble was not initially metaphysical, it was an exploding shell that wounded him in the occipital region’ [PP: 146/127]. The qualification of this statement is crucial, for the contingency of his injury leads to neurological change that can only be understood in metaphysical terms, as an alteration not just to the structures of perception but also to the conditions of understanding. If philosophy is to approach its task in therapeutic terms, then it must take account of this non-­ derivative status of the pathological, and Merleau-Ponty here reformulates a key thought from Canguilhem: Illness, like childhood and like the ‘primitive’ state, is a complete form of existence, and the procedures that it employs in order to replace the destroyed normal functions are themselves also pathological phenomena. One cannot deduce the normal from the pathological, or deficiencies from their substitutions, through a simple change of sign. It is necessary to understand the substitutions as substitutions, as allusions to a fundamental function that they are attempting to replace and of which they do not give us a direct image. PP: 125/110 This understanding of pathology is partly what Adorno means by an ontology of the false condition (falschen Zustandes), except that, in its

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radical contingency, it tilts the bearing of the ontological away from essential, transcendental grounds, and also that this false state bears its own intrinsic experience that is not reducible to being the inverse of the good life [ND: 22/11]. This approach echoes ideas developed by Catherine Malabou over a number of works in relation to her belief that the brain sciences have revealed an unavoidable imbrication of the empirical and the transcendental, which can release a new understanding of the significance of contingency and perhaps a new form of biopower: a resistance to power from within the structures of life.3 While this approach is very interesting it is important not to valorize neurological disorders as a form of transcendental resistance; even if they may be understood empirically as symptoms of the ‘false’ state of things, these disorders are also opaque modes of sense that are not necessarily comprehensible in human terms. This is the significance of radical contingency, which Merleau-Ponty described quite carefully: When our initiatives get bogged down [s’enlisent] in the paste of the body, in language, or in this excessive [démesuré] world that is given to us to finish, it is not that a malin génie opposes his will to us: it is only a matter of a sort of inertia, of a passive resistance, of a weakness [défaillance] of meaning – an anonymous adversity.4 Merleau-Ponty articulates this thought in relation to politics and the possibility of distinguishing between a ‘good’ and an ‘evil’ contingency in terms of its effects on the aims of any action, which is, however, impossible since contingency is that which can always be otherwise. The relation of such intentional inertia to pathology, but also thought and literature, then becomes apparent, for just as learning other languages or playing the piano at an early age affects the way that neurological development occurs, so the material contingency inherent in writing exposes thought to previously unknown modes of experience. To take an extreme example, in studying Sade’s writings Blanchot found that his ‘thought is the work of madness and it had as a mould a depravity before which the world shrank [s’est derobé]. Additionally, it presents itself as the theory of this penchant, it is its tracing [décalque], it claims to transpose the most repugnant anomaly into a complete worldview. For the first time, philosophy conceived itself in broad daylight as the product of illness.’ Furthermore, in conducting his thinking by way of illness, Sade went further than others ‘to the point of being able to help the normal man understand himself, by helping him modify the conditions of all understanding’.5 Clearly, the issue at the heart of this argument is the relation between the empirical and the transcendental, which Kant had attempted to secure in order to provide a ground for thinking. Which is to say, that the distinction between the two states attempted to be a transcendental distinction in itself,

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an absolute separation in principle, but it cannot avoid the suspicion that it was developed empirically in order to secure Kant’s thought in contradistinction to the emergent physical sciences. The conditions of possibility of under­ standing in general cannot be detached from their historical and material bases, which cannot be secured from the effects of contingency. Just as critical theory has carefully pursued the Marxist injunction to look for the historico-­ material conditions of existence in the relations of class, technology, and economics, and phenomenology has analysed the modes by which the body operates as the condition of possibility of perception, it is also necessary to understand how literature concretizes the individual vicissitudes in the development of thought and language and in doing so explores the variety of its material pathologies and their transcendental implications [PP: 456/419]. This is not to suggest that literature is a form of psychoanalysis, as it does not operate with its normative and cognitive assumptions about pathological states, but instead operates as their expérience. It is just such a path that Blanchot pursues in Le Très-Haut and, perhaps more than in any other of his works, the effects of these pathologies are not only discussed but also conveyed by the text, and in a way that exposes both their existential and political ramifications. The black water streaming down Jeanne’s body is not entirely literal, but nor is it merely symbolic, rather it is indicative of the fact that insofar as literature becomes a ‘science’ of material pathologies, as it were, it becomes an experience of the transformation of experience, with all the opacity and alienation that this implies. A science, therefore, of sovereignty insofar as the latter is, in the terms sketched out by Bataille and Blanchot, an experience of the loss of experience. The dislocation made apparent in illness gives rise to its own form of experience, so while Sorge experiences these trans­ formations as illness they are also evidence of this dislocation. It is as such that they recede from being simple phenomena and become traces of the limits of experience, such that they can only appear as obscure and unstable forms. And it is precisely in terms of pathological states that Merleau-Ponty talks about the experience of encountering things in their contingency and the disorientation and anxiety that comes from their meaningless factical obtrusion [PP: 294/265]. Although Blanchot was not a phenomenologist he was familiar with Merleau-Ponty’s work and his interest in the forms of experience, particularly unusual states of mind, was longstanding. At Strasbourg, alongside his studies in philosophy, he took classes with the psychologist of morbidity, Charles Blondel, and after completing his dissertation at the Sorbonne on the early Sceptics he studied neurology and psychiatry at Sainte-Anne where Eugène Minkowski was working, although he did not complete a thesis. A work like Canguilhem’s, which was first published in 1943, is useful not just because it critically illuminates its key terms but also because it gives an overview of the state of knowledge of French medicine in the early twentieth century. For this reason, it is

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appropriate to cite two remarks used by Canguilhem to orient his work, the first from the surgeon René Leriche, who had also taught at Strasbourg: ‘At every moment there lie within us many more physiological possibilities than physiology would tell us about. But it takes disease to reveal them to us.’ The second comes from a study of Théodule Ribot: ‘Disease is, in effect, an experiment of the most subtle order, instituted by nature itself in very precise circumstances by means unavailable to human skill: nature reaches the inaccessible.’6 Becoming desperate in her attempts to lay claim to Sorge, Jeanne announces that he is the Highest (le Plus-Haut) and she is there to serve him. Sorge quickly dismisses this statement, and shortly afterwards the black water is again seen seeping from her body [TH: 223/232]. There then follows a long description of a pipe that is dripping on to a red cloth, which seems to mesmerize Sorge on many levels, partly due to the intense folding that the cloth reveals and also the changes that are brought about by the dripping of the pipe. I cite the passage in its entirety to show its strangeness: In the room there was a spot at the base of the wall where a very large pipe passed, almost below the basin. At this spot the pipe was bent and a large wet patch, the product of mild seepage, covered a certain area. This patch looked very dirty. At certain moments the seepage became visible, and anyone monitoring the slow noises of the flow could know the exact instant when a real drop was formed, which, thickening, ran along the metal, and fell down onto a rag. This rag was a piece of very bright red cloth. Now, I noticed, I must have been looking at this piece of cloth a great deal, and being alone I continued to gaze at it. It was a thick piece of fabric, crumpled into a thousand folds. It shone and glowed with an exceptional brilliance. Perhaps it wasn’t really shining, for in it there was also a muted colour that slowly came to light and it was this dull, still hidden colour that made it so dangerously visible to the point that, down there, where it was approaching me, was here, then was further away, in the street, walking slowly, passing before my eyes with an inexplicable flirtation, then sinking further away, and I saw it as a cloth hanging by a thread and blown by the wind, I saw it mixing dangerously with filth, curled up, brilliant and untouchable, in the rubbish bin. It didn’t move. It waited an infinite time for the mild interrupted seepage. Then suddenly, as if impelled by an order coming from the inside, the wholly formed drop passed through the metal, gathered itself up quickly, grew larger, up to the moment when, becoming a real liquid particle, resting for a mysterious second, it stayed hanging, menacing, avid, frightened, over the red cloth that was always completely immobile. And as long as it wasn’t falling, even though behind it, impelling it, there was an instinct that was like the sordid life of this pipe, hope still remained, and the day also stayed intact. And even once it fell, during the flight that it was following

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with the lightness and the clarity of a small bubble, it seemed to sense nothing of what was coming, and it was still possible to believe that what was going to come wouldn’t arrive. But at the exact instant in which it slid into the folds and disappeared, entirely absorbed, without leaving the slightest trace, as hidden as it could be, I only had to hear the noise of the water penetrating the cloth to feel that it was meeting I know not what shameful wetness, more wet than it was, a sticky thickness, a saturated unstanchable deposit of wetness. This sound was making me mad. It was that of a liquid being corrupted, losing its transparency, becoming something always more damp, secreted by a discarded existence, a cold, thick, black stain. And what made this situation so dangerous was not that one had to wait hours for the water to seep, that one had to foresee and almost desire the fall of this tiny drop, nor even hear or feel in itself the slow infiltration, but that with every new fall the cloth continued to offer the same dry, dazzling look, the same glowing and unchanging red. That was the damn trick of this story. I was not able to ignore how this insolent redness, enclosing a store of stagnant water in its always dry wrapping, was pulling me by the arm, dragging my body along, making it lean forward, intoxicating my fingers with the thought that they only need to squeeze suddenly this piece of such visible and tidy cloth in order to express its latent intimacy, to make it throw it outside and display it forever in an indelible, thick, black stain. TH: 225–27/235–36 While this passage seems to discuss its own experience in the reading of it, with all the difficulty that goes along with such an experience, it also shows how Blanchot’s protagonist becomes stuck in this vision, even as it only indirectly responds to his attention. Elsewhere, the opposite effect appears to take place, as Sorge finds in his encounters with the stone-­like revolutionaries and the vegetal existence of Jeanne, since Bouxx and Dorte are compared to stone objects and Jeanne is compared to a plant. This inversion between people and objects might seem pathologically paranoid but it is indicative of the way that Sorge’s illness has corrupted his relation to the world by suggesting that meaning occurs contagiously: by passing slowly through objects and only expressing itself obscurely, and yet yielding a strange almost human-­like blushing, as if of some new order of life. Such passages of intense material fascination are of course not uncommon in literature but what is unusual here is that this fascination does not lead to any revelation, no meaning whatsoever is drawn from it, either by Sorge or in the novel itself. As such, this passage might just as well have not been included in the text, and yet it is in its contingency that the effects of Sorge’s illness are conveyed most concretely. Thus it is possible, indeed, almost unavoidable, to find some kind of metaphorical meaning here: is the dripping of the water like the percolation

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of the law into the population, or is it rather the slow accumulation of revolutionary tension? Or, is it to be determined by the contrast of dullness and brilliance, the smoothness of the drop and the rich texture of the cloth, the dirty pipe and the somehow dry and intact rag, which might be a comment on the gravitational metaphorics of enlightenment in which the sun rises and the night falls? Or, should we look to the burden of keeping track of the drips, their hidden but intense gravidity that generates an obsessive impatience? All of these attempts are possible but all come up against the impassivity of the image, its failure to submit to reading, which paradoxically does not undermine its affects and effects. Exactly what generates and maintains this fascination is as difficult for us to say as readers as it is for Sorge since the image is not embedded in the text as a simple description but nor is it presented as a symbol to be interpreted. Instead, it is strangely elusive and obtrusive, creating an anomalous kind of vertigo: as it is not possible to determine the status of this passage in relation to the novel it is not possible to know where we are in relation to it when reading it. As Blanchot had written in relation to Kafka’s parables around the same time, ‘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]. But the material undecidability of this image is even more opaque than is the case in Kafka’s writings, as it removes itself from any kind of parable-­like relation by failing to put forward any assertions. At the same time, the recto and verso of the image are so closely combined that it is not possible to know which side is being presented, and thus how or what to read in it. In a way this is an image without a reverse, in that it lacks an illuminating meaning, but it is also one that is only reverse, in that it bears a depth without relief, which indicates how the ordinary language of literary images fails. Hence, the tantalizing and frustrating expectation that Sorge experiences, which carries both a hope that it will not be satisfied and also a hope that it will, encapsulates this encounter with latent meaning. For as long as it does not occur, there is hope, but even when it does, this hope is not lost, since it is replaced not by a decisive presence but by an absence that suggests that what happened nevertheless did not take place. Its hope is thus not to be realized. And yet there is a passage from absence to absence that changes everything, for in doing so there is a passage through corruption; even though nothing happens there is a thickening and darkening of life that cannot be resisted, and in doing so this dull insensate wetness endures and is made apparent in an unfixed and measureless depth. It is thus that this stain is also ink, or perhaps blood, that which creates signs of legibility through its opacity, and is thereby forever at risk of obliterating these signs by its excess. The next time the black tide rises it again does so after Jeanne denounces Sorge for rejecting her, but this time it becomes merged with other pervasive forms, odours and sounds, dust and mud, that rapidly fill up the space while

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remaining indeterminable, like light or, indeed, life, except that these forms are not only like life but are themselves forms of life, insofar as they are autonomous. Even though the two move to new rooms the disturbances continue, and not just as smells and noises but as movement as well, a pulsation that affects light and space, creating a kind of tactile envelope, an alien and possibly hostile sensorium, which nevertheless seems to surpass any normal sphere of sensing. Much like instances in which mild concussion can lead to a strange metallic taste (dysgeusia), which is not that of blood but rather a temporary disorder in gustatory processing that leads to one’s own taste being wrongly interpreted, that is, interpreted as unfamiliar and in doing so finding a previously unknown flavour, one not ordinarily experienced, and without a ready vocabulary it can only be understood through analogy as a hybrid non-­ taste, like metal. In the same way Sorge is experiencing his own sensorium becoming alien. Such symptoms can occur across the senses (strange lights, noises, smells), and can also lead to more complex emotional and cognitive disorders, such as dislocations in space and time, or altered relations to one’s body, or to others, and can often be a sign of imminent stroke or epilepsy. But this should not be understood as suggesting that these accounts ‘explain’ what is going on in Le Très-Haut. Instead, what is important about this correlation is the fact that contingent events lead to a breakdown or distortion in the structures of perception and cognition, which thereby indicate how these supposedly transcendental structures are vulnerable to material disruption. This means that the modes of experience that occur in these incidents are the result of such intrusions, that is, they are experiences of radical material contingency. Blanchot thus appears to be pursuing an equivalent analysis through literature, a phenomenology of exteriority as it were, although as exteriority it is not available to a phenomenological analysis, which is limited to the horizons of subjectivity. It is as such that literature becomes significant, since it is able to provide a means of responding to such exteriority as it partakes of its own material contingency, even as this leaves it at the mercy of the outside. As a result, this analysis is not academic but conveys something of the detail of the world that exceeds ordinary experience, details that cannot be reduced or assimilated to that experience but nevertheless punctuate it. In this way the experience of literature parallels that which occurs in the schizophrenic’s experience, as discussed by Merleau-Ponty, where difficulties arise ‘because the movement of existence towards things no longer has its energy, because it appears to itself in its contingency, and because the world is no longer self-­evident [ne va plus de soi]’. In other words, the alienation of experience is not a mere epistemological failure but reveals a different form of worldly existence in which we experience our own relation to things alongside the things themselves: Clear space, that decent [honnête] space where all objects have the same importance and the same right to exist, is not only surrounded but also

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wholly penetrated by another spatiality that morbid variations reveal [. . .] This second space permeating visible space is the one that, at every moment, composes our own way of projecting the world, and the schizophrenic disorder consists solely in that this perpetual project dissociates itself from the objective world, such as it is still offered by perception, and withdraws, so to speak, into itself. PP: 332/300 This is a form of perceptual and bodily scepticism, an epocheˉ of ordinary experience that reveals how that experience is structured, which can also be found in a non-­pathological form in the spatiality of the night, which ‘makes us sense our contingency’, the facticity of our existence that is assumed and forgotten but when revealed is experienced with vertigo or horror [PP: 328/296].7 As he had remarked earlier, the ‘unity of the senses, which passed for an a priori truth, is no longer anything but the formal expression of a fundamental contingency: the fact that we are in the world’ [PP: 255/229]. As evidence of this fact it is only necessary to look at one of the following nightmarish scenes, in which Sorge is caught up in a field of breathing dust that takes on a physical form while still invisibly permeating the room. In relation to this presence he categorically states, ‘it is a toad’ [TH: 234/244]. Humour is certainly not absent from Blanchot’s writing, although it is often quite oblique, but in this case it is possible that what is being referred to is the impassivity and obtrusion of the anomalous presence, which appears simply to sit there, gazing at him, with all its inhuman and slightly unpleasant concreteness like a cold and clammy stain made flesh. Equally, the ‘toad’ is the essence of ugliness, as is reflected in the fact that it is the term (crapaud) used for a flaw in a precious stone. But it is also a manifestation of the contingent in its absurdity, a discovery matched by the fantastic ordeal that Sorge then undergoes with a lamp. The absurdity of these points serves to mark their lack of greater meaning; they are not purveyors of ontological truths but simply excrescences of meaninglessness. Except that they are not quite meaningless, they bear meaning in themselves but this is non-­relational, it cannot be interpreted or translated and is thus idiosyncratic. But for meaning to be non-­relational is for it not to be meaning in any actionable sense. The toad is not for anything, nor does it do anything, and yet it is there, it could have been otherwise but in appearing it has made its meaning factical, and insofar as the ground of its existence, its necessity, is contingent, this contingency has itself become necessary. In encountering such a manifestation in reading we encounter that which is alien, just as Sorge himself has done, that which admits of no translatable meaning, and thus we come up against a limit of sense. Reading here becomes a form of alienation, an experience of alterity without relation. In a trivial sense the objectivity of the novel consists of the words on the page, and in this sense the toad does not materially exist. But the novel also

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conveys ideas, and as such there is an interplay between the ideas and the words that parallels that of the unequal relation between subject and object. While the objectivity of the object, in Adorno’s words, is that which is constituted as such by the subject, the object itself is obscured in this process, and although we cannot think of a subject without objectivity we can think of an object without subjectivity, which is part of what he understands by the priority of the object [ND: 184/183]. In the same way, the objectivity of words is that part that is constituted as such by thought but also that which obscures it, and so the idea is not simply that which communicates the word to us in its meaning but also that which blocks it. Consequently, the actual objectivity of the word can only be uncovered through the impotence of the idea, its failure to achieve identity or reconciliation with it [ND: 186–87/ 185–86]. This is not to reify the word as a natural-­historical given, either as text or etymology, but to understand how words become transformed in engaging with ideas, and vice versa, and that this bears evidence of a materiality that cannot be identified with thought and resists being assimilated to its order. What occurs in this way takes place through the sensuous and contingent aspects of language by which it introduces its actual objectivity. The ugly is not just the material, or the formless, or the real, it is also the origin of the work, and thus of beauty and form as such. As a result, it is also the repressed and absent origin, the life that is condemned by the act of making the work. For Adorno, the apparent reconciliation that occurs in the work of art is thus arbitrary and imposed ‘as an act of violence, aesthetic formalism, and unreconciled life’.8 This combination of facets bears a manifold of problems: for as violence, ugliness can no more be recognized than it can be suppressed, since to recognize it would assimilate it as necessary and justified; as dissonance, ugliness can no more be accepted than it can be dismissed, since to accept it would endanger the possibility of the work appearing at all; and as the past, ugliness can no more be recalled than it can be forgotten, since to recall it would revive the mythic irrationality that it conveys. Hence, as the artwork moves towards this absent origin, it engages with the contingency of formless materiality but also with its still breathing violence and suffering, and in so doing it moves further away from the form of the work and from the world and society. To open the work up to the ugliness at its heart only distances it from legibility, from any relation to its audience or author. This tension becomes the challenge of the work: to enable it to broach this truth and life without being destroyed. Thus, as Blanchot writes, ‘the novel has nothing to fear from an idea [thèse], on condition that the idea accepts to be nothing without the novel’ [PF: 203/207]. And this leads to a radical transformation of thought as, now engaged with its object, it begins to flounder (patauge), becomes bogged down (enlisement), and turns into thickness, viscosity [PF: 200/203]. While the narrative may appear only to exist in the mind and on the page, and so to have only an imaginary existence, in coming up against these

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limits of sense there is an externalization of thought and an encounter with that which cannot be taken up into thought as it carries no meaning. Reading the text has given rise to an experience of the loss of sense, a darkness or absence that cannot be configured in any way, and is thus not a mere ontic loss, as it were, but a radical unfounding of order, which is also an experience of the contingent order of things. Not the unifying transcendental of thought that encompasses all things but the manifestation of sense in things as their own order. So in encountering such absurd forms, we experience the contingency of the transcendental as such. This issue had been raised by Kant in the third Kritik in relation to the problem of organisms, whose necessity appears to arise as a result of their contingency, rather than through an a priori transcendental. It is the same imbrication of teleology and mechanism, or purposiveness without purpose that is found in the work of art and objects of natural beauty. What is important about these points is that they indicate how the artwork or organism creates its own law in its appearance, and that the idea of an ontological order as such thereby becomes altered. This lack of essential reason is also part of Sorge’s own situation, made apparent in his inability to give a fixed account of himself, which merges with his social and spatial disorientation, and provides the basis for Jeanne’s obsession. She becomes more and more convinced that only she knows him, and thus that he only exists for her, as the object of her affections, but such a situation cannot be sustained while he still lives, given his elusiveness and resistance. She is there to put an end to things, but the end cannot be reached and so his death can only go on without end.

II Blanchot’s thought about the relation of ideas to the novel occurs in a discussion of Sartre, and ably situates the key distinction between the roman à thèse (or novel of ideas) that Sartre pursues and the approach that he adopts himself. Whereas Sartre saw the novel as a way of exploring ideas about existence, Blanchot is interested in examining the kind of ideas that are produced by way of the novel. For him, ideas are transformed by their interaction with writing and this is precisely the point that concerns him: to understand how thought and language take place in the world through writing, which literature then makes possible insofar as it operates as a laboratory for such experimentation. But literature is not cut off from the world by being the space for this study; it is the world, and it is in this way that the introspection typically found in the writer or thinker becomes externalized. And insofar as thought becomes transformed and alienated in literature it comes to experience its own limits and that which lies beyond them: the materiality and contingency of the work and the world without. It is thus that the experience of literature becomes aligned with the two aspects

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of scepticism (as an experience of the limits of cognition) and alienation (as an experience of the non-­sublatable beyond). In literature, thought encounters its outside, which is why it is so often associated with madness. It is remarkable that such an experience is possible, that there is such a thing as literature, but despite its singularity this experience is intrinsic to thought, as literature condenses and extends what happens as thought takes place in language. Blanchot indicates the status of this fact by recalling Mallarmé’s question about the existence of literature and asking: ‘What is going on with being [Qu’en est-­il de l’être], if one says that “something like Literature exists”?’9 As he is discussing Mallarmé he goes on to explicate this question through the role of negativity in words, which illustrates the two slopes of the experience of literature: on the one hand words have the power to make things disappear, to make them appear as disappeared, appearance that is only that of a disappearance, presence that, in its turn, returns to absence through the movement of erosion and use that is the soul and the life of words, which draws light from them through the fact that they extinguish themselves, clarity from the dark. But, having this power to make things ‘arise’ at the heart of their absence – masters of this absence – words also have the power to disappear in it themselves, to make themselves marvellously absent at the heart of the totality that they realize, which they proclaim in annihilating themselves there, which they accomplish eternally by destroying themselves there without end, act of self-­destruction wholly similar to the so strange event of suicide, which precisely gives all its truth to the supreme instant of Igitur. EL: 35–36/43 A word appears and in doing so extinguishes that which it names. But the absence of the thing is not perfect, it recurs in the movement of absencing that is found in the word. Or rather, absence, as absence, even in its perfection, is never complete since it absents itself from itself. There is thus a flickering of presence in the word, a movement of chance in the very action of negation, a throw of the dice at the stroke of midnight. To this extent the appearance of the word resembles the complexity of the act of suicide, as an act that seeks to undo action, to annihilate itself and its own possibility. The moment of the appearance of the word, in its chiaroscuro of presence, is also an experience of this negativity. Hence, for the poet there is no difference between the attempt to write and the attempt to kill oneself, since both seek to find the point where action negates itself, even as negativity appears in the form of its own imperfect absence, its appearance as negativity. The dialectical formality of this manoeuvre undoes itself at the point of midnight, at the point where what is and what is not are both suspended in their mutual disarticulation, preventing their absence or presence, and thereby

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finding the moment of the word, or of death, in this undecidable null point. The complexity of this thought can be explicated by comparing it to the model of freedom in classical tragedy, which it extends to an almost impossible degree. Within Greek tragedy there is a problem of resolution as the hero must die, because he has committed a crime, but he cannot be punished, as he is not guilty since he was compelled to commit this crime by fate. Necessity and freedom confront each other in the struggle between the gods and humanity, thus the hero comes to be punished, not because he is guilty of a crime, but, more importantly, because he is guilty of resisting the will of the gods, and this has come about because he has chosen to take on the guilt of his actions, even though they are not of his own causing. The hero is thus guilty of presumption, of freely taking on the guilt to which he has been condemned, and so the structure of tragedy as a conflict over necessity is preserved while also allowing for recognition of the free will of the hero. As Schelling wrote in 1795: ‘It was a great thought: to willingly bear punishment even for an unavoidable crime, so as to prove one’s freedom precisely through the loss of this freedom and to go down with a declaration of free will.’10 The sublation of impotence into freedom fits with the Idealism of Schelling’s thought, but it also indicates the framework of the aporia of action that Mallarmé will complicate much further in seeking to respond to the impossibility of simply overcoming it. This aporia afflicted Mallarmé quite directly in the late 1860s when he struggled to face up to the force of negativity inherent in the word, and the effects this would have on any writing practice, a struggle that took shape in the prose piece Igitur. It has been noted that as Mallarmé was coming out of this period of crisis (marked by insomnia, paralysis, and neurasthenia) he had read Descartes’ Discours de la méthode, which would seem to have had a crucial role in the development of Igitur.11 Considering that igitur (thus) has almost the same meaning as ergo, and as Mallarmé notes at the opening of this piece that it is to be staged in the intelligence of the reader, that is, it is the mind itself that is the scene for what occurs, then it is possible to understand the drama as a fictional variation of Descartes’ proof: This was to take place in the combinations of the Infinite face to face with the Absolute. Necessary – the extracted Idea. Useful madness. One of the acts of the universe came to be committed there. Nothing else, the breath remained, the end of word and gesture united – blow out the candle of being, by which all has been. Proof. (Think on that)12 But, for Mallarmé, the consequences of this proof are exactly the opposite to that which Descartes hoped to achieve, since, by the simple fact that he can blow out a candle Igitur can make the night appear at the same time as

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existence is extinguished. Furthermore, since the word of this discovery is united with a gesture in the breath of extinction, it indicates how it is in the absolute movement of the word that its ideal is exposed at the same moment as its inverse in the night: scribo ergo non sum.13 The basic action of this proof can then be elaborated in the experience of this igitur as it/he descends into the tomb at the stroke of midnight to roll the dice in order to see if the proof will or can be actualized. The night here, the subterranean night, one without stars, without the constant mirroring between the infinite conjunctions of the constellations in the night sky and the scintillations of the waves beneath them, is thus another kind of night that is outside change and signification. In leaving his room and descending into the tomb Igitur carries a candle with him, in preparation for his proof, which means that prior to the appearance of midnight darkness is not yet apparent but insists latently in things, in the heavy curtains and furniture, and the noises of the wind and his own beating heart. All of these elements are forms of opacity in varying degrees of condensation that surround Igitur in his descent, just as the voices of his ancestors that seem to echo through the wind insist that his proof cannot be possible. And in the room, in the place of midnight, time stands still, and just like the waves that have become frozen in the folds of the curtain, and the face of the clock at midnight that reflects the empty gaze of Igitur’s ennui, thought is held in the outward moment of its expanding movement at the point where it turns back on itself and catches the light, its own light: It is the pure dream of a Midnight disappeared into itself, and that the brightness recognized, which alone remaining at the heart of its accomplishment plunged into the shadow sums up its sterility on the pallor of an open book that presents the table; ordinary page and setting of the Night, except that the silence of an ancient speech proffered by it still subsists, in which, returning, this Midnight evokes its finite and null shadow with these words: I was the hour that is to make me pure. 484/93 Mallarmé’s sense of this movement as an idea, an absolute present, is offset by the proliferation of material attempts to circumscribe it. The extraordinary density and opacity of his writing makes it evident that the pure dream is not to be realized in a moment of wordless joy but through the extreme compression of words that have become things, darkly reflecting each other in obscure and barely legible connections that have neither origin nor aim. By compressing the images so closely on top of each other it is not possible to determine any overarching key that would resolve them, since each simply refers back or onwards to another. But in this obscure mirroring there is a loss of constellation; the order that might be imposed by a reading has to be abandoned because there are no conjugating threads to draw them together.

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Each element stands sombre and isolated, caught in the moment of their mute confrontation, and so this (non) self-­encounter extinguishes itself. It is precisely in the moment of midnight that the scene collapses in on itself, in the coming together of past and future in the hands of the clock in sound and gesture, realizing and eliminating time in the absolute present, like a phrase of thought that can both express and evacuate the self in its own echoing eternity. The meagre sounds of this echoing translate into the beating of Igitur’s heart, which links him to his ancestors and the characters recurring across the pages of the books in the ancient library. This beating becomes an oscillation of ambiguity that leads Igitur astray, for in the closure of the door to the tomb this beating of time traps the door in a repetition (a suspended or interrupted closure) that turns it into a stuttering of stone, a stairway, which leads to the tomb. Like the lines of a text the planes of a staircase can be inverted, making it difficult to know whether one is ascending or descending through time or meaning as there is only the halting leaden step and the slow pull of inertia. Thus ambiguity is not resolved by meaning as much as by the fall of the step that is merely the result of tradition. What emerges from this stroke is not the idea in its absoluteness but a mere fluttering of thought, like the inane croaking of Poe’s raven, or the sound of the wind that endlessly says ‘oui’.14 The outcome of this sequence of steps is the darkness and dust of the metal-­bound volumes that have enclosed Igitur with the material accumulation of time, but it is also the opening of a space or interval that is the tomb itself as the self-­reflecting void, an ambivalence that cannot be decided in either direction: [It] is present equally in one and the other surface of the shining and secular walls retaining only in one hand the opal brightness of its science and in the other its volume, the volume of its nights now closed: of the past and the future that, attaining the pinnacle of myself, the pure shadow perfectly dominates, and finishes, outside themselves. 486/95 In confronting this undecidable chiaroscuro, Igitur is confused as each possibility seems illusory, unless in the dream of himself as the last of his line there is the possibility of thought detaching itself from this sequence by the merest degree of unconscious dissolution, as a pure reflection without object: ‘The hour has sounded for me to leave, the purity of the mirror will be established, without this character, vision of myself – but he will take away the light! – the night!’ [475/97]. Consequently, the moment of descent into the tomb enacts the throw of the dice in which its idea is always accomplished, whether it affirms or negates itself (such is the early form of the thought developed further in Un Coup de dès jamais n’abolira le hasard). The throw of the dice in bearing

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this latent and indissoluble chance thereby reveals the form of the infinite. But in voluntarily taking this chance upon himself in throwing the dice Igitur makes of it a necessary realization, he chooses to make its endless contingency necessary by way of his action, since it is in this action that he assumes the idea of both realization and extinction. Such an absolute idea is madness, but the dice are rolled, the book is closed, and the candle is blown out. There is only the fact of the act remaining, the loss of language in the grimoire of history, its symbolic language reflecting the obscure actions that have taken place, but that still gives way to its idea. Igitur lies down on the tomb having inverted the act of blowing out the candle by ingesting a drop of nothingness, the drop absent from all seas, and in this self-­annihilation there is only madness left in its purity. Unavoidably, this is an interpretation, a reading that necessarily imposes a form on what is not merely unfinished but perhaps unfinishable. To some extent, the exercise Mallarmé is pursuing is to set out a situation that cannot be resolved and whose meaning resists being formulated in any precise or definitive form, as this would seem to be the manner in which he understands the movement of the poetic act. The presence of the idea, and the associated forms of eternity, infinity, absoluteness, and nothingness, are persistently engaged with a force of absence and resistance that disrupts their appearance. This tension is felt in the sentences of Mallarmé’s writing as well as in the descriptions of the scenes, where the syntax seems to fall apart as it attempts to counter itself at each step. And yet an extraordinary idea emerges, perhaps not the Idea that Mallarmé sought, but one closer to the elusive image of a thought isolating itself in obscure materiality, strange forms at the limits of legibility. Thought exposed to this degree of estrangement can feel almost nauseous in its conceptual vertigo, in its frustration of meaning, but it also indicates the thought of this estrangement, that which arises as its madness in the form of the material outside. Insofar as the text is unfinished, and only consists of drafts and sketches with many deletions and alterations, any reading will be selective and somewhat arbitrary. But even in sections where Mallarmé’s writing is more or less intact the writing is still considerably difficult. Within these sections meaning can be gleaned by close and patient reading but what kind of meaning is this, and at what cost to what remains does it emerge? The sliver of sense that may be retrievable is so evanescent that it is barely distinguishable from what it is drawn from, and to which it seems liable to return, and given the nature of the piece such density seems deliberate. In effect, as Blanchot writes, Mallarmé starts from nothing, and as this absence affirms itself, ‘it is lost to itself, rendering it still present, leaving the dissimulated presence of being and, in this dissimulation, remains chance, which cannot be abolished’ [EL: 110/109]. Thus, within this intense but necessarily never completed self-­negation, ‘Igitur is an attempt to make the work possible by grasping it at the point where what is present is the absence of all power’ [EL: 108/108].

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The effects of such an attempt are thus not limited to this work but affect the poet’s language and knowledge, and any attempt to ground thought or expression, and ultimately the possibility of their existence as that which is not nothing. When Igitur descends into the tomb to encounter this pure absence, he is following the path of Mallarmé himself, and it is because this absence at the heart of the night is pure that it cannot fully negate itself but eventuates in the sliver of chance. Thus this encounter is not one of annihilation, but of the possibility of finding the non-­power that is the basis of possibility, and so Igitur’s suicide becomes an act that negates itself rather than being an act of self-­negation. The descent is primarily an act of thought seeking ‘to advance outside of itself, to perceive itself disappearing and to appear to itself in the mirage of this disappearance’ [EL: 111/111]. This would be a form of inverted cogito, but Mallarmé also makes of this act a revision of Hegelian negation insofar as this thought becomes the death of the spirit, which is only maintained in it by being exposed to its own disappearance as an endless suicide. For Blanchot, this inversion comes about because midnight, as the presence of disappearance, introduces the anonymous force of dying that enables Igitur to die. As such, the act of suicide is not one of self-­killing but of exposure to an impersonal absence, which is also to be found in the act of writing. The drama of Igitur is not concerned with an event, since nothing takes place; there is only the darkness of the empty room with which it necessarily begins and ends, and in which there is only the thought (the word and gesture) of departure: the closed book, the extinguished candle, the empty vial, the bed of ashes. Midnight is an absent rather than an absolute present, in which the immemorial past touches directly upon the most remote future [EL: 114/114]. There is no moment that passes between them, the work, like suicide, is never present but is both ahead and behind, done and undone, and it is this tension and repetition that makes the act possible, and that takes shape as the conjunction igitur. The character of Igitur is then no more than that part of the night that the night expresses in giving form to itself, and in doing so is negated. Hence, Blanchot criticizes Mallarmé’s decision to make the drama into Igitur’s monologue, which renders its perspective one of a speaking subject encountering its own reflection, and instead refers to what he sees as an earlier version in which it is the night itself that is the subject of the drama [EL: 116/115]. Given the state of the text it is not possible to know how far this diagnosis is accurate, but while Mallarmé’s thought takes on a form of presence in the figure of Igitur, which draws back from the extremities of its self-­negation, it is also the case that this figure is no more than a thought of disappearance mired in a milieu of endless ruination. However, making the throw of the dice a manoeuvre in which chance and necessity combine to make the act into a moment of self-­realization seems to go against what has been laid out in the non-­appearance of the present, which would fatally undermine the possibility

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of claiming any moment as the instant of one’s death. It is part of Blanchot’s argument in L’Espace littéraire that the writers he discusses (Mallarmé, Rilke, Kafka, Dostoyevsky) fall short of an understanding of death by seeking to find the right moment or the right relation to what is construed as one’s own death, whereas for him death is that which withdraws from any propriety as much as from any present. Perhaps, as Blanchot concludes, the fact that Igitur was abandoned shows most clearly that the attempt it may have pursued is misguided, as it confronts its own failure to make of its moment one that could appear [EL: 118/117].

III Around the end of the seventeenth century suicide began to be discussed in England in terms that were no longer dictated by religious notions of sin and judgement. As these discursive strategies became less viable, suicide began to be addressed in a different way and so it became a privileged site of Enlightenment debate. It is thus that suicide entered Romantic thought as it seemed a pre-­eminent example of individual freedom, but it also became a problem that legal and medical discourses started to approach as instances of voluntary death were an affront to State control. This Foucauldian understanding of suicide as a site of contestation became solidified in the nineteenth century with the work of Esquirol in early psychiatry, and Peuchet in early police administration (which was the focus of one of Marx’s first articles).15 These studies laid the foundations for the later work of Durkheim and Freud, by which time suicide was almost completely determined as the result of an overwhelming destructive force exerted upon the individual, rather than being in any way a rational and voluntary act. The sociological approach gradually became less dominant in the twentieth century as psychiatry became buttressed by neuroscience, genetics, and pharmacology, and as an institutional reluctance to see individual acts as socially determined increased. Thus the dominant view has become one in which suicide is a pathological result of disordered internal forces, which means that it is to be corrected through medical and psychological intervention. Not only is suicide determined by these sciences, but they have in turn derived their legitimacy and definition through the way they have constructed (and attempted to resolve) the pathology of suicide. The result of which has been to diminish or marginalize any understanding of suicide as a rational response to an entirely bleak and hostile world. The suicidal individual is now pathologized and consequently treated to remove or suppress this pathology. But, as Blanchot insists, the converse idea, that suicide is an act of free will, is equally dependent on an illusory and reified image of the self, and so it is of considerable interest that, against both of these positions, he will, in

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his later works (as will be shown in Chapter 3), begin to think of suicide in very different terms. By claiming that suicidal tendencies arise from within, the State absolves itself of any responsibility while also asserting itself as the sole means of rectification, thus the persistence of these tendencies, and their explosive challenges, can be seen as barbaric deviations. Such a logic arises because the individual’s relation to their own death is rendered illegitimate, as their responsibility as an individual and a citizen is to preserve life (even as death is marked as that which belongs to the individual, it is not that which can be taken up as one likes; it must be treated properly). Blanchot begins by exploring how this apparent illegitimacy is negotiated by the attempt to appropriate death and how this affects the status of the individual, which exposes an anomalous dimension to suicide. Although he does not discuss it to any great extent it becomes apparent that his long interest in the experience of death and dying comes to a critical point when the problematic of suicide is considered. Consequently, it can be viewed as a key that helps unlock the enigmatic significance of death in his thinking and also allows for a particularly acute analysis of the relation between his thinking and that of Hegel and Heidegger. Furthermore, the notion of a ‘right to death’ that seems to lie at the heart of his 1947–48 essay can be illuminated when the complexity of suicide is shown to be analogous to that of writing.16 For what is uncovered in suicide is a non-­ event that secedes from what is historical as well as from what is natural, since death (like writing) is not something that occurs in the order of things that happen [ED: 102/62]. Death is not part of history, nor is it ‘natural’ in the way that has been peaceably established, it occurs without sense or form, outside of history and nature as that which is merely insignificant, an inapparent outside that persists within life as a perpetual presentiment [EI: 269–70/180]. It is sheer contingency or, as Camus would say, absurd. In the notion of the absurd Blanchot finds an idea he can recognize, an idea of the arbitrary eruption of meaninglessness, of opaque moments that persist through life and resist thought, even as he goes on to criticize Camus for moving too quickly to include this notion within thought as that which cannot be thought. This logic, although hasty, is difficult to avoid, and as Camus attempts to overcome the aporias of the absurd by incorporating it into a thought of revolt, Blanchot sees both a retreat from the difficulties of absurdity and also what does not support this move. Initially, in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Camus opposes the absurd to suicide by claiming that the latter rejects the meaninglessness of life, whereas in the figure of Sisyphus he finds a model of happiness, of sorts, that is able to live with the absurd [MS: 79/52]. Within this contrast lies the basis for Camus’s later transformation from the thought of the absurd to that of revolt, but, for Blanchot, it is this move that is too quick, since it passes over the way that these modes involve each other. For in the endless repetition and revolution of Sisyphus’ task lies

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both the anomalous errancy of dying and the ambivalence of a revolt that takes place in the interval between affirmation and negation: What does Sisyphus say to us? Not at all that he does not want to kill himself, but that he does not want to because he cannot: he has precisely left the space of possibility, having left the world where dying is possible. Sisyphus is the approach to this region where even the one who kills himself by an act that is personal and a will that is resolute collides with death as with a density that no act can penetrate and that cannot be proposed as an aim. A region that announces extreme suffering, extreme affliction, the desolation of shadows, a region approached in life by all who, having lost the world, move restlessly between being and nothingness; a swarming mass of inexistence, a proliferation without reality, vermin of nihilism: ourselves. EI: 267–68/179 As Blanchot points out, there is no simple translation from the Yes of Sisyphus to the No of the rebel, just as there is no simple opposition between thought and the absurd.17 Consequently, thought cannot fail to respond to the absurd, which means that the absurd cannot fail to be thought, but in doing so it secretes itself inside thought, not as a ‘thought’, but as its inescapable distortion or perversion, a madness from which thought cannot be dissociated: The authenticity of ‘losing oneself’ for reason could always be denied, as long as it has not proven that, by itself, by its own means, it could destroy itself, becoming madness [démence]. And finally, supposing that reason, by an actual questioning [contestation véritable], could become unreason [déraison], this term could in no way represent a conclusion [dénouement]. One would then have to aspire to a beyond of madness, to a new possibility where madness would in its turn be condemned, questioned by reason become mad [folle] but remaining itself within madness [folie]. And of this possibility, one could still say only: voilà l’absurde. FP: 76/58 Thus, in his perpetual recommencement and turning back, and his relation to an unusable material exteriority through a form of work without work, Blanchot finds the figure of Sisyphus to be an enigma without end such that he returns to it again and again, from 1942 to 1954 to 1960, to the point of considering the absurd, despite all his reservations, as a neutral term [EI: 268–69/179–80; A: 217/190]. Sisyphus is a solitude deprived of a centre, not because he is alone, but because he is without relation to himself. And above all: his revolt, this

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volte-­face with which everything (re)commences, is the volte-­face of the rock; all the truth of Sisyphus is bound to his rock, a beautiful image of ‘the elemental’ within him and outside him, the affirmation of a self that accepts being entirely outside itself, delivered over and boldly entrusted to the strangeness of the outside. EI: 262/175 Such would be a concise understanding of Blanchot’s approach to politics, an approach in which the revolt of the rebel is first of all the volte-­face of the rock, the instability and ambivalence of the material, from which the actions of the rebel are derived, with all that this entails for their inscrutable contingency and turmoil. It is in Le Très-Haut that this turmoil is examined most fully, but Blanchot takes this analysis further by examining how it leads to a disruption of the law itself, and what happens when thought is corrupted such that the seemingly seamless passage into action is lost. The depth of Blanchot’s deviation from the thought of action that was apparent in post-­war Paris can be shown by the confusion it aroused in others. In an article for Vogue in 1945 Sartre introduced his readers to the new generation of writers in contemporary French literature, and in doing so focused heavily on Camus. But, to demonstrate the significance of Camus’s writings, it was first necessary for Sartre to show how they differed from those of his peers. Thus, for instance, the pessimism apparently found in L’Étranger and Le Mythe de Sisyphe, ‘in contrast to Blanchot’s despair [. . .] is healthy and constructive. It is when he has lost all hope that man finds himself, for he knows then that he can rely only upon himself.’18 Although his thought in this article is clearly measured according to his audience, it nevertheless reveals much of what was being discussed in the literary circles of Liberated Paris. The hardships of the Occupation had clear consequences for Sartre in terms of what he felt was necessary for literature, and so the idea that man could find himself when all hope was lost became an article of faith that obscured its difficulties. What takes place when all is lost is exemplified by the resistance of the man under torture, which provides a concrete experience of the ‘metaphysical’ nature of man’s freedom, ‘for, after all, most of those who were tortured did not talk. So, in extreme suffering, there is still room for that which is human to reign.’ The complacency of this statement is not masked by rendering it metaphysical, or by the way that the writer is valorized as one who can turn his writings into actions that embody this freedom. Consequently, the possibility that this freedom may itself have become transformed during these times, and that what is found outside or beyond hope may not be so easily dismissed, and that its endurance may lead to a wholly different form of experience that cannot be sublated (as Blanchot pointed out above), all of this is ignored. But in the few critical remarks that he makes about Blanchot a different perspective arises that bears much more than this naïve promise of freedom.

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Sartre begins by claiming that the writers of this new generation (Bataille and Anouilh are mentioned alongside Blanchot) have rejuvenated the ‘theory of Art for Art’s sake’ in a grave and metaphysical mode, as fear, horror, and despair have inclined them ‘toward an absolute pessimism, turning aside from human undertakings’. This ‘disgust for the times’, he writes, is manifested in their writings, for example, in Blanchot’s novels, ‘which take place in an entirely imaginary world, and whose heroes only remotely resemble men; the events which take place in them appear to be symbolic, but are actually not’. Given the dehumanizing horrors of the preceding years, the relation of pessimism and disgust – and of novels whose heroes only remotely resemble men – with l’art pour l’art is very far from accurate; this was the actual experience of the times, with all the disorienting meaninglessness that comes with moving restlessly between being and nothingness, as Blanchot had written. Equally, the mystery of a novel that is imaginary but not symbolic is left tantalizingly unclear, as is the idea of a novel that pursues a notion of l’art pour l’art but is ‘enveloped in metaphysics’, but this does not stop Sartre from going on to declare, in relation to these new writers: ‘it must be said that the rigours of our times, the social ills, the daily contact with Evil have given birth in France to a literature of suicide’. It is evident that he is perplexed by the works of Blanchot and Bataille, since despite his distaste for the style and the approach of their writings he senses that something significant is at work, and this may explain why he has included them in this review. Nevertheless, he concludes by stating that ‘these works, by their very nature, are without posterity’, and it is true that they establish no tradition. Doubtless, he felt it would be reassuring for his readers to find that, in place of these decadent fantasies, there was a much more serious and substantial ‘literature of involvement’ developing in France, but it is all too apparent that the enigmas passed over in these quick dismissals are far more engaging than the simplistic equation of writing and action, for how could these writers not be pessimistic or disgusted? And what does this mean for the relation of the concrete and the imaginary in literature? Rather than recoiling from these problems, it is necessary to ask why and how this literature of suicide arose, and what it entails.

2 Sickness in words

Sickness and the death of the animal are only an abortive attempt at self-­transcendence. Sickness is a discord between the animal and the rest of the natural world; the sick animal is, so to speak, dislodged from its ‘natural site’ (topos), from the hic et nunc that fixes its particularity and distinguishes it from everything that is not it. Now, to detach from the hic et nunc is to universalize, to transform into a general notion or concept. But the animal is absolutely determined by its topos. To dislodge it is to nullify it, it is to render it sick to the point of death. For in contrast to Man, the animal cannot ‘organize the universal in itself, without relating it to the animal process’: it cannot, to put it another way, develop into a universe of discourse (which it will transform by action into a real technical and historical world) the particular entity that has become a concept by its detachment from its given hic et nunc. But Man can do so only because the animal that incarnates him is susceptible of being dislodged from its topos by sickness and death. KOJÈVE, 19341

The narrative of Le Très-Haut takes place in a city where the law has become indistinguishable from life. Sorge is a civil servant in this city and takes great comfort in the universal realization of the law; he fully accepts and respects its rule. But then he becomes sick, he takes time off work and goes to a clinic to recover. The cause and nature of his illness is not clear and it seems to vary in severity and, although he is discharged from the clinic, he finds that he cannot return to work and consequently his relations to others start to change. People respond to him differently, as if he had become estranged, and he begins to see and feel peculiar things. A revolution of sorts seems to

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be afoot in the city and Sorge encounters one of its main orchestrators, Bouxx, who seeks to recruit him to his cause. Conversely, his stepfather, who is a very senior member of the city administration, also wants to draw him over to his side. At the conclusion of the novel nothing has been resolved, although the city has fallen into chaos, with fires, lawlessness, and disease everywhere, in a sense nothing has changed. Sorge has not joined the revolutionaries, nor has he returned to the fabric of the administration, and his respect for the law is unaltered, but in another sense, everything has changed. Understanding the nature and implications of this change is at the heart of the difficulties facing any reading of Le Très-Haut, partly because, as readers, we only see these events through Sorge’s eyes, and partly because Blanchot refuses to allow his narrative to develop into a partisan account, hence the reader, like Sorge, also finds themselves without a clear position in relation to the disorder.2 Such a profound resistance to choosing sides is remarkable for a novel published in Paris in 1948, and indicates the strength and singularity of its political perspective for in doing so it seems to be conducting a critique of partisan logic. In effect, Blanchot is claiming that opposition is an inadequate mode of resistance, since it is dependent on and ultimately recuperated by that which it opposes. This is a result of the fact that the law has become indistinguishable from life, for any move that is made in the life of the citizen, whether conscious or not, rebellious or not, is always part of the machinations of the law. As a result, if there is to be any sense of real change it must come from another source, and the implication is clear that it is only when the structure of life itself comes to deviate that some kind of alternative relation to the law may arise. But what becomes apparent through Sorge’s sickness is that illness as such is profoundly anomalous as it fails to adhere to any category of disorder and remains formless and inconsistent. Hence, although he refuses to choose sides in the revolution, and does not cease to profess his love for the law, the nature of the law itself has changed, as he remarks quite late in the novel: ‘sickness contaminates the law when the law takes care of the sick’ [TH: 165/169]. But the neatness of this formulation belies the complexity and significance of its implications, for when the law is contaminated the very basis of its legality is put in doubt, and thus what is meant by ‘law’, with all the consequences this has not just for socio-­political life but also for the regularity, transparency, and impartiality of any ontological order. Sickness challenges the form of existence from within and expresses itself otherwise, through its animality and mortality, and thereby affects thought and language in their responses to it. Part of the problem is that sickness seems unproblematic, but this is only the case if we adopt the perspective of the system, in relation to which it is a disorder, but the significance of sickness is that it makes this perspective unreliable. It is such a change of perspective that Sorge endures and that the novel conveys, which

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is why it is so elusive. And it is perhaps for this reason that Le Très-Haut also introduces Blanchot’s first attempts to develop a thought of the neutre, a notion of material resistance that is as much political as it is existential. When he heard that Lazarus was dying, Jesus announced, ‘this illness will not end in death’, and, writing under the name of Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard responded by claiming that even if Lazarus had not been resurrected, his illness would still have not led to death for in dying there is only a passage to the next life. The real sickness unto death (maladie à la mort) is the life of despair, in which the individual is alienated from god and from themselves so that they cannot understand death as simply being a transformation and are thus condemned to a life of endless spiritual dying.3 For Kierkegaard’s author, this alienation arises from ignorance or from a refusal to recognize the transparency of the subject to god’s law, which in both cases leads to a belief in the finitude of death. Only in the Christian believer’s perspective does death reveal itself as a passage to the next life, which thereby releases them from fear and despair. It is thus that death can be accepted, whereas for the alienated individual death persists as a fearful asymptote because, in its permeation through life as despair, the sickness unto death of an immanent finitude, it renders itself inassimilable. This life of alienation that Kierkegaard feared has become inescapable in modernity, but it yields its own material alterity, an experience without the law, which is an experience of endless disorientation. The discourse of sickness in Le Très-Haut is one of the most sustained in all of Blanchot’s writings and supplements the more widespread discussions of death and dying that occur elsewhere in his works, for much like tiredness, ageing, and writing itself, sickness is a movement of decline intrinsically drawn towards an end that is never reached. But of equal importance is the fact that sickness is a manifestation of an errant materiality and bodily fragmentation that exposes the instability and ambiguity of these states. But sickness presents a hermeneutic dilemma, since it is apt to make everything look like a symptom, or, alternatively, it gives rise to the impression that there are asymptomatic conditions. In the first, paranoid, sense there is the feeling that everything is a sign to be read, in the second, and even more paranoid sense, even the absence of signs is a sign to be interpreted. Furthermore, the existence of symptoms and the possibility of their interpretation carry a resonance that is of critical personal significance: they cannot be treated abstractly as they are a matter of vital concern. All these aspects come to bear on the experience of Sorge, and the experience of the reader who is introduced to Sorge’s world, which is evidence of the contagion of its instability. In a broad sense Blanchot’s novel explores the nature and implications of this contagion, and also that which lies outside it, what may precede reading and remain without it, which has political, philosophical, and literary effects.

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I I wasn’t alone, I was just anybody. How can you forget that phrase? During my sick leave, I would go walking in an area near the centre. What a beautiful city, I told myself. Going down into the metro, I bumped into someone who shouted at me brutally. TH: 9/1 It almost seems as if the thesis of Le Très-Haut is presented too obviously, for as these first lines indicate it is a question of what happens when someone who is just anybody (un homme quelconque) becomes sick, and this is a problem that is both literal and figurative and thus one that affects the relation and distinction between these two modes. Sorge’s conduct in these opening pages (although he has not yet been named) shows him to be very ordinary and also quite unusual; he is argumentative and yet remote, unpredictable but also indifferent, as if he were both contingent and abstract. If he is merely someone or other, then he is not the vaunted novelistic figure of everyman but rather the non-­figure or negative image of such generality, more like the nondescript, anyone at all. And if such a ‘figure’ can become sick, then what does this mean for the possibility of figuring humanity in general? This instability of definition occurs repeatedly in the first chapter as, for example, when Sorge challenges the description of a suicide recounted in the newspaper, or in Bouxx’s changing accounts of his past, and also in a discussion about the nature and significance of begging: I think that some of these people who stop passersby and ask for help are not really in need, as they claim. They are also not seeking to exploit public generosity. It’s possible that they have a wholly different goal: for example, to give the impression that things are not going perfectly well, that the system, despite a more and more closely woven net, always lets through a dust of miserable and distressing cases, or even that for some work is no longer possible. TH: 16–17/8–9 In a city where the law has fully realized itself such a situation should not be possible, there should be no scope to form such opinions about the functioning of the State, or to demonstrate them. But as Bouxx points out, these people who beg are not really in need, so their demonstration of the imperfection of the law appears not to be conscious. They simply exist and in doing so manifest a sense of unease, they are the city’s symptoms of impending disorder, and much like Sorge’s uncertain condition, this ailment is such that they remain out of work, restless and unused, like an unemployed

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negativity. And if the beggars indicate what is wrong with the city and its organization of life, then what does it mean when a figure like Sorge is unable to work within its structure? Someone who is part of the civic administration and thus a functionary of the State, who works in the registry office (l’état civil), where births, marriages, and deaths are recorded as part of the State’s vital statistics, so that, thanks to him, ‘individuals had a legal [juridique] existence’ [TH: 32/26]? Given this unease Sorge’s strained relations with his family are not surprising, nor his association with Bouxx. Indeed, the latter seems attracted to Sorge as he believes they share certain attitudes, for although Bouxx is planning a revolution he is also a functionary of sorts, with almost as much elusive ambiguity as Sorge, an ambiguity that begins to have its effects on the very possibility of defining positions. Witness how his discussion of different countries and customs is transformed into an unsettling indifference as the borders between one country and the next are erased: In sum, everything is different. And from one country to another, everything is always fairly different. Still, aside from the estrangement [dépaysement] and other similar impressions, you realize very soon that crossing a border is not much and that foreign countries [l’étranger] hardly exist. You sense completely that the country you are leaving extends to all the others, that its surface covers surfaces a thousand times more considerable, that it itself is also all the rest. TH: 18/10 Is this a subversive internationalism, or the imperialism of the law? If borders no longer exist it is because it is not possible or desirable to make such distinctions, which may refer to the reality so perceived or to the judgement that would attempt to make them. Confronted by this profound lack of clarity in the presence of the law it would be easy to slip into nihilism, but in listening to Bouxx explain this point Sorge is also confronted by his imposing materiality, as he seems like ‘an unpolished block, sculpted straight from the mountain’ with an extraordinarily large red and white face [TH: 15/7]. The two planes of materiality and signification do not converge but pass alongside each other with occasional ruptures of sense. Such a figure on its own is thus already a contestation of the law, which assumes a unity and transparency of meaning in form and function, but Blanchot pushes this mutual and divergent disruption into more eccentric paths than he does anywhere else in his writings. It is for this reason that Le Très-Haut is his strangest work but also his most political as it confronts the law in both its practice and its idea with a persistent instability or sickness. The implications of this confrontation are complex and subtle as sickness is not mere destruction, as Bouxx explains: ‘You find you are tangled up in general ideas and you begin to feel dizzy.

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You sense vaguely that these ideas are perhaps nothing at all, but if they collapse, what remains? The void, but then they cannot be nothing; so, they are everything and you stifle’ [TH: 18/10–11]. This is precisely the Hegelian negotiation left to the last man who is faced with the problem of finding out what can be done when everything is complete, when humanity and history have fully realized themselves, when there is no longer any need for work, and yet there is not nothing.4 Whence the negativity without use that pointlessly proliferates throughout the novel. Although Bouxx seems more aware of this situation than Sorge, since he at least perceives it, his confessions that he cannot tolerate the sick and that he feels compelled to bring about some form of change that would not be useless, put him at a distance from the more profound disturbance brought about by Sorge’s indifference, and also indicate the revolutionary structure that he will entertain in opposition to the State. Thus, Sorge’s verdict that Bouxx is an actor (comédien) refers not just to his playing of roles but also to the fact that he is still involved in playing roles, which means that he has not reached the point of realizing his position as just anybody [TH: 20–21/12–13]. Indeed, it is the actor who is central to the structure of tragedy for Hegel, since it is through acting that individual figures embody the agency of different forces, of history and the law, but are also reduced to being such figures, rather than individuals in themselves. This distinction may explain why the sections that deal with Sorge’s relations with his family – which, as has been widely noted, reflect something of the structure of Aeschylus’ The Oresteia – are to begin with slightly detached from the account of his relations with the other characters. While the two storylines do not fully cohere, later they come together in a way that seems to blur their differences, as with the suggestions that Bouxx is indistinguishable from Sorge’s stepfather, or that his nurse is like his sister [TH: 134/137, 232/242].5 (This last point needs to be seen in the light of other lines in the book where his sister is likened to a nurse just as is his neighbour, Marie Scadran, which suggests a deliberate merging of associations between the three female figures who both provoke and take care of his illness.) Instead, there is a suggestion that these storylines belong to different times, as his family seems to have come from the distant past, from a time before the law that intrudes into the putative immanence of the State structure: ‘That’s what the family was. The recollection of the time before the law, a scream, rough words coming from the past’ [TH: 11/3]. The importance of The Oresteia, and its contemporary rethinking in Sartre’s Les Mouches (1943), is that it dramatizes the relation between life and the law, and the conflict that sunders the State when the two forces come together. When Orestes returned to Argos he found a city labouring under a curse, for after his father (the king) had been killed by his mother the latter had remarried and remained in power. A sense of guilt and unresolved crime thus hangs over the city that renders its inhabitants complicit, as Sartre’s

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play emphasizes, and the curse is also made clear by the decay and desolation into which the city has sunk. It is a city-­state under the sign of the disaster, so it makes sense that Blanchot, like Sartre, would turn to this story during the time of France’s occupation, just as he would also turn to the thematics of the last man and the end of history. But these associations should not be overemphasized, as it is through the excessive layering of themes that Blanchot unsettles the possibility of any single interpretation, just as the single-­mindedness of his protagonist, Sorge, is also unsettled. It is thus that the disaster that overtakes the city in Le Très-Haut occurs as a manifold dissolution of clarity that extends beyond the socio-­political sphere and into the very operation of thought and language. This flaw cannot be removed or expiated as it is part of language itself; it is its own restless and contagious uncertainty. As is found in Heidegger’s readings of Sophocles, the significance of The Oresteia comes from the way that it demonstrates the emergence of the political and the fundamental relation between the polis and the family. Hence, any attempt to understand the implications of the disruption of the law must pass by way of its original tension with the tradition of the family and its inevitably tragic unfolding. But unlike Sophocles, as Hegel points out, Aeschylus brings the cycle of violence to an end by dissolving the tension between the family and the law with the introduction of the force of justice, as the Eumenides (or Furies), who had been released to track down Orestes after he killed his mother and stepfather, are placated by Athene, thereby finally extinguishing the curse on the House of Atreus [PG: 394–97/446–49].6 In Blanchot’s novel this conflict is made more complex, for if the State has reached a point where the law is immanent, then there is nothing in which it is not felt, nothing that does not participate in it and is not in some way guided by it. However, this sense of utopian harmony is undone by the same logic, for insofar as it becomes coextensive with the life of every individual the law also finds itself indistinguishable from their separate acts and expressions. And if the law is indiscernible from its acts, then there is no way of preventing or delimiting its disruption as these individual acts diverge and conflict, and it is from this problem that the discourse of corruption and pathology receives its impetus in Le Très-Haut, since it is in these opaque actions that the State comes up against forces that it cannot comprehend, let alone control, forces that are strictly anomalous to the law. Sorge’s illness is not easy to grasp: feverishness appears to be its most distinctive mark, alongside an uncertainty about its presence, and his excited speech also seems to be a product of his erratic condition. His volubility is unusual and disturbs those to whom he talks but this appears to be part of his relation to the law, for which he expresses the utmost love. The excitement of his speech converges with a facility to see and experience the law as it is, in its invisibility and ubiquity: ‘the law was always in movement, that it passed ceaselessly [indéfiniment] from one person to another, was present

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everywhere, with its even, transparent, and absolute light, illuminating everyone and everything in an always different and yet identical way’. But it is not clear if this facility is an effect of his sickness, or its cause, which would undermine the status of the law as ideal. For his explanations of how work has led people to realize themselves as the completion of history, and have become coextensive with their own images such that there is no distinction between the public face and the ideal, suggests an enthusiasm that verges upon the heretical as it would imply a radical undoing of the law in the discovery of its irrelevance and meaninglessness. But alongside this delirious insight, which makes him feel as if he was already dead, that is, abstracted from life by virtue of its complete realization, another different feeling arises, the squeamishness of immanence, a bodily obtrusion that becomes just as fascinating. Looking at his neighbour’s hand, which is very ordinary apart from being oversized, much like the hyper-­realized presence of many of the other figures in the novel, Sorge remarks: I couldn’t imagine that it resembled my own, and I also didn’t believe that it was unique. What bothered me was that by seizing it, touching it in a certain way, yes, if I succeeded in touching this flesh, this skin, this moist swelling, with it I would touch the law, which was there, it was obvious, which, perhaps, would linger there in a mysterious way, holding back a moment, for me, from the world [à l’écart du monde]. TH: 35/29 Two points arise from this discovery, since perceiving the presence of the law as it is reveals it as conspicuous, which has the effect of rendering it suspect, and at the same time this appearance makes itself felt through a materiality that conveys a very different form of experience, neither within nor without the law but as its own excessive manifestation. Marie’s hand is not unique, but nor is it like Sorge’s own hand, instead it appears with the distinctiveness of his own feverishness as a moist swelling of flesh that bears the law and yet also expresses something entirely outside it. Moisture not only marks the erasure of borders and the possibility of contagion but also the contiguity of sexuality and mortality, which is not part of a law of work and its realization through acts in the visibility of history, but of a mode of contamination that is not visible and yet persists and insists within every act. Water is regarded as the perfect medium because of its stability and neutrality, and because it presents itself as the epitome of transparency, and as such it can become the paradigm of language and the law. But the moisture that recurs most often through Le Très-Haut, as has been seen, is that of sweat or damp, an uncomfortable, treacherous communication, opaque to control but undeniably intimate. Sorge does not work to undermine the law but finds that in his enthusiasm it doubles itself, thereby revealing the opacity of its apparent transparency. His illness consists in seeing things ‘as’ they are, in

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their appearance to themselves, which suspends the certainty of their appearance, and reveals that which subtends and is obscured by this self-­ appearance, and that challenges it from within, as Bouxx later tells Sorge: ‘clarity followed through to the end is that which denounces itself’ [TH: 135/138]. Consider the following paragraph, which concludes the first chapter, where there is a growing and undecidable ambivalence about the position of the writer: I would have liked to compile a report on this day, as for the rest of my whole life: a report, that is, a simple diary. That everyone was equally faithful to the law, ah, this thought intoxicated me! Everyone appeared to be acting as they pleased, everyone performed obscure acts, and yet around these hidden existences arose a halo of light: there wasn’t anyone who didn’t see every other person as a hope, as a surprise, and who didn’t approach them with a knowing step. So, I asked myself, what is this State? It is in me, through all my fibres, I feel it existing in everything I do. I was certain then that all I had to do was write, hour by hour, a commentary on my activities in order to find in them the blossoming of a supreme truth, the same one that actively circulated between all of us and that public life endlessly relaunched, watched over, reabsorbed, and threw back in an obsessive and deliberate game. TH: 26/18–19 Is this written from the perspective of the law, or its excessive inversion? And if it is not possible to make this distinction easily, then what does this say about the status and relation of these different perspectives? (A point that is made more resonant when it is realized that the journal in question seems to resemble the text of Le Très-Haut itself, which places further pressure on its title. For if the law is not just the highest but the most-­high, then does this superlative position not render it suspect, doubling its appearance and so rendering it opaque? Or is it the other way around, does the most-­high refer to the fact that the law contains itself and its excessive inversion? Seemingly, it is precisely this ambiguity that is being examined in this novel as the ‘law’ of literature, where the very idea of the law has become strange insofar as it is neither regular nor irregular but is both itself and otherwise.) If this passage is considered in terms of the political fidelity of his situation, then Sorge has succumbed to the vertigo of the double agent, but this is the position from which he begins only to go on to uncover what lies beyond it. For after discovering the overbearing physicality of Marie’s hands, something happens: ‘nobody looked at me, or seemed to be aware of my presence, just as if no one had been there and that around us there had only been a noisy void, a true desert, vulgar and sordid’ [TH: 35/29]. Such is the insight that Blanchot finds here: the impurity of the neutre, which is

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unavoidably related to the void but also, and more unusually, to sensuality, to the contagious obscurity of bodies. Sickness makes such contact possible but also externalizes itself in it as the irruption of the contingent, it is an accident, a disaster, ‘you no longer grasp the law, you contemplate it, it’s bad’ [TH: 37/31]. And it is as such that this scene ends in an entirely different physical encounter, which is as violent and incomprehensible as the sudden misapprehension of bodily language with which the novel had started. Marie works in a photography shop, a place where the infinite streaming of light is fixed in the portrayal of identity, extracting it as an instance of the law, a moment of its expression (much like the registry office). But in the studio, to which Sorge is drawn again and again, there arises another moment, one that does not partake of such isolation or expression, an anomalous moment of passion: She got up and, getting up too, I grasped her hands. I held her roughly. She was rigid, with a rigidity that called for a hammer. Suddenly, the cloth of her dress took shape under my fingers. It was something strange, an irritating and smooth surface, a kind of black flesh that slid, adhered, and did not adhere, swelling up. It was then that she was transformed: I swear she became other [autre]. And I myself became other. Her breathing grew deeper. There was a change in every part of her body. Up to now, it is strange to say, we had had the same body, a true common body, impalpable and clear. With a shattering speed this body broke in two, dissolved itself, and in its place a burning layer [épaisseur] formed, a sticky and eager strangeness that could see nothing and recognize nothing. Yes, I swear it: I had become a stranger, and the more I squeezed her, the more I felt her become stranger, determined to show me someone other and something other. No one will believe me, but, at that moment, we had been separated, we felt and breathed this separation, we gave it a body. That was obvious; finally we were no longer touching. TH: 44/39 This moment of fission or scission arises out of their contact, and forms a kind of alternate sensuality, one born of separation rather than union, a vibrant experience of difference through which the common existence of life under the law is sundered. It is worth remarking on the strangeness of this passage, given that sensuality is rare in Blanchot’s writings, and that Levinas’s discussions of eroticism and alterity were only starting to emerge at this time. Le Très-Haut was submitted to Gallimard in May 1947, and Levinas’s lectures on eros in Le Temps et l’autre had only been given a few months earlier [TA: 188–90/88–90].7 But the form of sensuality here is far from Levinas’s thought as it arises out of a strange and insidious impurity. There is not the clear and steady flowing of the light but a vivid burning thickness that takes on a life of its own. The consequences of such an act

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cannot be known, and this is perhaps its most significant, most explosive, political implication, as it does not concern attraction and union, and is precisely oriented to the dissolution of the common. This is a sexuality that is not presaged on the preservation of tradition, but on the creation of difference, with everything this entails for the role of the family in the construction of the State, and of the very foundations of ‘economy’ as the law of the home. Sexuality is seen from the point of view of its material secession; not in terms of the circularity of reproduction but rather its particulate frag­mentation and divergence. It is necessary to follow this passage closely as it is very careful in its transition. It starts from the awareness that Sorge and Marie had the same body, ‘a true common body, impalpable and clear’. This is not an ordinary physical body, but that of the law that unites them as citizens, and when this body is broken it is not only dissolved but replaced by the formless materiality of a strange and blind desire. In this displacement the body that was infused by the law, which was the law, has been exchanged for one that now expresses itself with a passionate longing, and in which the destruction of the common body reveals the two figures in their distance. Finally, in finding this estrangement they not only realize their separation but give it a body. The movement thus works in both directions: the dissolution gives rise to differentiation, which allows this separation to appear. It is difficult not to see some kind of Hegelian revision here as the law is sundered and exposes individuals to separation, but this scission is not merely conceptual but relates concretely to the manner in which the luminosity and ubiquity of the law is replaced by a blind and burning passion, which implies a different form of inter-­relation, less transparent and universal and more unpredictable and, moreover, without relation, as the pair find at the end that they are no longer touching. This transition would seem to reverse that which is found in Greek tragedy, where the archaic rule of the family is replaced by the classical law of justice, which is to say that Blanchot has pinpointed the weakness in this transition in that it is never complete or perfect; bodily passions can never be entirely sublated but remain within the form of the law as its inevitable corruption. However, any reading of this encounter also needs to take account of how the next meeting between Marie and Sorge develops, which has a very different outcome (see later in this chapter). In his early writings on the spirit of Christianity, Hegel discusses this tension between life and the law in terms of the movement of revenge, which motivates the saga of The Oresteia, but that also bears upon the subtending structures of the law; the passionate and archaic vivacity of life that experiences this splitting within itself as part of its unfolding: Only through a departure from that unified life, which is neither regulated by law nor unlawful, through the killing of life, is something other [ein Fremdes] created. Annihilation of life is not a nullification [Nicht-Seyn]

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of the same but its splitting, and the annihilation consists in it being transformed into an enemy: It is immortal, and, if slain, it appears as its terrifying ghost, which vindicates all its branches, and releases its Eumenides. The illusion of trespass, its belief that it destroys the other’s life and is thereby enlarged, is dissolved in that the departed spirit of the injured life makes its appearance against it.8 Much like the figure of Antigone in Hegel’s later readings, the Eumenides are a force of disruption for the State as they are bound to the archaic rules of the family. But where Hegel discusses this disruption in terms of the violence of killing, Blanchot sees something similar in the movements of sensuality. Hence, the fluidity of relations between Sorge and his three female companions, Marie, Louise, and Jeanne (horizontally linked to him as his neighbour, his sister, and his nurse), marks an equivalent disruption in his relations to the State. They do not so much sabotage his position as bring out its inner tensions, drawing out both his proximity and distance in relation to the law, which is inherent in the ambivalent movement of life, its necessity and contingency, as is found in the creative contagion of material difference. But in its autonomy such difference is just as dangerous as it would be if it were the creation of an enemy, or a force of violence; this is the source of its ambivalence, as it is neutral in relation to the law, not being reducible to being either part of it or against it. It is perhaps no accident that in the scene after Sorge has left Marie and gone back to his rooms, the first of the many flies in the narrative makes its appearance, almost as if it were a literal metaphor of difference, circling the light in his room before suddenly falling down due to the cold [TH: 45/40]. Le Très-Haut is full of such strange occurrences, to a degree that it feels almost overwritten, but they are not there to be interpretatively translated.9 Instead, the novel stages these events as part of the confrontation between the law and its excess in its ambivalent non-­resolution, which is why they resist explanation. The layering of different references, to Aeschylus, to Kojève, to Heidegger, and so on, only leads to the impossibility of finding any single understanding, which adds to its political resistance and multiplicity. It is thus that the book also reflects something of the atmosphere of the events Blanchot lived through during the first years of the Occupation, in his relations to the Jeune France movement and his work for the Journal des débats. The short-­lived attempt by the former to work against Vichy from within Vichy, as he later recalled, gives evidence of a form of fifth-­ columnism that would sit well with his understanding of the unavoidable equivocity of language.10 It is because it is not possible simply to oppose the law that politics, for Blanchot, is always conducted from the space of the fifth column, although his role at the Journal des débats makes this position discreet to the point of invisibility. The lack of detail about his activities in the Resistance could perhaps then be taken as a mark of the inability

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of political language to recognize it insofar as such activity is illegible to the law. If the events in the narrative are so uncertain that it is difficult to ascertain how they are to be taken, then this is because uncertainty itself has become the focus of the narrative: it seeks to render events in such a way that their sense is direct and indirect, and also neither, suspending the language in which this distinction would operate in favour of an awareness that language hovers undecidably between these two aspects. Such would be the lasting political impact of the novel: to show the implications of the instability that affects language at every level of civic life, and becomes obvious in official edicts and rhetoric, which cannot present themselves without suspending their meaning through the fact of their presentation, since they always present themselves ‘as’ themselves. Bouxx makes this point in listening to Sorge speak; recalling that he had heard Sorge say ‘I see everyone willingly, I have no preferences’, he remarks on the significance of this expression and Sorge considers it, revealing the image of certainty yielded by the self-­ presentation of thinking and the universality it underpins: ‘Then a thought formed itself with such force that I believed I had expressed it. “It’s the official doctrine”, I said. “Besides, even when you prefer someone, you prefer anyone [n’importe qui].”’ ‘Ah’, he said, ‘if you took that maxim literally! What strikes me is your attachment, more than that, a real veneration of the authorities. Through each of your gestures you express that veneration. Furthermore, you put it into words. Sorry, at first sight this almost seems to be servility: one thinks that you’re a functionary, that you want to get ahead. But don’t be offended by this idea; I dropped it straightaway. I even wonder if you don’t harbour completely different thoughts, you talk too much, you think too much: it’s not natural.’ TH: 45/40 Sorge believes that he is not doing anything remarkable, that he is simply taking each thing as it is, but this renders it in a form that is unfamiliar and makes it seem arbitrary and artificial and profoundly removed from the field of the law. On its own this crypto-­ironic position perhaps yields no more than the utopian solace of quietism, the illusion of freedom and critical distance offered by inner emigration, but its ambiguity is related not only to language but also to the difficulties with which the State is confronted in dealing with sickness, which individualizes and fragments, revealing marks of contingency that cannot be abstracted. The ambivalent relation between the sickness of the body and the body of sickness parallels that of the undecidable relation between the literal and the figurative, since it is a question of what level the reading or diagnosis operates on: is this a breakdown of order, or the emergence of something entirely different,

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especially when the two neither converge nor lead to each other but occur separately? And in this confusion the State is faced by an enigma it cannot dispel or resolve as it forms part of the body of the law; it is its own irrepressible life, which follows its own path. And it is precisely in that instance in which life itself is at stake that this issue is felt most acutely: in my own irreplaceable and irreducible mortal sickness, which eludes State control and leaves an indelible, illegible mark that cannot be contained by any aetiology or narrative. Decay and corruption in themselves do not fit into the terms of any case history, which remains oriented towards the health of the system as a whole, as their fragmentation and dispersal bears a fundamental loss of sense, of meaning or signification, so that what remains are merely mortal surds. The complicated position of existence in relation to the law is implied by Sorge when he tells Bouxx that ‘all offences are plots against the law, you would like to disobey it, but as this is not possible, you have to rebel against its legitimacy’. Dissidence is not possible as all acts, both real and potential, linguistic and otherwise, have already been incorporated into the fabric of the law, thus Sorge seeks to refute Bouxx’s insinuations by saying ‘you are not teaching me anything, you’re only expressing what I think, and when you speak it’s not you, it’s me who is speaking’ [TH: 46–47/41–42]. If the assimilation of language to the law requires the suppression of any allusive qualities in common with a vulgar form of literary-­political realism, then a trap is formed since the literal meanings of Sorge’s pronouncements generate the same allusive space. So when Bouxx urges Sorge to realize the literal meaning of his words, he is trying to draw his attention to the way that the literal implies its own form of allusion, which if realized would comprise a rebellion against the rule and status of the law, its very legitimacy. The nature of Sorge’s speech is at the heart of this issue (as the final words of the novel emphasize), which he is beginning to understand, as the tendency to speak too much is driving his thoughts into a sphere that cannot fail to contest the reality of what is there, and the strength of his remarks clearly registers his awareness of the sickness permeating his language, which makes it impossible to avoid allusion, indeed, words cannot be made immune to this sickness as it is their ‘health’ [PF: 302/310]. But if literality cannot exist in language, does it exist at all, and what would constitute its appearance? I had my eyes fixed on something on the other side of my bed, a stain [tache] that moved a little. This stain was well known to me. I had seen it for the first time at my parents’, quietly resting on the partition that ran alongside the couch. It spread out on the clinic wall, across from me, in a place hidden by the door when it was left wide open. Here, it was the result of water leakage. This stain was unusual in that it was only a stain. It represented nothing, had no colour and, except for its dusty permeation, nothing made it visible. Was it even visible? It didn’t exist under the

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wallpaper; it had no form, but resembled something dirty, spoiled, but something clean as well. I had looked at it a great deal, I had no reason to avert my gaze; being only a stain, it absorbed me; it never looked at me: that’s what made looking illicit. TH: 48/43 Almost as if it were marking the obscurely contagious effect of language, this peculiar stain reappears shortly after Bouxx has spoken about the way that the State erases the lumpen underclass as if it were wiping away mould. As it has no form and no fixed location, it would seem as though this stain was a blind spot in Sorge’s vision, except that it remains obtrusively, if anomalously, material. As has been pointed out, it occurs again and again in the novel, as the seepage of black water that runs through the streets and down Jeanne’s body. But what is important is its impassiveness, it represents nothing, it asserts and expresses nothing, it is barely there, and yet it persists, comprising its own challenge that cannot be met. It has the quality of having no qualities and is thus that which bears no allusions, it is simply there. In this intransigence it thereby appears as dirt, which is only visible by its effects on other things and is thus inseparable from what is unspoiled, but in its mere existence it cannot be discussed as it simply absorbs attention, without reciprocity. It is intriguing that the same expression is used here that is used later in the novel when Sorge becomes fascinated by the dripping pipe, one of looking at something a great deal (beaucoup regarder), since this seems almost superfluous. Instead, what is being remarked is the literal reflexivity of the gaze, the sense of doubled awareness that arises in deep and perhaps pathological attention, when the gaze does not just look.

II For a narrative set in an absolute city-­state beset by revolutionaries, this is not a novel that deals with the police, military, or judiciary, and for as much as there are discussions about spies and agents, these are not representatives of the intelligence services. Instead, the negotiations between the State and its adversaries are conducted in the language of hygiene; it is through doctors and clinics, quarantines and vaccines that the struggle takes place. This is not only to move the problem of dissent and revolt into the arena of public health but also to make the activities of security subsidiary to this arena. Treating the problem of civic disturbance in terms of hygiene is very different from doing so in terms of criminal law, for not only do the diagnoses differ but so do the prognoses. Furthermore, it makes apparent the way that revolt is seen as part of the activity of the body-­politic, albeit an aberrant one, and so is to be cured or at least suppressed. While this places the novel in the

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context of modern biopolitics it also recalls the structure of the original republic insofar as Plato’s discussion in the Politeia tacitly revolves around the inter-­relation between the political and bodily senses of the words ‘regime’ and ‘constitution’. But insofar as this is an absolute city-­state any disturbance to its body-­politic comes from within rather than without, and so gives evidence of a flaw or divergence within its basic structure. Such is the basis for the layering of the narrative with the story of Orestes and Elektra, but by introducing these mythic narratives Blanchot is simply supplementing the already narrative basis of civic life, by which there is politics, so that these myths render the narrative construction of politics apparent and thereby reveal the obscure and pre-­legal origins of the political form. Consequently, the possibility of resolving these initial tensions through the self-­realization of the State is voided by Blanchot in emphasizing how these mythic elements, much like bodily passions, assert themselves in a clandestine and eccentric manner that persists in and through the structuring forces of the State. It is by articulating these disruptive forces in terms of an anomalous epidemic that Blanchot can give expression to their formlessness, which is that much more threatening to the State. This is a revolution without agents or aims and so cannot be sublated or recuperated into the organization of the State, which is why the latter comes to defend itself through the faculties of medicine, since it has recognized that this is where its fundamental existential struggle takes place. The air of sickness that hangs over the city is such that the crowds in the streets are as listless as the clammy and pestilential fog, and in the apartments there is a persistent coughing and moaning amidst the ubiquitous rubbish. This decrepitude affects thought and action as well as what is seen and felt. Lights flick on and off or fade dimly, noises and odours percolate obscurely, words are suspect in their meaning, and everything becomes murky and unintentionally clandestine as if certainty itself were rotting. Sorge’s relation to this decay is not clear as we only see things from his perspective, so it is not possible to know if he is just a witness or if he is in some way (perhaps unknowingly) complicit with what is taking place. Without thinking them himself, he becomes overworked by ideas, ideas that ‘smack of sickness’ (sentent la maladie) [TH: 86/86]. Is he simply channelling these ideas, or somehow calling them forth? But Sorge quickly dispels this dilemma by saying that it is the result of the fact that he is talking to Bouxx, as if contagion were not just the mode but the form of sickness: ‘When you listen to me, I’m a sick person. In coming to you, my words come to sickness; it is through sickness that they reach you. Otherwise, they wouldn’t even fall on your ear, you wouldn’t pay any attention to them or they would mislead [abuseraient] you even more’ [TH: 90/89]. Although the excessiveness of his justification makes it suspect, it is also the case that if the city chooses to operate in the mode of hygiene then all problems will become pathologized. In this case, Sorge is simply giving expression to the disease, as Bouxx

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himself says: ‘you are so devoted [inféodé] to this world that even when your thoughts become really bizarre, they are still prompted [soufflées] by it, they reflect and defend it’ [TH: 91/91]. But neither of them realizes the extent to which this insufflation causes the world to become changed, since any defence in this situation is uncertain, as its very existence as a defence only calls its effectiveness into doubt by reflecting and refracting it still further. Thus it is not possible to determine Sorge’s position in relation to the city, or the status of his narrative, as there is no limit against which to place his narrative, to contextualize it and define its sense. There is a popular belief that in the moment of dying all the memories of one’s life pass before one’s eyes. If so, then this also articulates the position of the individual or the State at the end of history, the condition of being the last: All the events of all of history are there around us, just like the dead. From the depths of time they flow back to today; they have existed, certainly, but not completely: when they were produced they were no more than incomprehensible and absurd outlines, terrible dreams, a prophecy. They were lived without being understood. But now? Now, they are going to exist for real, now is the time, everything is reappearing, everything is being revealed clearly and truthfully. TH: 88–89/88 The journal that Sorge is writing, his own existence, and that of the city itself all appear to be equally infected by this terminal excess. And in this surfeit of illness there is a realization that the immanence of bodily disorder is inseparable from dying, an endless moment that evades its own death insofar as it lacks agency or passivity as the movement of sickness renders agents and patients indistinguishable. As noted above, there is a point later on in the novel when Sorge says that his nurse looks like his sister, just as he had earlier stated the reverse. Furthermore, he insists that he and his sister look alike, although Louise is described as very shabby and other characters see no resemblance to him [TH: 80/79]. Equally, when he attempts to approach Marie a second time, the earlier revelation of corporeal difference is displaced in favour of an aborted assimilation, as Sorge insists that they are not only alike but the same. He tries to persuade Marie to see this by making her look into a mirror with him: her face was next to mine, our heads were touching, her eyes, fixed on mine, became troubled. Little by little the resemblance appeared in the world before us, taking it over, spilling out its presence there, disdainfully reigning and dominating in the serenity of an inaccessible presence, and I saw by her wild look that she also recognized this resemblance, grasping

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it without being able to get rid of it, from now on she would not cease to be haunted by it as by the inescapable proximity of the law. TH: 100/100 But what this passage suggests is that it is not possible to know what Marie sees as her confusion and distress may have come about because of Sorge’s conduct, his idée fixe that has seemingly appeared before her as a concrete image. It is as though Sorge’s fever distorts his perception by first making him believe that his perspective is objective, and then letting this certainty become shaken as more and more equally objective appearances are overlaid on it, such that he starts to become delirious, ‘as if the whole of history in every sense had passed through me’ [TH: 106/107]. This point is reflected when Sorge asks his stepfather to write out a certificate stating that there is no epidemic: ‘The letters shone, sparkled: upon them a thousand other signs lit up, phrases of all kinds, shameful, despotic turns of phrase, the embellishments of a drunk, the cries of a wild beast, and out of this orgy [débauche] the law formed a faultless, definitive sentence, an irrefutable firmament for all’ [TH: 120/122]. While it may well be Sorge’s faith that turns this statement into a demonstration of the law (just as it could also be that of the reader in relation to the novel), it is still necessary to ask what kind of law could draw all these disparate elements together. And it is perhaps only one that, like the novel itself, operates with its own opaque mediation; bringing all its points into communication with each other and appearing by way of this contagion. This is not a constellation of meaning in Benjamin’s sense as these elements are not coordinated in any way but are errant, disastrous, and it is as such that this excessive overlaying of sense becomes its own refutation. The reading that occurs here is explicated by two further statements that emerge in the next few pages, which, like this certificate, seem to explode the possibility of their own meaningful appearance. The first is an oath of loyalty to the law and the second is Sorge’s resignation from all work, and both are performative statements that unravel through the breadth of their claims, for in their appearance as documents they undermine their own pronouncements while nevertheless still existing. As Sorge realizes in relation to his resignation: ‘by not sending it I had not suppressed it but made it definitive by subtracting it from any response and from any possible refusal on the part of my directors and in this I had taken the only way of actually freeing myself from all these stories [histoires]’ [TH: 125–26/128]. In these statements Blanchot seems to have found the point from which the récit will arise from the novel, how its form will occur by way of an intensification of its self-­relation and a resignation from its work: ‘the page is there, it contains certain words, a series of clear phrases, it concisely expresses a serious decision, which can even shake the heavens, and yet it signifies nothing, yes, look, there is nothing, it does not exist’ [TH: 125/127]. Thus his own resignation is more

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serious than Sorge realizes as it exposes a void in the relation between work and the worker, the State and the citizen, the law and its subject, a space that rejects immediate identification without simply opposing it, as Bouxx tells Sorge: ‘You are not an enemy of the law, and yet you want to leave the law, that’s extremely important’ [TH: 137/140]. Such a void also has its implications for the work of the novel by exposing its worklessness in relation to reading. This point is made clear by the fact that Sorge’s stepfather writes out the oath of loyalty to the State on the same piece of paper as Sorge’s resignation notice, making the possibility of their combined signing even more problematic as loyalty would then imply resignation, and vice versa, leaving the place of this writing itself anomalous, neither inside nor outside the law. It is partly in relation to this excess of writing and signing that Bouxx urges Sorge to carry on with his journal, regardless of its content, and suggests counter-­signing it with his own certificate about Sorge’s condition, one that states that he is ‘sick, contagious. From that moment on, no one will have the right to make you leave, not even the highest [la plus haute] authority’ [TH: 139/142]. Hence it is primarily because Bouxx sees a contagious quality in Sorge that he is beyond the reach of authority. This contagion is, as has become clear, evident in his vision, which seems to attach itself to things as if it were tactile or sticky, which is to say that it is not a vision that is immediate or immaterial, not an intellectual intuition as it were, but rather a way of seeing that gets caught up in things and thereby becomes ‘objective’ (and in doing so contaminating the conditions of perception), as is found in epilepsy (haut mal), as Marie had thought [TH: 96/96, 135/138].11 This obtrusive quality also affects other senses, given the narrative emphasis on heavy boots and sweaty palms and dusty, creaking voices, which indicate the non-­negligible materiality of these appearances as well as their anomalous presence, which parallels the breakdown of meaning in language and the law. Such items present a lowness that is lower than that which opposes height as they manifest a formlessness, a resistance to thought and any kind of sublation. These things, ‘that might seem absurd, like hair, and mud, and dirt, or anything else totally undignified and worthless’, are exactly those that are viscerally dismissed by Socrates in the Parmenides (130c–d) as being outlandish because of their formlessness, and that cause him to flee from them, they are instead ‘just what we see’ rather than being representatives of an ideal form that, conversely, would be ‘other than anything we touch with our hands’.12 In this way Blanchot is taking up a distinction between the lowness of base materialism and the idealism of Surrealist thought that had initially been explored by Bataille, particularly in terms of the failure of the Surrealists to realize the incendiary potential of formlessness for political thinking. But Blanchot does not proceed by way of associating this materialism with that of ecstasy (mystical or hedonistic), as does Bataille, because for him the

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strength of the formless as a political or philosophical thought is to be understood through its distance and resistance to conceptualization, that is, in its neutrality. As noted, it is in Le Très-Haut that the first formulations of this notion are developed, largely in terms of sounds or gazes, but most significantly in the lines: ‘they were talking without looking at each other, without getting closer, at an infinite distance from one another, as if the words were only the complement of a neutral presence, so that this sound resembled the tapping of Dorte on the wall’ [TH: 153/157]. The later thoughts of a community and relation that dissolves itself in a space without centre or horizon here emerges out of the materiality of a formless sound, a mere scratching or tapping. If communal language is the basis not just of an ethical society but also of objective knowledge, then the words that arise out of the infinite divergence between individuals, as if they were only the complement of the neutral presence that subtends this mutual evasion, would be ones that did not converge on a shared understanding but exposed a material interruption, an emptiness of thought and language that still leaves its material remains. This would be to expose a material puncturing of political or philosophical thought, an immanent aporetic stuttering consisting of the undisclosed distance and resistance that breaks up relation, the negativity or noise that enervates its sound. This flaw is partly what is underway in the endless descriptions of the law, which may provide some understanding of the excess of this work. Le Très-Haut is Blanchot’s last novel, and in its extravagance can be seen as being like a folly: a project whose incompleteness remains part of its design, a wildly eccentric work that explores the formlessness of the novel as its raison d’être. In doing so it has the same status as the epidemic in relation to the law, making its existence as a novel a manifestation of this same contagion and corruption of thought, of its anomalous formlessness. Rather than pursuing an idea of the novel as the Book, the form in which absolute knowledge realizes itself as Science, as Kojève discusses, Blanchot is inter­ ested in another approach, one drawn from Mallarmé.13 In this case the book is not so much the Great Work, destined to sum up the universe, a microcosm that could hold everything, but the hollow of its totality, its other side, its realized absence, that is to say, the power [pouvoir] to express everything, as a result a power that is itself subtracted from everything and expressed by nothing, that which must be called ‘the game par excellence’. PF: 43/36 Such a notion deviates from the stony resistance of Pierre Bouxx (as his name implies) and finds a more insidious and substantial mode of disruption, which also coincides with the thought of sovereignty in its exposure of

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experience. In so doing, and as pointed out, Blanchot comes across the formal implications of this thought that lead in the following years to the new version of Thomas l’Obscur, L’Arrêt de mort, and La Folie du jour, which turn away from the ambition of saying everything towards a focus on the absent origin of narrative. As a result, Le Très-Haut is more radically formless than these later récits, which are intensively concerned with their own form and occurrence, and this distinction is highly meaningful when it concerns Blanchot’s most political novel, the one in which he engages with the family, the State, and the law. The designation of the law as the highest (le plus haut) arises because there is nothing higher than it and so, in relation to it, those who are subject to the law are the lowest, as is reflected first by Sorge, and then later by Jeanne [TH: 118/120, 139/142, 221/231]. Equally, when Bouxx talks about the lumpen, he speaks of them as coming from the lower depths, although, in discussing their wretched and unhealthy conditions, they are also said to be outlaws (hors-­la-loi) [TH: 53/48]. This suggests that the discourse of sickness is not entirely determined by its relation to health, and that its vectors, the flies, vermin, and other contagious media (air, water, skin, language), operate in a different mode from that of the verticality of the law. The form of contagion is legion; it obeys no hierarchy and is both one and many, like a swarm, and so cuts across the relation of subjection imposed by the law. While Sorge is happy to subject himself to the highest, he rejects Jeanne when she tries to subject herself to him, but this is because he feels that her abjection is inappropriate to the law, rather than it being a rejection of the recognition as such, as a similar incident had occurred earlier that had inspired Sorge with joy, indeed, one so profound that he had wanted to kill himself [TH: 216/225, 222/231]. And although he tries to reject Jeanne’s pronouncement that she knows who he is, by stating that her words are meaningless and worthless, this rejection gives way to the materiality of her ‘wet animal hand’ on his mouth in which ‘the day’s events and words found room in their true place’ [TH: 223/232]. This alternative mode of communication bears its own uneasy space, like that between a gaze and its object, or a body and the grave, and it is this sense of spacing as contagious that is opened up by illness, which thereby gives evidence of its own kind of truth-­relation. The distinction between the most-­high (très-­haut) and the highest (plus haut) is hard to concretize. As epithets of the Hebrew god, they are largely the same, but in Blanchot’s novel the former term only appears once, other than in the title of the book, while the latter, less specific term, occurs three times, twice as simple descriptions of the law as the highest, and lastly, in Jeanne’s pronouncement, in its nominal form (le Plus-Haut). The most-­high is used in response to a discourse by Abran, a very old man whose rambling memories lead him to be called a vieux ressasseur, and whose decrepitude seems to situate him in an altogether remote and ancient time. His discourse

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is of interest as it exemplifies a kind of Sisyphean resistance grounded in a refusal of escape, by which the law of history and of life is supplanted or undermined by the endless repetition of memory. This repetition is an experience and understanding of suffering that can only go on and yet in which there remains, by virtue of this endurance, even as it comes to resemble the depth and burden of the grave, some kind of promise. Consequently, in listening to this meditation, Sorge remarks to himself that ‘without doubt everyone lent him their ears, but someone most high [de très haut] listened as well, someone who through his attentiveness gave to these appalling ruminations a character of hope and of beauty’ [TH: 185/191].14 This reference is not elucidated much further but it appears to indicate a kind of spiritual presence that arises in response to these ruminations as their legitimating audience (and perhaps inheres in Sorge himself). However, throughout the novel Sorge has had the impression that the things around him are in some way attentive to him. Noises and odours seem to gaze at him, and objects appear to respond intimately to his presence, and so the suggestion of redemption or transcendence in Abran’s words has to be considered from the perspective of Sorge’s other intimations of alien intelligence, which are even more equivocal in their humanity since any hope or beauty they may offer is predicated on their material distance from the law. Blanchot’s decision to use très-­haut in the title thus suggests a distinction, albeit marginal, between the apparent law of the city, and that which seems to arise out of its interstices and appears to be the law of the novel itself, one that cuts against the grain of verticality in the two terms (as they are different: très-­haut is not plus haut) while yet remaining within it (as they mean the same) by finding a depth more profound than that of the bas-­fonds, and a law that is neither regular nor irregular. It is as such that Blanchot’s thought can be related to Hölderlin’s understanding of the highest as strict mediacy, for if Sorge has become a form of the law, it is not as its perfectly transparent vessel, which is a merely illusory form of mediation, but as something opaque that corrupts the law of the city without being in opposition to it, something that operates in a different kind of space and is thus useless in relation to the State.15 In place of the glib transcendence of the phrase used by his stepfather, ‘whoever is in the hall is already in the attic’, Sorge finds a more abyssal alternative, ‘whoever is in the grave has no need of climbing out’ [TH: 123/125]. Whether the grave is the ultimate point of life, or its lowest point, there is no resurrection, no return, the goal of the human is the end, so whoever is in the grave is also the last man, the most complete and thus annihilated. Sorge’s stepfather applauds this saying but its meaning diverges from his own; instead of an easy ascent the vector of life dissolves itself in a site where work or movement is no longer needed. Where his stepfather may see the perfection of a satisfied life, the grave for Sorge indicates the finality of a death beyond use. The distinction is subtle, and it may not be apparent

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to Sorge himself as he says these words without thinking, as if by accident, but it coincides with the sense of mortality that has haunted his existence throughout the novel. The language of the depths, and of a dying that estranges, has marked his interactions with Bouxx and with others, as well as his attempts to plumb the peculiarities of his own illness. The sickness from which he has been suffering has rendered him already dead, in terms of his relations to his family and his work, and to the State itself, and its material effects have shown that the finitude that was perhaps thought to lie at the end of his life runs through it with its own enigmatic force. This finitude, with its autonomy and eccentricity, forms part of the resistance of the text, indicating how the death of the human that is uncovered in Sorge’s existence extends to the possibility of meaning, which is precisely what is demonstrated in the toxic excrescences that pervade the novel. When the end is everywhere, then it is also that which is lived through, not to go beyond it into some other state, but to live on in the end in its ongoing disaster, the grave remains open, as he had been told earlier. Something of what such a situation entails is being attempted in the anomalies of the text, its resistance to comprehension and interpretation, which, like Sorge’s skin, seems liable to a violent and unexplained fever. Such effects are not merely arbitrary but indicate the results of a system, textual or political, that seeks to align itself to a particular aim and to subsume everything to its achievement. By contrast, Blanchot is seeking to show what remains unassimilated to this teleological drive, which is as much a part of the movement of Spirit realizing the absolute State as it is that of the reader’s interpretation. What becomes important is how these other elements emerge and propagate themselves, and the effects this has for thought within the novel, and in relation to it. For the point Blanchot wants to raise is that the mortality inherent to the subsumption of the individual by the State cannot be so easily assimilated as its negativity is manifold and deviates from conceptualization. If the dead no longer need to re-­emerge, then this is not just to say that such re-­emergence is unnecessary but that they may have other inapparent needs, which may no longer even be formulable as needs. As Le Très-Haut persistently demonstrates, materiality has it own existence, which insists throughout life otherwise. Unlike other narratives by Blanchot, death does not appear to play a large role in Le Très-Haut (although it seems to culminate in it), instead, sickness takes its place, to such a degree that the whole narrative could be considered to be an analysis of the movement of sickness unto death, which is, of course, never reached. This point can be given greater depth, for, as Kojève made clear in the epigraph to this chapter, sickness is that which dislodges (délogé) the animal from the site of its existence. Where this displacement becomes conceptualized in the human as part of the universality of its thinking, in the animal this sickness only leads to death and the failure to achieve this transcendence. In Le Très-Haut Blanchot explores this

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displacement as that which is exposed in the inability to transcend sickness and for what it reveals about the status of the human. In doing so he finds a way to explore the non-­conceptual underside of thought and existence that is elsewhere discussed in the enigma of dying, but in sickness the materiality and life of this endless aporia is exposed in a way that is often obscured in the discussions of dying. But, as will now be seen, the overlap between the two is brought out in the problem of suicide, which draws out both the endless moment of dying as the failure to transcend and the ramifications of what Kojève called a mortal sickness.

3 The right to death

Human reality is therefore in the last analysis ‘the objective-­reality [Kojève’s translation of Wirklichkeit] of death’: Man is not only mortal; he is death incarnate; he is his own death. And, in contrast to ‘natural’, purely biological death, the death that is Man is a ‘violent’ death, at the same time conscious of itself and voluntary. Human death, the death of man – and consequently all his truly human existence, is therefore, if one prefers it, a suicide [. . .] Now, it is only in the Struggle for recognition, it is solely through the risk of life that this implies, that the given (animal) being creates itself as human being. It is therefore the very being of Man that ‘appears’ or manifests itself as a deferred suicide, as Hegel would say, ‘mediated’ (vermittelt) by the negative Action that engenders a consciousness discursive of the exterior and of itself. Man is a being who kills himself, or who is at least capable of killing himself (Fähigkeit des Todes). The human existence of Man is a conscious and voluntary death on the path of becoming [en voie de devenir]. KOJÈVE, 19341

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries attitudes towards suicide began to change in Western Europe, especially in England. As a result of the Reformation, which led to greater uncertainty about religious edicts, and the Renaissance, which not only emphasized a more individual, scientific response to the universe but also introduced many non-Christian classical texts to European thinking, it began to be possible to think about the act of taking one’s life from a perspective that was not wholly grounded by the strictures of religious morality. Previously, suicide had been considered a sin against god and a crime against the crown, insofar as it involved a violation

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of the duty to preserve life, and an act of unsanctioned killing. Acts of self-­ killing were harshly condemned with the perpetrator being subjected to posthumous bodily punishment, excluded from burial in sanctified grounds, and losing the right for their property to be inherited. While the influence of classical writings made the idea of noble suicide more acceptable, and the confusion and iniquity of the new secular world made melancholy suicides more comprehensible, these were largely intellectual positions. But attitudes towards suicide also began to change due to practical considerations, as there was growing resentment that the State could seize the property of an individual who had killed themselves, as well as an increased sympathy towards the fact that suicide could be caused by poverty or dishonour, which were not necessarily the individual’s fault. The development of these ideas in England coincided with an increase in the number of suicides (as social and economic circumstances changed) and a decrease in the number of convictions of these acts as crimes, as juries became less willing to condemn them and instead judged them to be caused by an ‘unsound mind’ (non compos mentis). As it was not morally or politically acceptable for the act of killing oneself to be the result of a rational decision, it had to be the result of a loss of reason. As such, the discussions over suicide sidestepped the theological proscriptions and became articulated in secular terms as resulting in some way from a loss of self; rather than being caused by sin, which was to be punished, self-­killing began to be seen in terms of insanity. This change gave rise to a feeling that the secularity of English cultural life in particular was linked to a ‘malady’ that led individuals to kill themselves at the least hint of misfortune, but in doing so it also propagated an idea of self-­ determination, that individuals could take their own lives without this being a sin or a crime, which came to spread across Europe. This change was marked quite emphatically by the publication in 1700 of An Essay Concerning Self-Murther by John Adams, which for the first time sought to condemn suicide on philosophical rather than theological grounds and thereby gave evidence of the necessity of developing such an argument.2 Consequently, the discussion of suicide in the eighteenth century began to change as it became necessary to understand the ‘madness’ that brought it about. Without a theological argument to condemn it, suicide became the locus for a different kind of approach that sought to learn how an individual could become ‘alienated’ from themselves. It is as such that early psychiatrists considered themselves to be alienists, and that suicide became the cornerstone of their diagnoses, for if an individual harboured suicidal thoughts then they were deemed to be irresponsible, in dereliction of their duties of care to themselves, and perhaps also a risk to others. And, if the individual was not able to be responsible for themselves, then someone else needed to take on this role. Thus, suicide was not only defined by alienism, but this new discipline defined itself in relation to suicide – indeed, the latter became the reason and necessity for the existence of this discourse – alongside the

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practices of isolation, restraint, observation (including examination, documentation, and classification), and treatment that accompanied this diagnosis. The presence of suicidal impulses also made it possible to distinguish the mad from the other groups, the poor and the criminal, who were often incarcerated with them, but to make this distinction it was necessary to develop an aetiology of these impulses, which was pioneered by Pinel and Esquirol who began to study the passions as internal pathologies. The force of this idea of alienation would be taken up by Hegel and Marx but in doing so it would become transformed and lose its connection to this earlier form of mental alienation from oneself and from others, as Foucault has pointed out.3 For in claiming that the causes of suicide arose from within, even if the precise nature, location, and origin of these passions was unknown, the possibility of claiming that suicide could arise from social or political causes was removed, equally, these pathologies were necessarily irrational in arising outside the control of the self.4 But the manner in which the individual was seen to be removed from themselves and thus considered to be irresponsible reused the ideas of expropriation and exclusion, which had earlier condemned the suicide after their death, and installed them within their life in an early manifestation of the logic of biopolitics.5 In both cases the individual is found to be in dereliction, to have abandoned or been abandoned by themselves, and this sense of dissociation repeats the structural logic of scepticism, of doubt about the basis and extent of reason, through which a space emerges within thought, a separation that is irresolvable. Importantly, Esquirol found that although the alienated individual was wholly affected by their disorder this did not imply a complete loss of reason or selfhood and so, through alienation, the self was confronted with the experience of not being fully in command of themselves while nevertheless remaining rational. However, this masks the point that when rationality is not complete, it cannot assume that it is fully rational; while alienation may not extinguish rationality, the nature of what is left is uncertain as it has now become contaminated. Thus, this dissociation implies both a distance within the self, as reason is detached from actions, and also a proximity, as impulses impose themselves without any means of controlling them. The self is not only exposed to alienation but subjected to it, rendering suicide (like writing) into a response to this alienation that is also its expression. Suicide is thus part of the history of the development of the intérieur, an intrinsic and inescapable facet of its emergence that finds its correlate in the development of literature as an external interiority. It is for this reason that suicide is such a central part of Blanchot’s understanding of writing, not just in relation to the ideas of Heidegger, Kojève, and Camus but also because suicide is the form in which the intrinsic scepticism of writing comes to its most focused literary-­existential point. Suicide as the ongoing force of being exposed to the alienation inherent to language and thought is a historico-­ material exposure of identity and meaning to endless corrosion, which is the

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irrefutable element of scepticism, the ever-­present possibility of the loss of meaning as such. This approach does not valorize suicide; as Blanchot makes clear the Romantic view of suicide as a noble act of autonomy is just as misleading as its religious condemnation. What is important is to understand suicide as more than the result of an individual pathology and instead as being part of language and thought when these are pushed to extremes, which then becomes manifest in writing. This is not to reduce the gravity and torment of the difficulties endured by a suicidal individual, or its devastating consequences, but to question the possibilities and limits of its pathology. This pathologization is of a kind with the instrumentalization of life and death that occurs in military service, where the individual gives up their rights to determine their own relation to death.6 It is in terms of the impossibility of defining this relation that Blanchot pursues his understanding of literature and the right to death, an impossibility that is foreclosed in its pathology. What occurs in this mutual destabilization of the relation between writing and dying is the impossibility of determining the nature of the exteriority that is exposed: as the attenuation endured by the one is used to understand the other neither can be the original trope, and so exteriority becomes a neutral term, neither of experience nor not of it, neither material nor immaterial. It is this enigma that suicide exposes.

I When the law grounds itself in the facticity of the act and the act is shown to be inherently ambiguous, then the law becomes indistinguishable from corruption, indicated concretely in Le Très-Haut by the ubiquity and indeterminacy of sickness and the way that language manifests its own obscure deviations of sense. And yet, insofar as this remains the law, it remains persistent and rigorous, not leading simply to disorder but to a thoroughgoing corruption of identity – in terms of what is one’s own, what is the same, and what is meant – a loss of transparency and utility that has consequences for eroticism as much as for conspiracy. It is in this way that the dialectical sublation of history and action is destroyed from within while nevertheless leaving it intact, just as death takes place but is not something that occurs in the order of things that happen. To live this situation would be to live as the last man, one whose existence is grounded in an (endless) being towards the end, as Heidegger writes, ‘death is not attached to Dasein as its “end”, but as Sorge Dasein is the thrown (that is, null) ground of its death’ [SZ: 406/293]. That is, ‘in regards to its ontological possibility, dying is grounded in Sorge’, a sense of dying that he will call ‘being towards death’ [SZ: 335/242, 344/248]. Death is the basis of this corruption as the imminent loss of sense, corroding the possibility of the completion of any acts or

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statements from their inception. Care (Sorge) is that which maintains the form of this corrosion, it is its law, or life, and is formally indistinguishable from an endless suicide.7 In this form of suicide Blanchot almost seems to have revised the revolutionary claim in The Communist Manifesto that ‘the free development [Entwicklung] of each is the condition of the free development of all’, by replacing free development with free death (Freitod), with all the implications that follow in terms of the rule of law and of language. The significance of this revision comes from the way that a free death permeates life rather than existing as its end. Aside from its discussion by Nietzsche, the sense of this notion can be grasped by comparison with the judgement involved in the idea of ‘committing suicide’, which remains a criminal act of self-­murder (Selbstmord), as opposed to a relation to death as voluntary, a conscious suicide that is part of one’s existence, a Freitod.8 The difficulties of developing such a notion, given the problematic relation of being towards death that Heidegger introduced, as well as the need to avoid a nihilistic pathology of suicide, will be discussed shortly, but it can be seen that the corruption and decay that permeates Le Très-Haut partake of this perpetual dying, which Blanchot is seeking to examine from a political and linguistic perspective, in terms of how the State founds itself according to laws about the place and status of death. Blanchot’s thinking on this point is made clear in his response to Sartre’s Les Mouches. While he is impressed by the manner in which Sartre has updated Aeschylus, and has depicted the horrifying consequences of taking responsibility for one’s own actions, he faults Sartre for not taking this latter point far enough, for not realizing that the abyss of freedom that is unveiled in the criminal act is not to be resolved by simply taking its horror upon oneself in the form of responsibility, a flaw that is made clear in Sartre’s decision to turn this assumption into a declaration that will also free others through its self-­evidence. To demonstrate this point he turns to the similar ambitions of Kirillov in Dostoyevsky’s Demons, who also felt that the realization of freedom contained in his act of killing himself would be enough to free all of humanity, but it is precisely in the contradiction between the responsibility of Orestes and the death of Kirillov that Blanchot makes plain the difficulties inherent in the idea of freedom [FP: 82/63]. For in his attempt to kill himself Kirillov uncovers the depth of emptiness that is freedom from the law, an abyss that cannot be filled by any form, and that his madness tries to cover over. Suicide is much more closely linked to freedom than Sartre has allowed in his existential reading, for in freedom there is the loss of any ground for action, a loss that is uncovered in the work of literature as an ongoing and incomplete death. By turning from Sartre to Dostoyevsky Blanchot indicates what will be sketched out in more detail in his rewriting of The Oresteia in Le Très-Haut, a revision that will seek to adumbrate this abyss outside the law by way of the unending death

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of meaning, which claims Sorge, just as much as it had Orestes, by drawing him into a corruption that will undermine him long before his actual end, which obscurely and inconclusively closes the novel. Care is that which reveals the dimensions of existence through its concerned awareness, and it is thus that which enables Dasein to come to an understanding of itself. It is because such understanding is intrinsic to Dasein’s existence as Dasein that its potentiality for being relies on the full awareness of its possibilities, including its most proper possibility of impossibility, of no longer existing. This full awareness is only apparent in being towards death, which first reveals this possibility of impossibility and thus makes it concrete as a potentiality. Being towards death is not an obsessive brooding over death but an anticipatory awareness of the immanence of death to Dasein’s existence as that which is impending (bevorstehende) and unsurpassable (unüberholbare), but indefinite (unbestimmte). Such awareness is cultivated in anxiety, not as fearful or melancholic, but as the awareness of the finitude that constitutes existence, since ‘the nothing before which anxiety brings us unveils the nullity that determines Dasein in its very basis, which itself is as thrownness into death’ [SZ: 409/295]. It is only in the moment of historical resolution, the Augenblick of being in which Dasein perceives and appropriates its historicity, that it can take a fully authentic relation to its own death as that which grounds and opens its complete historicity: ‘Authentic being towards death, that is, the finitude of temporality, is the hidden basis of Dasein’s historicity [Geschichtlichkeit]’ [SZ: 510/367]. The reading that Kojève will suggest, in which this attitude of resolution combines with the Hegelian realization of historical culmination, makes it possible for Blanchot to situate the last man and the being towards death of Sorge within the same figure and to elaborate its broader implications for society and life. Blanchot’s reading of Heidegger is, as is well known, critical to the development of his thought. But it is possible to refine this point further by looking at the analytic of death in Sein und Zeit, particularly section 53 (and subsequently, 62 and 74), which becomes the focus for much of his thought. It is in this section that Heidegger summarizes and elaborates the dimensions of death as the unsurpassable, most proper (eigenste), non-­relational (unbezügliche), certain (gewisse), but indefinite possibility of impossibility of Dasein that is always impending, and is revealed by anxiety as a nothingness. This manifold analysis is profoundly influential for Blanchot’s thinking, for in its richness it provides a way of approaching the enigma of death and, at each point of the analysis, reconsidering its existential definition. The centrality of death and dying in their mutually destabilizing non-­relation is to be found throughout Blanchot’s writings and it is evident that he never stops considering how it fails to adhere to the form of Heidegger’s analysis. While works like Thomas l’Obscur and L’Arrêt de mort are heavily focused on this issue, the significance of the account in Sein und Zeit is that death grounds the possibility of Dasein insofar as it is able to realize its wholeness

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and finitude authentically, a question that concerns many of Blanchot’s works in terms of what can be said about the definition of existence, and how the writer’s work undermines this possibility. This relation to writing is not simply a result of Blanchot’s own approach to this issue, but comes from the fact that the work of writing and dying are analogous when considered from the perspective of Heidegger’s analytic. Moreover, this analogy is brought out most compellingly in the problematic of suicide, which places any understanding of the possibility of encountering death under the greatest conditions of impossibility. Given this analogy, it is not surprising that Blanchot’s fictional works return to this issue again and again, but, aside from some comments in L’Espace littéraire in relation to the experience of the artwork, he does not directly approach Heidegger’s analysis until some late remarks in L’Écriture du désastre [EL: 252–53/240–41]. However, it is clear that the reading of Dostoyevsky in L’Espace littéraire is tacitly engaged with Heidegger, indeed, this volume as a whole is an extended if largely unremarked response to Heidegger’s thought. The central section of the book is a discussion of the work and the space of death, in which Blanchot discusses Kafka, Mallarmé, and Rilke, which is to say that it is through the work of literature that his own analysis of death will develop, and thereby come to respond to Heidegger’s reading. Dostoyevsky is not a common point of reference for Blanchot, and it would seem that his works are brought to Blanchot’s attention by the writings of Camus, as it is Camus’s thoughts that consistently frame his readings. In L’Espace littéraire it is the character of Kirillov in Demons who is discussed, since he is, as Camus had written in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, one of the very few who have understood that the lack of meaning in life, when taken to its limits, implies a refusal of life from within life [MS: 22/6]. Kirillov is a confused character who believes that by killing himself, deliberately and rationally, he may defeat death and become god, and that such is the necessary burden for humanity now that god is dead. Ultimately, his death occurs in a much more messy and anxious manner than he planned, which is part of Dostoyevsky’s satirical approach, for rather than freeing himself through a calm and fearless assumption of his own death, Kirillov becomes more childlike and disturbed as the moment approaches, lending the act a grotesque and farcical quality. Although Kirillov has his reasons, his suicide seems to need an additional impetus to be actualized. Verkhovensky, the revolutionary instigator, contrives a plot in which a member of their cell will be killed in order to create fears of suppression, and Kirillov will take responsibility for the act so that the revolutionaries will not be suspected. It takes time for Kirillov to accept this proposal as he feels that it undermines his philosophical ideas but ultimately he is persuaded that any meanings attached to his death will be immaterial. After he signs the confession he withdraws to another room to consummate the deed, but nothing happens, no shot is heard. Frustrated,

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Verkhovensky rushes into the room only to find it empty, but then, turning around, he is struck by horror: Against the wall opposite the window, to the right of the door, stood a wardrobe. To the right of this wardrobe, in the corner formed by the wall and the wardrobe, stood Kirillov, and he was standing there in an awfully strange way – not moving, drawn up erect, his arms held at his sides, his head raised and pressed tightly against the wall, as far into the corner as he could get, looking as if he wanted to sink into obscurity and disappear [. . .] The pallor of the face was unnatural, the black eyes were completely fixed and were staring at some point in space. Not knowing what to make of this, Verkhovensky grasps Kirillov’s shoulder, who reacts by biting his finger, and Verkhovensky hits him a number of times before fleeing, unnerved by the strange scene. ‘He was pursued by terrible cries coming from the room: “Now, now, now, now . . .” About ten times. But he kept on running and was already in the entryway when he suddenly heard a loud shot.’9 What Blanchot is interested in is the way that the aporetic enigma of death undermines any attempt to fix it through an intentional act, especially that of assigning its moment and approach. Dostoyevsky’s satire aside, there is a profound strangeness to Kirillov’s final moments, which partly explains his confused utterances, as there is an awareness that there is no possibility of overcoming death or of realizing it rationally, as it evades any argument and refuses to be assimilated to any course of action. The enigma of his death becomes a nightmare for Kirillov, which suggests that at the moment of killing himself he has departed from any sense of himself, either as a subject or as an object. The conclusion that Blanchot draws from this enigma is that suicide as such is not possible as ‘I’ cannot kill ‘myself’, which implies that any sense of death being one’s most proper possibility is lost. Although he does not mention Heidegger in this section, Blanchot makes the association clear by asking a series of rhetorical questions that put in doubt the possibility of appropriating one’s death through suicide, and thereby realizing one’s destined end: The attempt to deliberately and affirmatively claim one’s death; to grasp it fully and authentically so that one can become free and human by assuming the death that is the condition of one’s existence; to maintain this finitude as one’s inner possibility and thus to convert its impossibility into a power or work for oneself; to make the negativity of death active through the force of one’s decisive action, which renders its indeterminacy into a moment of complete resolution, all of this is suspended through the repetition of these points, which makes their possibility more and more remote. The plan that Kirillov has set himself unravels with just as much disorder, but in doing so exposes another and more intriguing issue, for the attempt to encounter one’s death on equal

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terms, without fear or despair, to meet it openly, not only parallels the work of the writer as he attempts to approach the absent site and event of his work but also indicates that the lack of calmness and resolve in Kirillov’s end ‘are not simply part of his share of existence in the world, but emerge from the sordid intimacy of the abyss’ [EL: 101/101]. Seeking to approach death as the goal of a planned action will only lead to it eluding such assertions, since this project involves the imposition of a defined act over an endless negativity. Instead of finding a sought-­for conclusion in death, the individual ‘risks becoming infinitely mortal’ and thereby losing themselves to a space of wandering without end or form [EL: 100/100]. Such ‘wandering [erre] is already death’ in which the individual can no longer assert or negate anything, as they now belong to the neutrality of absence in which they are no longer (themselves) but in which death can also no longer come [EL: 102–3/102–3]. Suicide seeks to make death present through the efficacy of an act, which dissolves itself at the moment of its realization thus rendering the act impossible; even as I deceive myself through an illusion of mastery, the act escapes, making it impossible for me to kill myself. Whether it is because of honour or shame, or through anger or grief, the act of killing oneself is subordinated to an idea, for the sake of which the suicide is attempted, death is put to work, it is seen as something that can be made use of in order for a certain idea to realize itself here and now, thereby ‘abolishing the future as the mystery of death’ [EL: 104/104]. Suicide is subsumed by its idea, which hopes to assert itself in its place, only to find that it is the ignominious non-­existence of the act that places its mark on the attempt, leaving a remainder that cannot be effaced and that distorts everything that can be said about it with an enigma that refuses to accommodate itself to its putative idea. It can be seen that this evasion of the idea in the act of suicide reflects that in the creation of the work of art, where the notion of work is just as persistently undone. In both cases the Hegelian discussion of work is put under pressure to expose its impossibility, as Blanchot had showed in ‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’, and is shown in L’Espace littéraire through the examination of the possibility of death. It is now understandable why Blanchot’s argument in the earlier essay is structured around the relation between literature and the right to death. While this discussion focused on the right to death that arose in place of the right to life in the period of the Terror, this argument was generalized in terms of the work of art and the existence of the artist or writer, such that the right to death becomes intimately interwoven with the possibility of the work: ‘Every citizen has a right to death so to speak: death is not his condemnation, it is the essence of his right; he is not suppressed as guilty, but he needs death to affirm himself as a citizen and it is in the disappearance of death that freedom causes him to be born’ [PF: 309/319]. Death is not to be concealed or denied, it is everyone’s right, that which does not just define existence but underpins its

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very possibility through its extinction. But this does not mean that death is to be appropriated since it remains a sheer absence of sense, an exteriority that cannot be assimilated, which renders the right to die profoundly alienating. While the concreteness and elusiveness of death comes to inflect the analysis of the work, the impossibility of the work as a project or act comes to inflect the status of death, so that for the writer they become almost indistinguishable, and it is in Mallarmé’s Igitur that this aporia is examined most directly [ED: 105/64]. As Blanchot makes clear, in many ways the question of whether I have the ability to kill myself is answered by Mallarmé’s later work, Un Coup de dès jamais n’abolira le hasard, for suicide is effectively a gamble, a game of chance, in which I seek to avoid the idea of killing myself under the name of any kind of project, and instead seek to approach the death that always eludes my attempts, the death that is not mine, that does not complete me, and that cannot be found or appropriated [EL: 37/44]. It is on this point that some of the most interesting pages written on suicide become relevant to Blanchot’s work, pages from Jean Baechler’s work that draws inspiration from Roger Caillois’s study of games.10 Aside from those suicides that arise through despair or shame, or grief or anger, there are those that bear a ludic quality, as Baechler terms it, ones that revolve around exercises in contestation, mimicry, chance, or vertigo. Here the experience that is undergone in the suicide attempt does not have any superseding aim, but is solely for its own sake, as a mode of losing oneself. The central significance of Baechler’s work is to indicate that suicide is not a simple or unitary phenomenon but comprises many different tendencies. While the ludic suicides that he discusses may seem rare or trivial they provide an insight into the way that the relation to death can occur in its uncertainty. That is, the suicidal person enters into this relation knowing that an unknown element will decide its outcome, and this can take the form of an ordeal, a competition with death, or a game of chance. In this way the manner and moment (and even the arrival) of death lies outside the individual’s control, but with a significant degree of likelihood that it will occur and will thus happen by surprise or accident, as it were. Here the act of killing oneself has abandoned responsibility for its own decision and becomes voluntarily involuntary. The stranger forms in which this may occur are the other modes that Baechler describes: mimicry and vertigo. Caillois’s thoughts on the mimicry of death were developed much earlier in his studies of the praying mantis, but Baechler does not refer to these, instead he uses the mode of mimetic games to understand how an individual can become fascinated with death to the point of wanting to imitate it.11 Although partly found in the form of a certain kind of childhood game, the fascination goes deeper and is more akin to a desire by the individual to experience this outer limit, and perhaps also (impossibly) to experience themselves as dead. Thus, this mimicry is not the same as that found in

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copycat suicides, or in the desire to imitate a particular dead person, but occurs as a fascination with death as such, which arises as the more basic repulsion to it is eroded. Instead of seeing death as terrible, it becomes something else, which remains enigmatic but is now no longer merely frightening, and if this feeling persists it can become a fascination. Such a relation may form part of the background to situations of so-­called inherited suicides, where the awareness of such an act in the history of one’s family can make the possibility of its recurrence oppressive. The category of vertigo-­ based suicides occurs differently and is linked to the notion of the ordeal but as a purposeless engagement with excessive disorientation, a desire to lose oneself not in order to achieve some other goal but simply for the (impossible) experience of loss.12 While akin to the (apparently) reckless acts of daredevils, there is also a sense of suicide as involving a form of abstract rather than physical vertigo, to which the individual submits themselves: a fugitive moment exists after which the subject is no longer at the centre of his own behaviour but where his behaviour becomes autonomous and reveals its hold over the subject. Survivors say so, remarking that they sensed themselves led on by an irresistible force. I do not think that this force was a social or psychiatric impulse that pushed the subject, but rather an emptiness and a horror that seizes them beforehand.13 As is apparent, there is a considerable convergence in these descriptions of suicide and that of the writing experience that Blanchot pursues, but the most important aspect of this convergence is the repeated ambiguity and impossibility of the experience of this encounter, which contributes to its imperative. As he describes it, death appears to be doubled, or contradictory, as there is the death that the individual seeks to encounter in order to bring things to an end, but in doing so there is only an escape from such closure into an altogether different kind of end, hence the gamble, for there is a ‘passage from the certainty of an act that has been planned, consciously decided upon, and vigorously executed, to one that disorients every project, remains foreign to every decision, the indecisive, the uncertain, the crumbling of the inactive and the obscurity of the non-­true’ [EL: 104/104]. In saying this Blanchot is pointing to the aspect of suicide that is most challenging, insofar as it is a leap into the dark, an absolute commitment to radical contingency. Not simply in terms of the possibility of survival but also of the role and status of such an act in one’s life, in that it might not have happened. There is no way of lessening the impact of this contingency, of realizing the kind of existence that transpires when the movement from one moment to the next could encompass the loss of one’s life, or not. Suicide is an act that undoes itself; even if it is rationally and consciously enacted it does not remain within such an ambit, as the ability to go through with the act dissolves reason and consciousness and thus the possibility of

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there being an act, an actor, or an acted upon. There is the approach and there is that which comes after, but they are separated by a sudden and impassable moment that supports no translation as it is a step that cannot be accomplished. One ‘cannot’ kill oneself, just as one cannot ‘want’ to kill oneself, the attempt dissolves desire as much as ability, and the approach masks what happens even as it does not ‘happen’. There is a need for a different approach, one without goal or reason, which is useless and endless and that ‘seems to reflect the immense passivity of death’ by avoiding any decision or illumination [EL: 102/102]. Such a need arises, Blanchot writes, because it is through the ability to kill oneself that humanity finds its equilibrium (albeit one without a centre insofar as it is ‘balanced’ against the unknown), and thereby its ability to be human by retaining a future that is human. Suicide is ‘an absolute right, the only one that is not the inverse of a duty, and yet a right that is not doubled, not fortified by any real power’. This is not to reinsert suicide into some programme in which the human realizes itself through it but to see how it opens a radically undecidable future, which is what the right to death bears within itself.14 And, as he goes on to say, recalling Camus: all these traits are striking as they can also be applied to another experience, apparently less dangerous, but perhaps no less mad: that of the artist. Not that he makes a work of death, but it could be said that he is linked to the work in the same strange way as the man is to death who takes it for an end. EL: 106/105; cf. MS: 18–19/3 It is important to note how this thought of death as double displaces that of the dead double that occurs in Thomas l’Obscur (which will be discussed in Chapter 5), as it suggests that Blanchot has realized the problematic nature of configuring death as a figure, which forms the core of Levinas’s analysis. Instead, by focussing on the relation of death to writing, he evacuates any sense of agency or position, and the aporetic movement of writing in relation to its absent origin comes to configure his understanding of the errancy and disorientation of dying.15 This understanding helps explain the unusual tone in this section of the book as it is marked by a large number of rhetorical questions and an apparently simple opposition between the activity of killing oneself and the passivity of dying. Firstly, it should be recalled that this section refers not only to Dostoyevsky but also tacitly to Heidegger, Camus, Kojève, and Levinas, as Blanchot sets out a polemical encounter between the existential problematic of death and its literary distortions.16 Equally, as his readings of Kafka, Mallarmé, and Rilke make clear, the literary versions of death are just as limited, hence the polemic goes both from literature to philosophy, and back, and this partly explains the movement of contradictions in this

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section. Particularly evident is the instability of mood in relation to death, where both anguish and passivity are found wanting insofar as they configure the encounter in terms of a certain approach, whereas Blanchot is seeking to go beyond any mood, either philosophical or literary, to understand what may be behind both, and outside each of their configurations. It is for this reason that the Kirillov section comes to present this problematic in its starkest but also its most ambiguous state, for as much as Kirillov’s rationale in attempting suicide extends and parodies the valorized encounter with death that might be found in a hasty reading of Heidegger, it also moves it towards the actual experience of errancy that marks this encounter. Blanchot’s point is precisely that dying does not enable us to separate passivity from activity, or the event from the non-­event, which is the basis of its contingency. There is an irreducible ambiguity that is exactly what renders the encounter with death vertiginous and enigmatic. And as the movement of dying exposes this dissimulation of sense it becomes indissociable from a kind of madness, which is why death comes to be configured in such different ways so as to obscure this ambiguity. The point of the rhetoric in this section is not to replace one image of death with another, but rather to remove the possibility of rendering suicide in any configuration of activity and passivity. While this section proceeds by undermining the possibility of assimilating the encounter with death to any form, this does not lead to a different encounter, but an awareness that what is undergone in dying is only partially addressed by such a thought and that there remains an excess or residue that escapes its form. As such, we are not left with a new image of death but the impossibility of finding one, and the effects of attempting to reduce its elusive enigma, an attempt that is intrinsic to thought but whose effects are felt through writing rather than being presented in it. We might wonder at the empirical basis that enables Blanchot to speak of death in this way, but it is here that his understanding of the relation between writing and dying becomes significant, insofar as writing exposes the writer to forces of desubjectivization that in turn reveal an anomalous materiality beyond thought. And it is precisely because the writers that he discusses in this section have uncovered this same movement that they offer themselves to his reading, even with the limits that they have also encountered, just as the thinkers that he follows have found a similar experience in the work of phenomenology. What is perhaps most critical to this point is that Blanchot has also undergone such a combined experience within his own fictional writings, as is visible in the narratives that he has pursued up to this point. These narratives, it is worth recalling, are intense experiences of their own loss of experience as they pursue their own limits and origins in their ever-­receding absence, experiences that are just as much of thought as they are of writing. In effect, writing exposes an unending material attenuation of thought, an experience of its own errant asymptote, which corresponds to the manner in which dying is a material asymptote of

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existence. The significance of this parallel is that thought undergoes the same evisceration in both cases, and thereby comes to think this evisceration in its attenuated self-­exposure. It is helpful to contrast Blanchot’s and Levinas’s thoughts on these points, which can be gauged by the way that Levinas moves from saying that ‘death is the impossibility of having a project’ into saying that the ‘approach of death indicates that we are in relation with something that is absolutely other’, an alterity that is quickly transformed from the other (l’autre) to the Other (l’Autre), and thence to the other one (l’autrui), which enables him to state that, insofar as the encounter with death and futurity is an encounter with the autrui, then the reverse is also the case [TA: 170–71/74–75]. In the mystery of this incomprehensible encounter there is thus an event of transcendence or infinity due to the absolute alterity of the other, in which the challenge is to allow the freedom that arises in this hypostasis to be welcomed and conserved by the self [TA: 174–75/78]. This relation with death is no longer distant from Heidegger’s thought, as it is precisely on its basis that a relation with the other becomes possible, just as Dasein’s own possibility is grounded in its relation to its death. And for as much as Levinas seeks to distinguish this sense of possibility from any ordinary sense, just as he seeks to dissociate his sense of the passivity of suffering from any that may relate it to the passivity that opposes activity, it is clear that these terminological difficulties arise from the conceptual shortcomings of a thought of death that remains within the sphere of subjectivity, of the self and the other. It is on this point that Blanchot’s argument will turn, as he seeks to move beyond both passivity and activity, and possibility and impossibility, into a neutral thought that is drawn not from the a priori relation of the subject to an other, but from the experience of literature, which is neither ethical nor phenomenological. Blanchot’s association of dying and writing is thus the result of a need to move the discussion of death outside of any terms that would configure it as my death, or as my relation to death. Suicide thus becomes an exemplary instance, albeit one that is impossibly aporetic, for examining the limitations of Heidegger’s thought, as well as phenomenology as such, a point explored most fully in those narratives where the narrator himself apparently dies (Le Très-Haut, Le Dernier Homme, L’Instant de ma mort). But there are subtle changes in Blanchot’s thinking of suicide; where earlier it was only the negativity of suicide that had been discussed, its elusive distance and effects, in his later works this impossibility is not just an aporia but insists within life as a non-­dialectical force. In Le Pas au-­delà suicide is discussed in terms of its relation to the law: ‘Suicide, temptation of defiance so prolonged and so clear (too clear) that it seems difficult – almost embarrassing – to resist it. Act of transgression: the prohibition, not pronounced by a law or by “nature”, but by the mortal indecisiveness of the act itself, this prohibition immediately broken at the

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same time as affirmed, transgression accomplished at the same time as suppressed.’17 While compressing the aporetic and paradoxical fascination of the suicidal act, and indicating the structural parallel to scepticism, this thought does not go much further than what was set out in L’Espace littéraire. But in L’Écriture du désastre, this aporetic situation is given greater phenomenological resonance: ‘To kill oneself is to install oneself in the space forbidden to all, which is to say, to oneself, clandestinity [clandestinité], the unphenomenal part of human relation, is the essence of “suicide”, always hidden, less because death is at issue there than because dying – passivity itself – becomes action there and shows itself in the act of slipping away, outside phenomena.’ That is, a form of space is uncovered in the suicidal act, a site that is not phenomenal, not of the order of that which appears, ‘the one who kills himself, even if he seeks a spectacle, escapes from all manifestations, and enters a zone of “malign opacity” (as Baudelaire says) where, all relations to himself as well as to the other being broken, the irrelation reigns, the paradoxical difference, definitive and solemn’ [ED: 56/32]. In this way the act remains outside any kind of relation, and so cannot be the result of a thought, instead it occurs as if by accident. In saying this, the phenomenological peculiarity of the act takes on a logical resonance, as its evasion of appearance affects dialectical thought, for in suicide ‘nothing at all happens; whence the feeling of incredulity, of fright that it always brings us, at the same time that it incites the desire to refute it, that is to say to make it real, that is to say impossible’ [ED: 113/69]. Thus, Blanchot discerns a dimension of the suicidal act that dissents from Heidegger’s understanding of death but also extends the implications of Levinas’s revision.18 The first consequence is that there is no death now or in the future (in a present to come). Suicide is perhaps, is without doubt a fraud, but it has for its stakes to make for an instant evident – hidden – the other fraud that is the death said to be organic or natural, to the extent that it claims to give itself as distinct, definitively set apart, not to be confounded, able to take place, but taking place only once, like the banality of the unthinkable unique. ED: 114/69–70 That is, before any understanding of suicide, there is the problem that death itself does not take place, that it not only does not occur, but that it does not exist in itself as a unique and distinct fact. This point then unfolds in two directions, for on the one hand: the one who has gone to the end of the desire of death, invoking his right to death and exerting over himself a power of death – opening, as Heidegger said, the possibility of impossibility – or again, believing that

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he makes himself master of non-­mastery – lets himself get caught in a sort of trap and halts eternally – an instant, obviously – at the point where, ceasing to be a subject, losing his stubborn liberty, and other than himself, he comes up against death as that which does not happen or as that which reverses itself (contradicting [démentant] the dialectic, in a kind of madness [démence], by bringing it to its end) into the impossibility of every possibility. ED: 114–15/70 This is to some degree the point that has been raised already, but Blanchot has pushed the extent to which it exposes the limits or weaknesses of a dialectical configuration of this (im)possibility, which indicates that even if nothing comes to pass in suicide: there remains of this aborted demonstration that we die ‘naturally’, of death without words and without concept (affirmation always to be put in doubt) only if, through a constant, inapparent and preliminary suicide, accomplished by no one, we come (of course, it is not ‘we’) to the lure of the end of history when everything returns to nature (a nature supposedly denatured), when death, ceasing to be an always double death, having apparently exhausted the infinite passivity of dying, reduces itself to the simplicity of something natural, more insignificant and more uninteresting than the collapse of a little heap of sand. ED: 115/70–71 It is here that we can come to grasp the significance of the non-­event of Sorge’s ongoing death in Le Très-Haut, and what the impact of this non-­ phenomenal, non-­dialectical evasion of occurrence means for thought and language. Prior to any ethical or existential understanding, the ‘logic’ of suicide, as it were, deviates from history and nature into a sheer insignificance. The impossibility of configuring suicide only exposes the impossibility of modelling death in any form. Suicide draws out the meaninglessness and utter removal of death, which does not happen and collapses any sense of it into mere materiality. This is no longer the appearance of death as double that marked Blanchot’s thought in the beginning, and, equally, this non-­appearance withdraws it from the passivity that sought to address it. Suicide as a way of (non-)being is a form of life in which the act is perpetual as perpetually incomplete (it is a vocation, as Jacques Rigaut insisted), and so for the writer it becomes indistinguishable from the work of writing.19 In drawing together literature and the right to death in the title of his 1948 essay Blanchot is making quite clear the association between them: that in literature the right to death is at stake, and, conversely, that the right to death is at play in literature.

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II Sorge’s existence is profoundly conflicted, for while he believes absolutely in the law he has to face up to the vicissitudes of everyday life in all their confusion, materiality, and violence. In this way he takes up the position of the unhappy consciousness in Hegel’s phenomenology, or, more precisely, he seems to occupy the position at the borderline between scepticism and the unhappy consciousness. In Hegel’s understanding, the sceptical position is one that has realized the endless negativity of the dialectic by recognizing the inessentiality of all existent things alongside the freedom of thought. But in this the sceptic is still bound to the contingent world and so has to experience its dirt and meaninglessness, the endless oscillation between this experience and the awareness of its inessential nonexistence, and the freedom that surpasses it. Scepticism as the activity of this endless negation is thus the experience of the dialectic itself in its movement between the negation and the freedom of thought: consciousness itself is the absolute dialectical unrest, this mixture of sensuous and intellectual representations, whose differences collapse into each other, and whose likeness [Gleichheit] is equally dissolved again – for it is itself determinacy as opposed to the unlike [Ungleiche]. But this consciousness, instead of being a self-­similar [sichselbstgleiches] con­ sciousness, is in fact therein only an utterly contingent confusion, the vertigo of a perpetually self-­generating disorder. This is what it is for itself; for it itself sustains and produces this self-­moving confusion. For that reason, it avows that it is a wholly contingent, individual consciousness – a consciousness that is empirical, which orients itself in terms of what has no reality for it, which obeys what is not essential for it, and which acts on and actualizes what has no truth for it. But equally while it counts itself in this way as individual, contingent, and in fact animal life, and forsaken self-­consciousness, it also on the contrary makes itself into universal self-­ similarity again; for it is the negativity of all individuality and all difference. From this self-­similarity, or rather from within itself, it falls back again into that contingency and confusion, for this self-­moving negativity has to do solely with what is individual, and it occupies itself with what is contingent. This consciousness is thus the unconscious drivel [Faselei] that goes backwards and forwards from one extreme of self-­similar self-­ consciousness to the other of contingent, confused, and confusing consciousness. It does not itself bring both these thoughts of itself together. PG: 120–21/124–25 Consciousness thus remains contradictory and at the mercy of its negativity, for even its scepticism remains a belief that has to be continually restated. It is only with the development of the unhappy consciousness that this internal

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contradiction is recognized as such in the awareness of the coexistence of freedom and contingency. But it remains unhappy since, even as it recognizes this contradiction and is thus freed from its endless oscillation, it cannot harmonize its aspects into unity. Instead, it sees the essential as remote from itself insofar as it persists in the inessential. This borderline is the central position of Hegel’s phenomenology as the unhappy consciousness is the state in which consciousness largely exists. It recognizes its alienation but cannot resolve it, and in this lies the modernity of Spirit, its intrinsic melancholy that is evident in the recognition of the infinite that Spirit’s current material finitude cannot encompass. Blanchot’s interest in focusing on this transition to unhappy consciousness (since Sorge is only partly aware of the sense of his continual negotiations between the infinity of the law and the finitude of existence), is guided by his underlying concern with the force of negativity, and the difficulty of recognizing this force as part of a greater and essential harmony of Spirit. But his awareness of the thought of the early Sceptics is also relevant as this offers an understanding of the radical suspension of thought in relation to beliefs in the non-­evident, a suspension that would inhibit the possibility of recognizing the harmony of existence and essence, even as an absent and irrecuperable harmony. This is the state of radical neutrality that is emerging in Blanchot’s thought at this time, which distinguishes his thinking from either the optimism of eventual reconciliation or the pessimism of utter destitution. Instead, there is only the endless negativity of contingent materiality in its negotiations with thought, which is found in the alienation of writing as an experience of non-­experience. It is of particular significance that Hegel’s understanding of scepticism should play a role in the development of society as well as in that of individual consciousness. For the role it plays is in the collapse of the apparently natural harmony of Greek Sittlichkeit and the emergence of Roman society, which became marked by a division between the now alien world of objects and the distance of the new Judaeo-Christian god. It also occurs practically, as The Oresteia showed, with the development of a system of laws that take the place of tradition, for these laws were seemingly impartial and thus available to discussion and contestation. This parallel with Le Très-Haut explains why Blanchot would be interested in exploring these issues of scepticism and social change during the Occupation and the Liberation. In many ways the turmoil that France had endured was symptomatic of the breakdown not just in French or European political life but also of the realization that capitalism, communism, and nationalism were all now exposed as false idols, which then led to the difficulty of trying to determine a path through what follows this collapse. The fact that Blanchot rephrases this breakdown in Le Très-Haut through the contestations between the abstract law and the alien world of objects makes it clear that he is examining this contemporary turmoil from a more fundamental

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perspective. It is not a question of debating the particular problems of the differing political systems but of asking about the relation of the individual to the law as such, and what place this relation has in a life of endless contingencies. Blanchot’s response to this situation in his novel is focused on the difficult burden of responsibility in the face of contingencies that cannot be shaken off. Writing becomes a way of understanding how to approach this responsibility insofar as it shows the negotiation between its materiality and its law and exposes the experience that arises out of it, the experience of externalization that arises in both sickness and suicide. As Kojève pointed out in his readings of Hegel, sickness is part of the movements of Spirit, its externalization to and of itself, by which it ultimately comes back to itself in the form of a realized humanity. But as we have seen in Le Très-Haut, the materiality of this experience is not one that can be coerced into such an ascent, it remains intrinsically meaningless and refractory to sense, to any sense, and in this lies its resistance, whether biological, textual, or political. The attempt to distance the sickness of the animal from that of the human (as one that is ‘only an abortive attempt at self-­transcendence’, whereas for the human the discord that arises in sickness can be conceptualized into the universal), suffers from the same difficulties that Heidegger attempted to overcome in distancing the death of the animal from that of the human. But, as has been shown by Blanchot and Derrida, this attempt comes unstuck at the point of trying to configure a relation to death ‘as such’, as death, which apparently secures the difference between the death of Dasein and that of animals. But insofar as death is the possibility of impossibility it cannot be related to ‘as such’, and thus the possibility of differentiating Dasein’s death is lost.20 The attempt to relate to death as such succumbs to the same dissembling that was found in the attempt to relate to the law as such. It is this aporia that is brought out most acutely in the experience of suicide, where the radical loss that is encountered is such that it cannot be taken up in any way as part of a meaningful world of existence. As Blanchot pointedly asks in L’Écriture du désastre, ‘what would be the difference between death by suicide and non-­suicidal death (if there is one)?’ [ED: 114/70]. As he goes on to make clear, the only difference is the way that suicide exposes the fact that death does not happen, that suicide is an obscure and abortive demonstration of the undemonstrable, the impossibility of laying claim to death, which is exposed by its failure to accede to this act as a resolution. Suicide, like sickness, makes apparent the meaningless rupture of what is called the natural, which remains the impossible for experience. The sickness that leads to death is thus a constant, inapparent, and preliminary suicide.21 In practical terms, that is, in terms of how the writer attempts to respond to this endless decay of meaning, it is useful to compare Blanchot’s thoughts on alienation to those of Marx, insofar as both sought to understand how Hegel’s dialectical model of externalization (Entäußerung) would be

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reconfigured once it was based in actual material experience. The writer, for Blanchot, experiences an alienation that alienates him from the object of his work, the practice of his work, his language in general, and his companions, which parallels Marx’s understanding of the alienation of workers as detailed in the ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’ of 1844.22 What is of interest is that Marx’s model is reversed in Blanchot’s works, since the alienation of the writer is from a language that is subsumed to exchange-­ value (abstracted from its particulars and generalized into a utilitarian transparency). That is, it is an alienation from a language that is itself alienated from everything but its exchange-­value, rather than the alienation of the worker from the practice and object of his labour into a commoditized exchange-­value. So, while both agree that alienation is the removal of the worker from his labour, they differ over its status, since for Blanchot alienation is an inherent and unavoidable part of language, whereas for Marx alienation occurs through the introduction of private property and the concomitant division of labour that breaks up the (supposedly) pre-­ existing natural unity of work and worker. Blanchot is thus closer to Hegel in that alienation is simply part of language, whether it is alienation from its possibilities into exchange-­value or alienation into the strange (im)possibilities of language. But where he differs from Hegel is in the materiality of alienation that is inherent to language, and its irrecuperability by thought, which brings him closer to Marx. As a result, alienation for Blanchot does not derive from or lead to a non-­alienated state, as the alienation that occurs by and through language is such that the writer is only alienated (further) with language as it is alienated from its value-­form. Hence, in this alienation the writer is removed into the underside of the socio-­historico-material vicissitudes of his existence, the indeterminate and anomalous exteriority that constitutes his experience of language. In this reflexive layering of alienation, part derives from the indeterminacy of these vicissitudes and part from the experience thereof, which is an experience of endlessness and namelessness. The experience of alienation for the writer has an entirely different valency from that of the worker, one brought about by the fact that language in its everyday form is already alienated in relation to its material forces of production, that is, to the idiosyncratic contingencies of writing. These comparisons do not serve to demonstrate a hitherto unrecognized Marxian background to Blanchot’s thought, but rather to indicate how the discussion of alienation in writing bears its own implications in terms of how it manifests itself materially, historically, and socio-­culturally. In the pieces he wrote in 1968 in reference to the events of May, Blanchot makes his most explicitly Marxist comments and states quite definitely that ‘the end of alienation only begins if man is willing to come out [sortir] of himself (of everything that institutes him as interiority): out of religion, the family, the State. The call to the outside, an outside that is neither another world,

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nor a hidden world [arrière-­monde], is the only movement to oppose all forms of patriotism, whatever they may be.’23 While this reveals the form of the political that inheres in Blanchot’s discussions, it also shows that alienation only ‘ends’ with the extension of exteriority, thereby indicating how language operates in writing as an endless force of critique and material abstraction. The relation of the writer to his work had been studied in such terms in the first part of the ‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’, which showed that Blanchot was aware of how his thinking both converged and diverged from the dialectical thought of Hegel, Marx, and Kojève. But what this broader understanding of the writer’s alienation conveys is that the dialectics of labour are stranger and more complex when considered in relation to language. Such an approach is significant for what it implies about the subsequent development of Blanchot’s writing, for the later emergence of fragmentary writing is partly a result of this rethinking of the dialectics of writing, as the following chapters will show. What seems to occur in Blanchot’s thinking is a process in which the alienation that takes place by way of the image, as it emerges in his writing, is reintroduced into writing as it is exposed to this alienation. For the image that emerges from writing is a sensible abstraction that not only reflects but also derives from the writing, so when it is reintroduced into writing as a formal innovation it is also its critique and experience, which only leads to further image-­like abstractions. Writing is thus reformulated according to its own expressions of exteriority, which lead it to fragment and make it an analysis of its own experience and vice versa. Such writing is not simply abstract or self-­contained as its quasi-­ dialectical reconfiguration allows it to develop as a critique of its socio-­ historico-material vicissitudes by finding the means to bring such indeterminacies to thought, to be their logic, in a way. But in doing so it is also the experience of this critique, the life or thought of its analysis that appears as its singular expression and affirmation, since it endures not just as the peculiar determination of indeterminacy but also the indeterminacy of determination, which is the material abstraction and ambiguity of alienation.24 From this position the readings of literature developed by Lukács and Sartre fall into the trap of following Marx too closely in that they see the necessary outcomes of their critiques to be normative reconstructions: realistic or committed literature. Whereas, for Blanchot, the analysis of literature does not permit of such confident normativity as the alienation of language cannot be redressed. Language does not exist in the world as a praxis like labour and so cannot be reoriented towards a supposedly more emancipatory model. But what its analysis reveals is not just its suppressed socio-­historico-material vicissitudes but also the experience thereof, which is thus an experience of language as a permanent contestation, the disruption and estrangement of all order that literature both expresses and explores.25

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For the space that emerges in literature by way of the image becomes the basis of its own deformation, it does not withdraw from its own effects but develops through the ongoing analysis and experience of its own expressions, leading to an exponential estrangement; language and thought pushing each other to further and further extremes that show their lack of inherent order. Literature holds no allegiances and recognizes no norms, and is thus closer to the absolute nature of capital in its incessant dissatisfaction, but one that is not alienated from its own material forces of production, from writing, insofar as it distances itself from its reified value-­form as mere communication. This then yields a different understanding of the dialectics of the abstract and the concrete as an autonomous material dialectic that takes on the appearance of a form of life. In this literary expérience writing gives rise to its own abstractions, which become the thought and language of its concrete articulation and fragmentation, the ‘science’, in effect, that is peculiar to its object. But this transformation has another effect, as Blanchot points out in response to Althusser’s Lire le Capital, since literature ‘only becomes science through the same movement that leads science in its turn to become literature, inscribed discourse, that which falls as always into “the insane game of writing” ’.26 In leading to this philosophical dis-­course, ‘Marx helps us to understand that the speech [parole] of writing, speech of incessant contestation, must constantly develop itself and break itself into multiple forms’. So, in reading Marx himself, for example, we are in the midst of different voices that articulate and disarticulate each other, the political, philosophical, and scientific, and even if these languages seem to converge towards the same end, they cannot be retranslated into one another, and their heterogeneity, the divergence [écart] or distance that decentres them, renders them non-­contemporary and such that, producing an effect of irreducible distortion, it obliges those who are to sustain a reading (a practice) of them to submit themselves to an incessant reorganization [remaniement]. A: 117/99–100 The only other reference point for such a strong vindication of the heterogeneity of political language comes in Blanchot’s response to the work of Sade, as will be shown later, which also reflects the force of his own multiple voices as a writer of fiction, critique, and theory, all of which come to bear on the mode of his political interventions and give evidence of this incessant reorganization of form.

PART TWO

The aporetic imperative

4 The absolute milieu

Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas holds a pivotal place in Blanchot’s writings for in it the form of the récit is pushed to its most extreme point in terms of its reflexivity and sparseness. After Le Très-Haut his fictional writings became more complex formally but more reduced narratively as he moved from novel to récit, which was then pushed even further in Celui qui. Thereafter Blanchot changes tack slightly with Le Dernier homme only to re-­emerge with an entirely new form in L’Attente l’oubli. Evidence for this movement can also be found in his critical writings, as Celui qui was written alongside L’Espace littéraire, which is the most focused and carefully constructed of his theoretical works. The récit was published in April 1953, and shortly afterwards his critical writings would become less introspective with the appearance of two articles in the re-­launched Nouvelle revue française entitled ‘Où va la littérature?’ These would be followed by other articles that sought to take account of a new direction then emerging in French literature, which, although akin to his own writings, would also be distant enough for Blanchot to ask more critical questions about the current nature and direction of literary writing. Works by Beckett, Barthes, and Robbe-Grillet for the first time cast his own works into perspective and forced Blanchot back from the extreme point that he had reached with the dual publications of Celui qui and L’Espace littéraire.1 It is thus highly useful to examine the nature of the point that was reached in this récit and the status of its attenuation. Describing what takes place in Celui qui is by no means easy, since a simple account of its ‘action’ would only be able to state that a man wanders around a house talking to an invisible companion. But saying as much gives no impression of the subtlety and complexity of the negotiations that the narrator is led into, for despite its rarefaction of the narrative form there is an almost vertiginous depth to this récit. In fact, it is precisely because Blanchot pushes what little is left of the narrative to such an extreme of reflexivity that what we are left with is almost bottomless. As a result, it is not possible to do any more than examine a few pages of this récit, but to do so it is necessary to approach the locus of its reflexivity by trying to

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understand the relation between the space of the work and the form of its sentences, which are interleaved or cross-­wired as it were. Such an approach reveals how the narrative constitutes its own mode of legibility, a gaze whose form is both generated by and grounded in the narrative itself. While such a sense of reflexivity might lead to banality or solipsism Blanchot manages to anchor it in the ambiguity of apparently prosaic words and things, which prevents it from becoming sterile.2 It is in this way that Celui qui brings into view for perhaps the first time in his writings, and certainly in its most intense form, the reality of désœuvrement: the nature of what is at issue when nothing is going on. The gaze that emerges from this thinning out of the narrative is thus a modern variant of the melancholy gaze, with all its ontological and epistemological implications, for in bringing this situation to a level of tangibility it also provides a rigorous analysis of it. The interleaving of the space and the language of the narrative can be ascertained most concretely by seeing how the conventional situations of continuity and discontinuity are reversed in Celui qui, such that the ordinarily discontinuous positions of tense or subject are made into transitions, as utterances that appear introspective are responded to as if they had been uttered aloud or statements in the subjunctive or pluperfect are treated as if they were actually ongoing. While, conversely, the sense and order of spoken words are suspended or disrupted, such that what would ordinarily seem to be a statement of banal transparency becomes ambiguous and problematic, rendering the progress of the conversation uncertain, as when the question ‘won’t it be winter soon?’ receives the response ‘What winter are you talking about?’ [CQ: 20/269]. The spatial metaphors underlying the expected movement of time and language, its steady linear progression from one point to the next, are ungrounded and give way to an inverted or evacuated form of position where the continuous and discontinuous are reversed. To understand this better we need to examine the topological descriptions in the récit, for just as conversation now seems fragmented by the doors and windows that open and close within it, leaving expected courses of navigation hesitant and obscure, so the space of the house seems fluid and open, with rooms and stairways sliding into each other and the passage of time collapsing into a confusion of hours and seasons. The space of the house, like that of the narrative, is one of inverted transparencies, which thus affects the position and movement of the figures who inhabit it in a way that empties space and time of conventional dimensions and coordinates. For if what is inner has begun to communicate with what is outer, then so too has exteriority insinuated itself into the interior. But this is not a playful or arbitrary inversion, or a pathological experiment like Le Très-Haut, rather it follows from a rigorous exploration of the aesthetics of language in both its Kantian senses, that is, not only in terms of (the conditions of) its sensible experience but also its indeterminate expressions.

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In the Transcendental Aesthetic Kant insists that time and space are neither concepts nor intuitions but the pure forms of intuition, that is, some entirely different form of representation that necessarily precedes experience. But, as Adorno points out, such pure forms are ‘speculative constructions’, which indicates the additional problem that if these forms are non-­ conceptual, insofar as they are not generally derived from experience, then they are also not intuitive, as they cannot be experienced as such. What this means is that the general forms of space and time cannot be understood except in reference to particular spaces and times, and vice versa, that space and time can only be considered in relation to the spatial and temporal as such, which can thus no longer be thought of as purely given infinite magnitudes. The aporetic contradiction between these understandings, in which the forms of space and time are neither conceptual nor non-­conceptual, neither intuitive nor non-­intuitive, indicates for Adorno that there is an inescapable mediation between the form and the material of these experiences.3 A mediation that expresses itself dialectically in/as the forms of space and time in their generality and specificity, that is, form is the mode in which the materiality of these experiences presents itself. It is as such that the sensible aesthetics of the work of art give way to an analysis of their own transcendental grounds, in which the forms and deformations of the spatial and temporal as such are inseparable from their expression in the form of the work. In terms of the work of literature, the pure forms of its experience are neither pure nor entirely formal but indicate the conditions of its actual rather than possible experience as these are examined through the work itself.4 So we could say that language in Blanchot’s récit is the mode in which the formations of space are examined insofar as the space of the work is the mode in which language experiences deformation.

I The narrative orients itself around a receptacle of transparency, a glass of water, whose meniscus marks the opacity of transparency by which it shows that it is not nothing but imperceptibly refracts what goes on around it. It is this refraction that communicates itself through the supposed immediacy of the forms of time, space, and language, a refraction that is as conceptual as it is material. Blanchot’s language, like the house of the narrative, is one that is open to the elements, as we say, a receptacle of transparency that is, as Jean-Yves Lacoste puts it in a discussion of the structure of Dasein, ‘nothing but doors and windows’, and as such the text acts like an Aeolian harp of language: allowing language to take shape through it as a form of negative space.5 It is perhaps for this reason that so much of the narrative is concerned with borders and approaches, since they are the terms of any relationship with the other, but also with attempts to describe them in order to find a

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way of coming to terms with the other so that it is possible to communicate. It is thus that communication with the other is made both possible and impossible by such reflexivity, and that the conversation at times seems like a soliloquy and at others to be immeasurably dissociated. Just as the attempt to approach the other proceeds alongside an attempt to describe this approach, so the exploration of the space of the récit also seeks to bring this exploration to words, to sustain it with its own commentary, for without this reflexivity its space would remain unarticulated, although through it the space becomes complex and refractory. It is particularly interesting in this regard to focus on a key moment that starts thirty pages into the text. After tentatively circling around the uncertainties of the opening statement of the narrative (‘I sought, this time, to approach him’) and failing twice to restart the conversation, the narrator in frustration releases a ‘flood of words’, his longest speech thus far, in which he expresses his doubt over whether he is able to decide between himself and the other [CQ: 30/274].6 This sudden outburst seems to release a key, for in its aftermath there appear the first concrete details of the narrative. As if animated by the disorderly rush of his words, the wind begins to blow, a harsh, cold wind that even the narrator’s companion seems to feel, a companion who up until this point had appeared to be disembodied, as if he were no more than an echo of the narrator’s thoughts and words. But with the entrance of this specific affect a threshold seems to have been crossed, for now the attention of both figures turns outwards, towards the house, which has not been mentioned before, and the narrator is asked if he can describe it ‘again’. This request is repeated throughout the narrative and arises from a desire to examine the ‘foundations’ of their situation, but these foundations are not revealed in the narrative as much as by it as it explores its own conditions of possibility in their actual linguistic specificity [CQ: 31/274]. A point emphasized by contrast in the silence that follows the companion’s offer to do ‘everything’ for the narrator (in his attempt to describe the house), for in the generality of this offer the narrator only finds a silence into which he feels everything solid should slide [CQ: 32/274]. Nevertheless, these thoughts find the narrator standing or sitting near the foot of the stairs, by accident as it were, since this first point of spatial determination appears in passing, in parentheses, and is as uncertain as it is specific, but from here the description begins: I looked at the room that seemed to extend quite far, I couldn’t see its limits clearly, I remembered the space instead, as I remembered myself. I stood up to go to the kitchen for a glass of water, but I must have mistaken the door, I saw below me a disorderly, poorly lit room, which I didn’t have the strength to go down into (probably the cellar). I found myself again a little further on. I heard a door bang, no doubt the one I must not have closed and that the wind was flinging back. But

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the noise appeared very distant to me. Everything was extraordinarily calm. Looking through the large bay windows – there were three of them – I saw that someone was standing on the other side; as soon as I noticed him, he turned to the window and, without stopping at me, stared rapidly, with an intense but rapid gaze, at the whole expanse and depth of the room. I was perhaps in the centre of the room. I couldn’t see the garden clearly that had to be found outside, but I recalled it with great intensity [puissance], with a force that resembled desire. I could make out the surroundings. While I was inside this image, I tried to look again, a little further, to see if someone was still there, but I didn’t manage to do so or not altogether. Yet I remembered these words: ‘People, people,’ which led me to say softly: ‘I think someone is there.’ ‘Someone? Here?’ ‘Just now someone was looking through the window.’ ‘Through the window?’ Words pronounced in a tone so unusual, so low, that I began in turn to feel a kind of fear. What frightened me was that he seemed to repeat my words without altogether understanding them, and this thought occurred to me: Does he know what a window is? ‘Someone was looking from outside into the room.’ ‘Here?’ ‘Where we are.’ He said again: ‘Who was it?’ ‘I don’t know, I didn’t see him well enough.’ ‘And did he see you?’ I reflected; this question, I don’t know why, gripped at my heart; I could only say to him: ‘Perhaps he didn’t see me, perhaps he didn’t see anyone.’ CQ: 32–34/275–76 It would seem that as soon as there is space, there is the possibility of people, and thus the possibility of interaction or failed interaction. This scene quickly introduces a complex of relations that will be at the centre of what follows in the narrative, so it will be worthwhile to proceed carefully through it. To begin with the relation of the narrator to the space that he finds himself in is made problematic as his gaze proves less helpful to his attempts to orient himself than his memory, and later his imagination. It is as though vision can only reveal some elements of his surroundings, which then must be enhanced with other modalities, suggesting that the space is not entirely objective and that there is an intrinsic uncertainty about how and in what modes it is explored and made manifest. Unsurprisingly, as soon as he gets up he becomes disoriented, and although sound seems to bring him back to himself, it does not do so without also indicating how remote he is from its source, for as a mode of reflection sound only offers a relative and indeterminate location. The figure seen outside the window could be considered to be the narrator’s own reflection, but this would fail to register the fact that it is not

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recognized as such, and insofar as it is not recognized it remains the figure of a stranger and thus is enigmatic. In doing so, and as with the spatial confusion that the narrator endures, these phenomena cannot be resolved through simple explanations for such explanations are irrelevant to the persistence of the enigma. As such, these are not merely descriptions of thought-­experiments but are the ways in which the narrative explores and expresses the conditions of its own experience in their concreteness: the fact that space and vision do not resolve themselves according to conventional coordinates but remain uncertain and changeable. Indicative of this approach is the fact that the narrator does not immediately react to the presence of the other, but instead tries to see if he ‘was still there’ in his memories. That is, he does not try to gaze directly at the figure in order to see it more clearly but instead tries to examine the possibility of its appearance by seeing if it was (retroactively) still there in his memories. As if its current reality was to be ascertained not just by its appearance in his memory but by its continued existence therein, like an active form of déjà vu, which in overlaying the present reflects or doubles it and thereby seeks to substantiate it, although significantly no confirmation is found here. This is to analyse the conditions of possibility by way of sensible memory, much as he remembered the space in the same way that he remembered himself, as if each gaze required a recollection of its own situation in order to see, which only removes it further from itself, into a receding exteriority of ambiguity over the position and nature of the gaze. The fact that this recollection is described as having a great intensity, a force that resembled desire, not only indicates the overpowering physicality of its experience but also suggests that it is operating like the force of imagination (Einbildungskraft), a point supported by the way that the narrator goes on to describe how he was inhabiting this image, was inside it (j’étais à l’intérieur de cette image), insofar as it had become something that could be inhabited; although only recalled, it has a spatial substantiality. The construction of the narrative image as merely ideal has been undercut to the extent that the image exteriorizes itself as a memory, which grants it the same degree of substance as an actual perception while also making sensible its conditions, not just in terms of what the narrator experiences but also in terms of the reading of the text, through the discovery that these images have a concrete linguistic ambiguity that cannot be resolved through a determination of their essence but rather have to be navigated; it is not so much a question of what they are, but how and in what form. It is perhaps this ambiguity that confuses the narrator’s companion, who seems not to understand the notion of someone looking in from outside; not the fact of the window as such but what such an object implies about the nature of vision, what it would mean to look through a window (par une vitre), as if the transparency and exteriority inherent to such an object were unfamiliar notions.

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The manner in which the exteriority of space has started to infiltrate these observations is made apparent by the way that comments and perspectives seem to follow each other paratactically, without convergence or conjugation, and so without reducing the distance between them, leaving them in their otherness. But while this movement of exteriorization might suggest a form of temporal progression, in that what is outside is also after, here the lack of firm conjugation merely places these observations beside each other without assimilating them, as there is no origin or aim that would provide a sense of direction. That is, statements and perspectives are repeated but in doing so they remain apart, the narrator and the figure outside the window do not see each other in an exchange of glances, and the narrator and his companion may engage in conversation but its turns are eccentric rather than concentric, at each point they turn away from each other, each reiteration providing more ambiguity rather than less, estranging their terms rather than gathering them into a harmonious accord. This is a text without centre or direction, which produces a profoundly unfamiliar topology. Conversely, this sense of pervasive exteriorization affects the nature of interiority in terms of those thoughts and words that the narrator keeps to himself, for his conversations with his companion often pass by way of ellipses that seem to communicate themselves, to the extent that it is through what is unspoken that there is a sense of agreement or community between them, however limited. The following moment is particularly resonant on the difficulties and instabilities of this point: I remember a period when I would constantly ask him a question that I could only address to him from the depths of my unconcern: ‘Do you know that?’, to which he would respond: ‘Yes, it’s true, I know it very well,’ and from these answers I derived a joyful pleasure, a strange lightheartedness, the impression that reduplication was not the frame of memory, but the opening of space. At present, I lacked unconcern, I remained silent. I certainly wanted him to speak, but not in order to say, as he so often did, almost at random: ‘Well, another day has passed, hasn’t it?’, because for whom had it passed? I could have asked him this, but he couldn’t have answered that it had for us: it would pass later perhaps; as I waited, I bore the weight of it and I didn’t bear the fruit of it. I couldn’t help expressing my reservation: ‘Passed? But for whom? I’m asking myself that.’ ‘Ah! One can certainly ask oneself that.’ I keenly pushed my advantage: ‘Why do you repeat that phrase?’ ‘Do I repeat it?’ and he seemed less surprised than eager to let me, in turn, repeat my protest, to lead me to raise it to a higher degree by saying: ‘Yes, you repeat it all the time. Yes, I’m tired of it and you ought to stop saying it,’ words that I kept to myself and I was in a certain way rewarded for that, as he made this remark: ‘But it’s to help you.’ CQ: 26–27/271–72

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The temporal status of this sequence appears straightforward to begin with as it starts with the memory of an idyllic period of communication. This memory is then abruptly terminated by the deictic (‘at present’), which is itself displaced by a casual recollection of a generic phrase that quickly takes on the force of an actual pronouncement, leading the narrator to express himself in response to it. But this is a response to what has only taken place as a generic possibility; what has not actually occurred but has merely been pre-­emptively echoed in the narrator’s thoughts, and which his companion can thus only reiterate. The fact that this exchange is then itself repeated only intensifies its disorientation, but it also suggests that this movement of possibilities bears its own actualization insofar as the repetition of what has not happened leads to a moment of communication: out of the emptiness of a present without issue a movement has nevertheless been found to emerge by restating the non-­coincidence of this emptiness with itself.7 There is no transition here from stasis to movement, instead, by expressing his reservation about the recalled statement the narrator finds, as he had remarked earlier, ‘that this reduplication was not the frame of memory, but the opening of space’. It is in the incommensurability of past, present, and future that this space opens up, which the narrator then finds himself in, as this sequence leads into the one discussed above where he finds himself near the foot of the stairs. There is a disjunction between the moments of time as if they existed as separate rooms between which lie no natural routes or connections, hence the manner in which the narrator finds himself in such a detached space as the stairway. As the scene then develops there is a sense that this fragile notion of communication leads to the space collapsing, as if it lacked the substance to keep it open: ‘That helps me?’ To which he answered right away with a joyful eagerness that was also a reminder of his own fate: ‘It helps both of us!’ ‘You too? You mean we’re connected?’ He seemed prepared to study the question, but the examination promptly led to these words: ‘Well, you know that very well!’, which were addressed to me in a tone that returned me to myself. CQ: 27/272 And so the conversation seems to have devoured itself, turning back on itself so as to leave nothing behind, but this is not quite true as the narrator immediately counters this apparent resolution with another rejoinder: ‘In fact, I didn’t know it.’ Something remains, which is doubt, scepticism, uncertainty, which keeps the conversation from disappearing entirely, but nevertheless the frustration of this mode of dialogue is expressed by the narrator who remarks on the disappointment of a conversation that is so closed that it keeps returning to its point of departure, as if it lacked a sense

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of necessity or urgency that left it ‘dangerously immaterial [indifferent]’, abstracted from any specific time into a nondescript ‘whenever you want’ [CQ: 30/273]. These are important points of self-­doubt that indicate how the disjunctive repetition of possibilities leaves room for its own disruption, for an element of chance that can create material instances of irresolution, or in which the ambiguity of meaning in each statement gives way to an ambiguity about its ambiguity; that its uncertain meaning indicates an uncertainty about the very status of words: whether they bear meanings or are things themselves. It is thus that the narrator promptly abandons these reflections and restarts the conversation precisely by questioning whether he and the other have become too close, a reframing question that opens space in the subsequent ‘flood of words’. The possibility of conversation in this attenuated arena seems to pass between the extremes of this material clinamen and its endless night of indifference, irresolvably oscillating between them as the night cannot be rendered impermeable to its material rupture just as this chance event cannot prevent its loss through comprehension or incomprehension. As such, the focus of the récit would seem to be its attempt to come to an understanding of the right distance for communication to occur, to come to a sense of its measure when that which it is drawn from is without measure, which is why it is unable to find a firm foundation for its movements or the terms of their relation. Crucially, the nature of this relation is described as a question of writing, which comes to exemplify and exacerbate its difficulties: According to him – but I must add that he never declared this to me with as much precision as I am doing – I came closest to his help when I decided to write. He had assumed a strange ascendency over me in all these things, such that I had let myself be persuaded that to write was the best way of making our relations bearable. I admit that for some time this way was quite good. But one day I noticed that what I was writing concerned him more and more and, though in an indirect manner, seemed to have no aim but to reflect him. I was extremely struck by this discovery. I saw in it what might paralyse me the most, not because I would henceforth try to avoid this reflection, but because I might perhaps, on the contrary, make even greater efforts to make it manifest. CQ: 9–10/264 Sinking into this uncertain relation in which the writer gives way to the other, who is neither there nor not there but remains apart, is not without consequence. Indeed, Blanchot describes it as disastrous: ‘Not only did I have to renounce what is called a normal life, but I lost control of my preferences. I also became afraid of words and I wrote fewer and fewer of them, even though the pressure exerted inside me to make me write them soon became dizzying’ [CQ: 10–11/264]. Despite the repeated attempts at

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description, it is not immediately obvious why there should be a privileged relation between writing and the situation the narrator finds himself in, but there is a sense of some kind of analogy between the two experiences that enables them to respond to each other. This alignment between writing and the peculiarly modern isolation of anxiety was noted in the piece that opened his first collection of essays, Faux pas, where he had stated that the ‘writer is not free to be alone without expressing that he is’, indicating that the possibility of being a writer is always constrained by its actuality such that anxiety is always double as it is always accompanied by that of writing, which has its effects on his work as much as on his life [FP: 10/2]. At this time Blanchot was working through a network of issues associated with the contemporary existential mood, as configured variously by Wahl, Bataille, and Sartre, but a decade later the nature of this problematic ambivalence is discussed in more singular terms that are made explicit in the essay that opened L’Espace littéraire, ‘La solitude essentielle’, which in many ways forms a commentary on Celui qui. The solitude in question is not the merely empirical isolation of the writer, understood either practically or psychologically, but a more fundamental solitude that arises out of the work and to which the writer is bound. This solitude is to be understood as relating to the fact that the work cannot be defined other than by saying ‘that it is – and nothing more’.8 It bears no determinate qualities and expresses no more than its sheer existence and so does not have any value or significance, is unrelated to any purpose or meaning, and is not made present other than in this solitude [EL: 12/22]. Writing opens up the space of this solitude and makes the writer part of it, for writing participates in this solitude to the extent that it is nothing more than it: ‘writing turned me into a shadow to make me worthy of the darkness’ [CQ: 13/265]. It is important to remember that the word so often associated with Blanchot’s writings on this point, désœuvrement, should not be immediately assimilated to its later quasi-­technical meaning, for it is used in relation to these narrative scenarios in its everyday sense of enforced idleness, which is what made it such a key notion in Bataille’s thought. This is the kind of idleness or inactivity that arises when circumstances lead one to be unoccupied, the dead space or time that occurs when there is nothing to do, when one is at a loose end, as we say. This aspect of everyday phenomenology is often passed over in favour of the more dramatic and supposedly more profound senses of anguish and ennui, but it is precisely its banality that renders it significant as it indicates how everyday existence is permeated by a nameless lack that is inherently contingent, that befalls one in certain situations, and in doing so renders one aimless and dispossessed. At this point it becomes easier to see how this existential condition is reflected in the work of writing when it is exposed to its own worklessness, when it becomes unfocused and unstructured as it is also consumed by

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what is at work in the absence of work, ‘à l’œuvre dans le désœuvrement’ [CQ: 70/292]. This phenomenological critique is directed as much towards Heidegger as it is towards Hegel, since it is a matter of demonstrating that there is an immeasurable extent of meaninglessness that underlies our meaningful engagements with the world and cannot be assimilated to them, just as there is an ineradicable dimension of negativity that undermines any attempt to relate thought to work and activity. For Blanchot, the lack that permeates the writer’s existence cannot be transformed or recouped in another form as its immensity eludes any attempts to configure it. But it still provides its own attenuated experience, which is the experience of what takes place par désœuvrement; when there is nothing else going on. It is this experience that Blanchot seeks to plumb, an experience that paradoxically occurs to the writer whether or not he is writing, as it arises both within writing and without, if it is not identified with mere inactivity. Just as the figure at the window is not simply the narrator’s reflection, so his companion is not simply his other. In fact he explicitly rejects the term ‘companion’, as the title of the récit emphasizes, and seems to be more like an echo of the narrator’s presence, which is to say, not just an echo of his thoughts and words but of his presence and thus as a figure without presence or situation, unseen and unlocated [CQ: 42/279, 57/286]. He could almost be the voice of the house as the inversion of the narrator’s own space, and in this way he would fall into the lineage of other figures in Blanchot’s fiction that manifest themselves in forms of negative space and thereby accommodate themselves to the figure of the narrator. Here too we find the unstable relation of mutual accommodation that takes place between writing and désœuvrement and makes the latter assume some kind of demonic form, corresponding at each point to the figure of writing but presenting its inversion, its frustration and impotence, like a secondary body that accompanies the writer and is the negation of all his efforts, able to counter his moves and reverse his actions at each step (pas). This is neither malevolence nor nihilism, but rather the diabolic turning in which persistent inversions lead to a deviation without end. The difference between the fantastic images of Blanchot’s early fiction and the minimalism of Celui qui is that the narrator of the latter no longer encounters these inversions innocently. The one who is not his companion is not discovered by accident in the way that Kafka’s Gracchus suddenly falls into an errant course, rather, there is an understanding between them, as we say, some kind of impossible intimacy, which it is then the task of the work to explicate, insofar as it is writing. It is perhaps thus that this récit is both his most concrete and his most abstract, insofar as it is only writing, in both its proliferation of sheer circumstances and its immersion in the unreality of fiction, which combine without dissolution in a désœuvrée melancholy and are thereby explicated through it. For this is no conventional melancholy, as Blanchot has

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neutralized its bipolar oscillation between the lament for a lost meaning, order, or purpose to life and the hope for its redemption or reconciliation. Indeed, Blanchot is indifferent to these extremes as he is intent on investigating its milieu, the space between, so that while he is exploring the space of melancholy he is not himself melancholic, like Orpheus he passes among the shades but remains apart from them. This is still a space of loss and disarticulation but one without beginning or end; it does not result from a fall or hold the possibility of resolution. Instead, it holds linguistic meaning to the point of its material indifference, not as the grey static of emptiness but as the ambivalence of that which is both material and meaningful, in the experience of their uncoordinated shifting planes rather than their union, and thus remaining immanent to the ambiguity of language rather than sublating it into a determinate meaning. Blanchot indicates the depth of this dislocation through the way that it affects the dimensions of the space in Celui qui, which places distances and relations into an uncoordinated disarray. The moment when the narrator sees a figure outside looking in through the window confirms this sense of non-­aligned spaces, but it also does so by emphasizing the mortal resonance of such dislocation, for there is the sensation of losing oneself in a space in which ‘here’ has become ‘nowhere’ [EL: 22/31, 272/259]. To see a figure through a window who is apparently gazing back on oneself, and to find that the gaze of this figure fails to register oneself, is to suddenly experience the possibility that one is absent, lost to the other, not there. This broken relation is the key to the title of the narrative, Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas (‘The one who didn’t come with me’), which recalls, as Christophe Bident has pointed out, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, but the significance of Blanchot’s recasting of this severed relation is that it is not possible to say which position the narrator of Celui qui is in, for at the moment when Orpheus turns back a rupture separates him permanently from Eurydice such that both of them are cast into different spheres, and each are now lost to the other, and thus to themselves.9 Ordinarily, this lack of accompaniment would be read as belonging to Orpheus, as he returns to the world on his own bearing an inconsolable loss that thereafter inflects his songs, which only separates him further from his earthly companions, and it is to Rilke’s sonnets on this experience that Bident refers by indicating the contemporaneous remarks in L’Espace littéraire: O wie er schwinden muß, daß   ihrs begrifft!

Oh how he must fade, that you   understand!

Und wenn ihm selbst auch bangte,   daß er schwände.

And even though he himself is   scared that he will fade.

Indem sein Wort das Hiersein   übertrifft,

As his word surpasses the being   here,

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ist er schon dort, wohin ihrs nicht   begleitet.

he is already there, where   you cannot accompany him.

Der Leier Gitter zwängt ihm nicht   die Hände.

The lyre’s bars do not squeeze   his hands.

Und er gehorcht, indem er   überschreitet.10

And he obeys as he oversteps.

After his ordeal, Orpheus can only speak in such a way that he is led into a ‘limitless insecurity’ that effaces the ‘false certitude of being’. But in doing so he ‘enters into his own disappearance’, as Blanchot describes it, by ‘identifying himself with the force that tears him apart’ he becomes the void from which the ‘murmurs of the interminable’ propagate, that is, he becomes the force of the poem itself as it endures its own impossibility in the formlessness of a yearning that cannot be quenched [EL: 162–63/156–57]. But in an earlier poem Rilke examines this relation from the other side, from the perspective of Eurydice as she turns back into the shadows of the underworld, away from a figure she no longer recognizes that stands before the light of the other world: Und als plötzlich jäh

And when suddenly

der Gott sie anhielt und mit Schmerz   im Ausruf

the god stopped her and in a   painful cry

die Worte sprach: Er hat sich   umgewendet–,

spoke the words: He has   turned around–,

begriff sie nichts und sagte leize:   Wer?

she did not understand and said   softly: Who?

Fern aber, dunkel vor dem klaren   Ausgang,

But in the distance, dark   before the clear exit,

stand irgend jemand, dessen   Angesicht

someone or other stood, whose   face

nicht zu erkennen war.11

was unrecognizable.

It is the divergence of these movements of signification and materiality that must be thought when it comes to understanding the tendencies of language par désœuvrement, which Blanchot emphasizes by focusing on their centrifugal nature that would render any dialectic of their expression workless as each movement disappears into the other; things becoming words just as words become things. But it is important not to get distracted by such mythical-­allegorical readings, just as the apparently autobiographical

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elements of the narrative should not be overplayed, for they attempt to interpret the work by withdrawing from it and reading it in terms of some other work. Hence, after reflecting on his companion’s question about whether the figure at the window had seen him, and speculating that he may not have seen anyone, the narrator suddenly finds himself at an impasse, for he has found himself in a space that is asymmetric or non-­reversible: ‘I experienced at that moment a weariness, to use that word, which hollowed out space, that sought to substitute another, thinner space for it, an empty rootless air. Yet I heard him go on to say to me: “You know, we should remain alone, we are alone”’ [CQ: 34/276]. This is not the air of actual spaces but the air of a fictional space, thinner, more attenuated, but no less real, an air hollowed out by language, which indicates how experience and language (weariness and its word) combine undecidably but indissolubly with each other in the emptying out of désœuvrement, which is perhaps why this is an imperfect solitude insofar as it is complex rather than simple, shared rather than unitary, and inescapable rather than isolated. As is stated in a remarkably apodictic fashion: ‘one can’t really disappear when one must die in two separate worlds’ [CQ: 41/279]. For in the exploration and description of the space of the récit experience becomes language and language becomes experience, without integrating them, and thus solitude is both hollowed out and folded back on itself, providing its own evacuated topographical expression. Consequently there is an inevitable repetition in this experience, as the narrator seeks over and again to find a measure for the measureless, to describe it regardless of the cost, and without fixed coordinates such repetition only intensifies the ambivalence of its dislocation: It is possible that time passed, a time that was also airless and rootless. I was still thirsty, I had sat down next to a table, and when I heard him murmur: ‘It’s a moment that will pass,’ I confused this speech with that other: ‘Another day has passed, hasn’t it?’; and this memory made me shiver, something in me broke. I had undergone so many struggles, I had been so far, and so far, where was that? Here, next to a table. Perhaps my silence, my immobility, and the feeling that a kind of balance had been established between us, restored some of my strength to me; perhaps, on the contrary, I had gained in weakness; at a certain moment, I found myself in the room again, and beyond the table, there where I had said to myself that the end had to be situated, there was a wall and, I believe, a mirror, at least a lightly shining surface. I tried to recognize this spot, was this where I had just been? was this me? In any case, at present the one to be found there was also leaning on a table. Thirst, the need to exhaust space, made me stand up. Everything was extraordinarily calm. Looking through the large bay windows – there were three of them – I saw that

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someone was standing on the other side; as soon as I noticed him, he turned to the window and, without stopping at me, he stared intensely at the whole expanse and depth of the room. I found myself again next to the table, I wanted to turn around quickly to face this figure, but I was surprised to be now very near the windows and yet felt myself still in the middle of the room. This obliged me to look strangely at a point that was not given to me, closer than it seemed to me, close in an almost frightening way, as it did not take account of my own distance. While I looked for him almost at random, I noticed in a flash – a flash that was the shining, tranquil light of summer – that I was holding this figure against my eyes, a few steps away, the few steps that must still have separated me from the bay windows, and the impression was so vivid that it was like a spasm of clarity, a shiver of cold light. I was so struck that I couldn’t help murmuring: ‘Don’t move, I think someone is there.’ ‘Someone? Here?’ ‘Someone is looking at us through the window.’ ‘Through the window?’ Words that immediately gave me a feeling of terror, of horror, as though the void of the window was reflected in them, as though all this had already taken place, and again, again. I think I cried out, I slipped or fell against what seemed to me to be the table. Yet I heard him say to me again: ‘You know, there is no one there.’ I kept a memory of this that resembled the space in which I stood up again a little later. Yet I was rational enough to lean on the table, slowly following the outline and in this way I went a little further. CQ: 34–37/276–77 The nightmarish quality of being lost in an indeterminate space where distances shift and slide seems to give rise to the sense of thirst that plagues the narrator, thirst as a physical need to exhaust this immensity of space, which of course is unattainable, but which qualifies the nature of existing in such an expanse. Experience finds itself empty of everything other than this topographical thirst, which is in turn the form in which this worklessness appears, as if the void of the window were reflected in it, as if its emptiness had taken form in this condition. Such a situation is unsustainable, its vertigo of fascination only goes so far before it comes up against an obstacle since it is not unaffected by circumstances. Although this is the most minimal of Blanchot’s récits he makes the most of its bare setting by showing how its seemingly insignificant material details become the only points of navigation in such a space, and ones that accordingly take on an enigmatic resonance that is non-­negligible. That is, Blanchot has not chosen to strip this narrative of all contingent details but rather to take them up in a way that amplifies the force of their contingency, for these are items that impose themselves on the narrator in an unmistakable if illegible manner. The table, the mirror, the windows, walls,

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doorways, and staircases do not bear any interpretable meaning that would convey any allegorical sense to the récit, but nor can they be ignored, they are thus its anomalous and fluid but nevertheless material constituents, against which it necessarily abuts, whether as words or as things. And by making these material constituents so prosaic Blanchot emphasizes the extent of their enigmatic force, which is to be found everywhere, and is thus inescapable. The manner in which the narrator’s companion persistently repeats and obstructs the thoughts of the narrator also derives from this sense of material disruption, disallowing the possibility of free development and forcing the narrator to keep turning back to the constituents of his situation, in language as in space, as well as in their cross-­wired expression and description. A signal instance of this disruption comes in the form of that rarest of moments in Blanchot’s writings: the joke. For how else are we to interpret the moment early on in the last cited passage: ‘I had undergone so many struggles, I had been so far, and so far, where was that? Here, next to a table’? The bathos is deliberate but also very revealing, enabling us to understand both the persistence of the mundane and the strange air of lightness that pervades this récit, lightness as a response to gravity, as the joy of companionship even in the attenuated and elusive form that it has here. For the sense of cheerfulness that permeates the narrative is not deflated by the frequent and often acute moments of anxiety and confusion but persists in the understanding that, despite his idleness and his companion’s opacity, there is still some kind of communication between them, and perhaps precisely because of their mutual elusiveness. It is possible that this levity, which is so uncommon in Blanchot’s writings, is a recognition of his intense friendship with Bataille, for whom laughter was just as powerful as boredom or anxiety as a mode of exposure to the il y a. But it should also be noted that the extract from Celui qui that Blanchot published in Botteghe Oscure in 1952 has a structural echo that is lost in the final récit, for it begins with the same initial proposal (‘I sought, this time, to approach him’) and finishes with a repetition of this joke, which reappears at the end of the first section of the récit.12 Or not quite, as the narrator’s discovery of himself by the table triggers a meditation on the uncertain support that writing provides, on the endless emptiness that the writer attempts to lean on in his work, which leads to an exhausted resolution reminiscent of another novel published at that time: ‘I will continue to go in this direction, never in any other’ [CQ: 78/296]. The proposal has thus simply been reaffirmed but the approach has not been bridged; the narrator, despite his movements around the house, is no closer to his companion or whatever it is that he shares the space with, but he is also no more remote from him or it (il). However, his aporetic movement is not over since it cannot be completed or exhausted, instead, after going as far as he has, and the distance he has covered is not negligible, he has merely come up against his table, as if his approach could have no

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other sense of gravity, and its banality could not appear to any other approach. The relation between these positions becomes more tense in the later sections of the narrative as the companion persistently asks ‘Are you writing? Are you writing at this moment?’ [CQ: 71/292]. A question that answers his aporetic approach with its own uncertainty. The relation of these statements is thus suspended, as Kafka would say (as if following Hegel’s thoughts on the banality of revolutionary action), ‘like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light’.13 This is the lightness of fiction in relation to the mundane, its disastrous worklessness.

II To understand this relation more clearly it is helpful to contrast it with the figure of the melancholic as one who, suffering from a nameless loss, is drawn into an intense examination of his situation to the extent of losing himself in its obscure details, and for whom the dimensions of space and time are set loose from their conventional terms and become immense and fluid. The discussion of these issues in Adorno’s Kierkegaard forms the most useful parallel to Blanchot’s investigations, as it is the question of the dimensions of the melancholic’s subjectivity that forms the centre of Adorno’s critique. The understanding of melancholy that Adorno draws upon is adopted from Benjamin’s study of the baroque Trauerspiel, which itself followed the work of the Warburg Institute on Renaissance allegories, but Benjamin makes a stronger case for the philosophical importance of melancholy by claiming that it bears a significance that is both epistemological and ontological. In his reading melancholy is not simply a subjective condition nor is it to be explained through the symbolic correspondences of astrology and pathology, instead Benjamin finds it to be the key to the baroque period as it manifests itself in a dialectical image that both reflects the world that it arises from and transforms that world through what it uncovers. That is, melancholy responds to the collapse of meaning in the disenchanted world by finding the seeds of material transformation buried within this disintegration, even though they are beyond reach. Melancholy is thus both analytical and synthetic; it not only diagnoses the problems of the time but also finds therein a possible response to them, and crucially this means that it is a rational as well as an aesthetic mode of thought, albeit one in which these modes are dialectically intertwined.14 Benjamin thus finds the basis for his work on the Trauerspiel in the attempt to unravel the enciphered knowledge of its allegories, for these are too immersed in their own contextual relations to be able to reflect on themselves explicitly, and it is thus that Adorno will also find the necessity of his own work on Kierkegaard. The key passage for Benjamin’s position is this:

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Every feeling is bound to an a priori object and its representation is its phenomenology. The theory of mourning [Trauer], which predictably proves itself as a pendant to the theory of tragedy, can thus only be developed in the description of the world that is opened up under the gaze of the melancholic. For feelings, however vague they may seem to self-­perception, respond like motorial reactions [motorisches Gebaren] to the concrete structure of the world. If laws are to be found for the Trauerspiel in the heart of mourning, partly explicitly, partly implicitly, then their representation does not devote itself to the emotional state of the poet or his public, but to a feeling that is released from any empirical subject and is intimately bound to the fullness of an object. A motorial attitude that has its well-­defined place in the hierarchy of intentions and is thus only called a feeling because it is not the highest. It is determined by an astounding tenacity of intention, which among the feelings is matched perhaps only by love – and that not playfully. For whereas in the realm of affects it is not unusual for the relation between an intention and its object to alternate between attraction and alienation, mourning is capable of a singular intensification, a continual deepening of its intention. Pensiveness [Tiefsinn] is characteristic of the mournful. On the road to the object – no: on the path of the object itself – this intention progresses as slowly and solemnly as the acts of the powerful move. UDT: 318/139–40 This is Benjamin’s doctrine of justification (Rechtfertigungslehre): that which permits him to develop a reading of the Trauerspiel in relation to the humanist allegories of the Renaissance and in distinction to the classical worldview of tragedy. A justification grounded in a conception of melancholy as a singularly intense exploration of the relation between subject and object in which the laws of this relation reveal themselves, however obscurely, in the forms of the Trauerspiel. That is, the world that is opened up under the gaze of the melancholic finds itself expressed in the form of the Trauerspiel, which thereby offers an aesthetico-­rational topography of its relations. A topography whose rationality derives from the actual relations disinterred from the material ruins of the disintegrated world, for ‘all the wisdom of the melancholic belongs to the depths; it is gained by immersion in the life of creaturely things and the sound of revelation does not penetrate through to it’ [UDT: 330/152]. This emphatically secular understanding of melancholy is central to Adorno’s intentions in his Habilitationsschrift, for he rejects Kierkegaard’s treatment of the aesthetic as merely being part of the stages of edification in order to show two things: firstly, and negatively, to criticize the way that Kierkegaard subordinates the aesthetic to the ethical by claiming that any transition to the latter can only occur by transcending the aesthetic, which is what occurs in the intérieur of the subject. This notion is not to be

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understood as a kind of space, for it is precisely space as the form of externality that is excluded from the intérieur. Rather, the intérieur is constituted by images and specifically, reified images of objects, which are arranged to make up the intérieur just as objects are made to do in the domestic bourgeois interior [K: 65/43]. Such images are reified because they are no longer linked to the forces of production and so can only appear as tokens of subjectivity divorced from their actual historico-­material background whose content thus only derives from their arrangement. However, and here the negative critique starts to reveal its inversion, these images are also symbols of the mythical that find their way into subjectivity, that is, these symbols of the historical (background) that have been rendered natural (reified) are also found to bear aspects of the natural world that have become historical; in the conventionalized forms of the aesthetic contingencies of existence: the sensual, material, and accidental elements that Kierkegaard discusses as the ‘demonic’. But such elements cannot be so easily transcended as their wilful intransigence is part of the very medium of reflection that Kierkegaard seeks to use to transcend them, since his introspective literary attempts to remove himself from the distractions of the everyday are constituted through these images of reification, which necessarily persist in conveying their own concrete traces. Thus, it is possible to read these images dialectically; both for what they demonstrate about the reification of subjectivity and for how the reification of these images undoes itself by virtue of the actual materiality that it fails to suppress: man is not divided into the natural and the supernatural, which struggle between themselves; rather, his natural essence is dialectical in itself, and what contributes in man to his rescue is equally attributable to his nature as to what will ruin him [. . .] The clarity of the despondent [Verzweifelten], who as spirit is demonically entangled in his own nature, is, however, a clarity that the mythical dialectic itself produces. In the captivity of complete immanence mythical-­ambiguous nature becomes separated as it does not persist emptily, but moves dialectically and its movement grasps nature in the depths from which it originates to pull it up to safety. K: 86–87/59 It is precisely this model of dialectical images that Benjamin takes up in the Passagen-Werk, but the significance of the dialectical nature of this reading is that the potential for redemption is undercut to the same degree as is the process of reification.15 This means that although the lens of this dialectical mode of reading allows us to read through the loss of materiality to its actual subsistence, it does so only because it reveals the diremption of the image, its existence as a mere semblance, which suggests much only by way of its distance from reality. This diremption arises in Kierkegaard’s writings through the way that the actuality of the aesthetic is displaced in the pursuit

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of the artistic, which is in turn displaced by the leap of faith. Adorno, by contrast, wants to find the materialist inversion of this move in which the artistic gives way to the aesthetic, as the artwork voids itself as a work of art and becomes an aesthetic experience in both its Kantian and Hegelian senses. For Adorno the convergence between these aesthetics occurs through the materiality of the work, which conveys a concrete expression of truth that through its material inversions and occlusions remains indeterminate. It is this sense of aesthetic experience voiding the artwork that also takes place in Blanchot’s récits, which thereby become non-­philosophical experiments into the conditions of experience. Adorno pursues this double sense of aesthetic experience through his notion of ‘exact fantasy’ (exakten Phantasie), which in its combination of rigour and imagination attempts to develop the image of materiality into the form of its existence in general, its abstract model, which is nevertheless concrete and particular.16 In much the same way that Benjamin focuses on the name as the encrypted expression of the disenchanted world, which bears both a form of knowledge of this world and also the potential to change it, Adorno finds the possibility of the model in the aesthetic fragment, for as the semblance or image of materiality the fragment bears an infinitesimal but unfulfillable hope, which, insofar as it does not fully agree with reality, leads beyond it. It does so because ‘fantasy is not intuition [Anschauung] that leaves the existing as it is; but intuiting that intervenes unnoticed in the existing as the completion of its arrangement as an image.’ Following Kant’s understanding of genius, Adorno sees fantasy as the mode in which nature expresses and thus surpasses itself and through this slight displacement perceives itself as rescued [K: 196/138]. The concrete generality of these images, by which this rescue is discovered, is a notion elaborated from Kierkegaard’s discussion of farce in Repetition, and more specifically from a passage that examines the nature of the categories at work in quasi-­ aesthetic activities, such as when one who is not ordinarily affected by art finds that he can be stirred by a Nürnberg print, a picture of the kind found on the market not long ago. There one sees a landscape depicting a rural area in general. This abstraction cannot be artistically executed. Therefore the whole thing is achieved by contrast, namely, by an accidental concretion. And yet I ask everyone if from such a landscape he does not get the impression of a rural area in general, and if this category has not stayed with him from childhood. In the days of childhood, we had such enormous categories that they now almost make us dizzy, we clipped out of a piece of paper a man and a woman who were man and woman in general in a more rigorous sense than Adam and Eve were.17 Such categories have a generality that

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is not the abstractness and size of the concept, but the smallness and concreteness of a model – in one variety it is familiar as a ‘pattern’ [Modellierbogen] – in which individual differences of existence disappear only to be resurrected, ontologically saved, as prototypical features of the apparent figure. Like names, the pattern attaches contingency, as ‘accidental concretion’, to the most universal concept and moreover, to the natural-­historical prototype, Adam and Eve, which anamnesis emphasizes for the instant and for all time by developing their contours out of the chaos of the sheet of paper as their ‘second nature’. Through fantasy genius continuously recalls and reproduces original creation; not as the creator of its reality but by the reintegration of its given elements in an image. K: 197/138–39 We see here the dialectical relation between the universal and the particular in which each actualizes the other, but such easy dialectical formulations are disrupted by two further aspects of the image that exert a centrifugal pressure on its relations. Firstly, despite the author’s intentions the image takes on its own form of life, like Frankenstein’s creature it bears witness to the inassimilable contingencies of its origin and calls the writer to account for it, and as such, like the creature, the image embodies a specific material aesthetic [K: 189/133].18 Secondly, as this voiding of the artwork as a work arises out of an intense immersion in the contingencies of the work’s existence, its form is related to melancholy, as melancholy is the mode in which material singularity is experienced as such. But in doing so melancholy conveys an experience that is peculiarly topographical as it is of a space whose depth and detail cannot be measured conventionally, and it is thus that literature is particularly capable of giving expression to this melancholy topography since it is precisely that which takes form in and as such a singular material space. For Adorno this point is made explicit by the Diapsalmata of Either/Or, whose fragmentary organization, despite Kierkegaard’s professed intentions, ‘legitimates itself as one of exact fantasy’ [K: 195/137; cf. 176–78/124–25]. While the Diapsalmata appears to exemplify the unstructured form of the aesthetic, in its precise deployment of images it actualizes more by way of its fragmentation than is possible in any systematic or ironic format, as it provides a glimpse of the actual diremption of material forms as well as the possibilities that lie beyond this. But the corollary of such a form is that it bears an intrinsic material affect that cannot be avoided, for the fragmentation of the aesthetic uncovers the singular logic of affinities of its images (as their exact fantasy), which manifests itself as an endless longing (Sehnsucht) that ‘does not finish up in its images, but survives in them just as it emerges from them’ [K: 199/140]. Such aesthetic forms can be found in the singularity of proper names, which bear experiences that resist conceptualization while surpassing what is

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present, as Adorno would find exemplified in the works of Proust [ND: 366/373].19 Such linguistic forms take on the manifold concreteness of things, while still providing descriptions of the world that are thus no less thing-­like than that which they describe, in all their materiality and finitude. In the modern age in which Blanchot writes the nature of such a topography has changed, for the introspection characteristic of the melancholic has become transformed by the loss of any centre or ground for the subject, so that any introspective meditation finds its pathways exploded into a space that lacks the forms and dimensions previously deemed intrinsic to it. As I have noted elsewhere, the sense of this transformation is captured by the way that Pascal’s depiction of god as a circle is inverted in the disenchanted world, for the melancholic finds that the centre is nowhere and the periphery everywhere, which is the nature of the space explored in Blanchot’s récits, particularly in Celui qui with its profusion of borders and lack of focus.20 But the pathways of introspection are not entirely set adrift in these modern texts, as the downward gaze of the melancholic still finds itself seeking out the material bases of relation from which it hopes to find some form of insistent meaning, an insistence that abides, as we have seen, in the writing of these relations. As Blanchot writes in a work that accompanies the investigations of Celui qui, the centre cannot be reached as it is displaced by the ongoing pressure of the work as the writer writes so that it becomes more hidden, as well as more imperious and more uncertain [EL: 7/v]. For the writer finds that the work is only able to explore its relation to the world, the relation that inheres between words and things, if it also describes this exploration as it proceeds. In doing so the work enacts the relation of expression and description within itself and thereby finds itself isomorphic to the reality that it seeks to approach even as it displaces it. So it is through writing that the space of the work opens up, but also remains open to displacement, and it is for this reason that there is always a distance that separates the writer’s gaze from its focus, which in turn appears as an array of exteriorities that provides the milieu of his fascination, a milieu that the work renders absolute [EL: 23/32]. Thus, in writing the work, the writer finds that it becomes illegible to him and he can only continue by starting again, and in attempting to decipher his own enigmas he only creates more, which then become separated from him as ruins and fragments. Since that which he uses to respond to the darkness in which he finds himself only leads to its extension, and so the work becomes increasingly alien. The writer thus becomes as removed from the work as he is from the world, which finally leads to an estrangement from his language and himself as he becomes lost in a milieu without end, neither here nor there, but in a space with uncertain dimensions [EL: 41/48]. For in the passage between the first and the third person, between the narrator and his companion, the writer finds that he is no longer able to speak in his own voice but only through the work, from it (il), which means, as Kafka had remarked, that he

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has entered into literature, into its space [EL: 17/26, 70/73].21 This is not a space of appearances but of that which takes place when nothing appears, which in relation to language becomes an image of material ambiguity. As a result, underlying the particular allegorical meanings that the melancholic might retrieve in the readings of Benjamin and Adorno lies a different kind of wisdom altogether, an ontological understanding that cannot be reduced to any conceptual system but is rather an aesthetico-­ rational experience that can only find expression in its own (aesthetico-­ rational) terms. Benjamin finds such a form of expression in allegory, in which the material and semiotic poles of the image are presented in the greatest dialectical tension. In this way the meaning and materiality of the image are combined so that they perpetually give way to each other, betraying themselves to and through the other. It is thus uncertain whether it is the thing or its meaning that we are presented with, thereby indicating the materiality into which meaning dissipates as well as the meaning that arises from this materiality, which is the mark of death in every image; the loss of meaning and the eruption of opacity alongside abstraction and signification that constitutes the double-­edged reification of natural-­history [UDT: 342–43/165–66; K: 80/54]. This internal division is what makes the image slip between opacity and transparency, between being an obstacle and a passageway, into the mysterious space in which words and meanings, names and things, become dissociated and in doing so make and unmake themselves as images, which Blanchot was led to discuss in terms of a symbolic form of language. The idiosyncrasy of these readings of allegory and symbol indicates the difficulty of addressing the complexity at issue in this understanding of ambiguity: that it is not simply ambiguous but that its ambiguity is itself ambiguous, upsetting any possibility of encompassing it in a straightforward dialectic of meaning. While baroque allegories have a hieroglyphic density that gives them a thingly illegibility, Blanchot’s much more minimal images aspire to a degree of indifference over the presence and relation of meaning and materiality, replacing the dialectical tension of the baroque image with something more subtle and discreet, an almost inconspicuous ambivalence that is consequently more difficult to address or dismiss. These images are not derived from a fantastic imaginary but are implicit in the most banal of forms, such as a glass of water, which could not be any clearer symbol of uncertain transparency.22 This manifestation of ambivalence thus holds the possibility of a more profound critique of language in the secular world precisely because it is not removed from the everyday. Blanchot’s understanding of symbolic meaning follows that developed in Hegel’s Ästhetik, where the symbolic is that mode of art in which there is an irresolvable inadequacy between the form and the content of the work insofar as the content remains too abstract to be fully formed into the work. There is thus an excess to the symbolic work that leaves it unstable, as its

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symbolic content perpetually indicates the possibility of meaning exterior to its form, to which it refers but cannot comprehend.23 For Hegel such works are not properly artistic as they fail to achieve the integration of their spiritual and material aspects, but for Blanchot the symbolic indicates the peculiar quality of writing that does not signify ‘a particular idea by a determined fiction’ as symbolic meaning is ‘global’: it is not that of a particular object or action ‘but that of the world in its entirety [ensemble] and of human existence in its entirety’ [PF: 83/79]. For what the symbolic narrative does is ‘to make present the global meaning that everyday life, strangled in too particular events, rarely enables us to reach and that reflection, which retains only its timeless aspect, does not enable us to experience’. This would seem to imply writing of an imaginatively transcendent form, or to make it into an expression of being, but Blanchot stresses the inadequacy and negativity of the symbolic by proposing that in it the ‘imagination goes further’ (N.B. The paragraph from which these lines derive is missing from the English translation): It is not satisfied to be given, in the absence of an object in particular, this object, i.e. its image; its movement is to continue and to try to give itself this very absence in general and no longer, in the absence of a thing, this thing, but, through this absent thing, the absence that constitutes it, emptiness as the milieu of every imagined form and, exactly, the existence of inexistence, the world of the imaginary, insofar as it is the negation, the inversion, of the real world as a whole. PF: 84 It is only in this movement that imagination becomes symbolic and the image that it seeks ‘implies an absolute absence, a counter-­world that would be like the realization, in its entirety, of the fact of being outside reality’ [PF: 84/79]. This persistent negativity of the symbolic removes it from any meaning or truth, either present or absent, as it does not signify anything, instead ‘it presents us with this very surpassing that it grasps and makes sensible in a fiction whose theme is the impossible effort of fiction to realize itself as wholly fictive’ [PF: 85/79]. Fiction in this form is inherently contradictory as it presents its lack of integrity in the excess of symbolic references that appear to reside in it, references that do not refer to anything in particular but rather to an absolute otherness that cannot be reached. Thus the fictional work does not cohere within itself in any specific meaning, but nor does it refer to one elsewhere either, but rather presents its own unreality as one that cannot be realized on its own terms or as anything else. The symbolic negation is both the condition of possibility of the work as fiction and its condition of impossibility, since it can never fulfil itself by means of it. Such a thought of abstraction and generality needs to be examined carefully for the symbolic is not simply a vague absolute. For, as Blanchot

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makes clear, the symbolic is made up of details, gestures, and moments, the ‘dust of words’, as well as announcing something that surpasses all these details taken together or separately and, going further, that surpasses this movement as well by refusing what it attempts to announce. It is thus not nothing, but rather ‘nothing but circumstances’, even as it can never attain them, which is why the symbol is not simply abstract for Blanchot but rather the space of the imaginary not just in its particularity but also as its very condition of possibility [PF: 85–86/80]. The inadequacy Hegel had attached to the symbolic has thus been extended and reformulated to make it into the intrinsic impossibility of the work out of which it nevertheless emerges, and towards which it persistently directs us. In entering the world of fiction, as K. does in Das Schloss or as the narrator discovers in Celui qui, we enter a form of language in which it is impossible to decide which side of its symbolization we are on: is this a language of surplus and signification, or that of its denial and evacuation, or is it somehow both and neither in its attempt to pursue that which underlies the possibility of signification but that can never be reached? Such a form of language is thus wholly distinct from everyday language insofar as it ‘seeks to surpass all particular negation and affirm itself as universal negation, not as an abstract universal, but as a concrete emptiness, a realized universal emptiness’, and although this seems to be an impossibly self-­defeating desire, for fiction to be itself as nothing but prose, it is nevertheless the desire inherent to it [PF: 86/81].24 While structurally similar to the hope latent in aesthetic fragments explored by Adorno, Blanchot’s understanding of the negativity of fiction pushes the aporetic logic of this non-­coincidence of language and the world much further, to the point where its impossibility extinguishes any scope for redemption and leaves a melancholy without relief, which entirely reconfigures what we might understand by hope for change. As a result, it is not possible to see the figure of the glass of water in Celui qui in simple symbolic terms; it does not represent or signify anything about the content of the récit. But its presence is not to be overlooked, precisely because it is the focus of so much of the narrator’s movements.25 Consequently, its symbolic resonance does not take place in the register of contagious pathology, like the black water in Le Très-Haut, but operates immanently across the language of the récit, insofar as water is almost entirely without qualities and is thus a medium of both transparency and reflection, which is to say, of perfect refraction. As such, it is seemingly the medium par excellence, the element or milieu that almost intangibly sustains communication, understood in the more basic material rather than semiotic sense. Such a notion of absolute mediation is behind Hegel’s description of language as the ‘perfect element within which inwardness is external just as externality is likewise inward’, for it appears to mediate its own relations between form and content, and transparency and reflexivity, between its material circumstances and its own lack of qualities [PG: 388/439]. But it

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only does so by bringing the two into the closest possible relation of intimacy without dissolving their differences, without absorbing one into the other, which makes for the thinnest, most limpid form of melancholic immersion. So it makes a difference when Blanchot speaks of a glass of water, doubling the refractory qualities of its transparency, as writing does for language, and also places it beyond reach, for when the narrator of Celui qui examines the table that he has come up against he finds that the bottle is empty, and his thirst cannot be quenched. If it can be argued that melancholy is that particular form of disaffection that arises in modernity for those engaged in artistic or intellectual pursuits insofar as it is the mode in which boredom or alienation appear when these are coupled to an experience that is creative and reflective, then it is possible to suggest that the nature of the melancholy Blanchot appears to experience is a particularly profound form of this creative disaffection, since it is not simply artistic but aesthetic.26 Which is to say that it is a profoundly philosophical form of melancholy, one that would seem to arise from the lived experience of the disparity between Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics. In the wake of Heidegger, and the more broadly existential ideas discussed in the 1930s and 1940s, the spiritual and religious senses of melancholy became translated into a sense of angst that was lived not just at the personal level but that directly affected the individual’s sense of existing truthfully. For the writer, who is naturally disposed to melancholy as this is the form of anxiety intrinsic to writing, such lived experience of doubt and disaffection would become inflected not through general questions of authenticity or humanity but by the incommensurability between the finitude of experience and the universality of concepts, alongside the sensible appearing (sinnliche Scheinen) of the idea and the autonomous purposelessness of the work, that is, between the different senses given to aesthetics by Kant and Hegel. The significance of this point is that this is not simply a conceptual or historical problem of relating different philosophical discourses, but a division that marks the writer’s existence and has to be endured. In this way the melancholy that Blanchot seems to experience is of such a stringency and rarefaction because it derives from the divided aesthetics of his existence as a writer. His is not a melancholy that derives from religious doubt or social alienation and so cannot be read in those terms, rather its peculiarly modernist form is aesthetic, which distinguishes it as much from the existential as it does from the intellectual and grants it its singular austerity. Such an aesthetics is concerned with developing a mode of writing that can deliver a kind of phenomenology of writing, a language that is responsive to the ambiguities and displacements of the experience of language in writing, and is not just reflexively sensitive but also rigorously engaged with the fact that this is an experience with its own historical and philosophical ramifications, a language that has been riven by irreversible fissures through the works of Hölderlin, Mallarmé, and Kafka, as much as by Kant, Hegel,

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and Heidegger, for example. This is not an experience of pure writing, but of one that is intrinsically if abstractly related to the world, and thus bears its marks in the actual words and images that irreducibly constitute it. And in writing from and about this experience Blanchot is seeking to bring it to a point of tangibility such that its imaginative force can be grasped as that which makes sense and nonsense of the world, extending and suspending its possibilities through its own formation of space, which manifests itself as a topography whose rigour and exactness derives from the extremity to which these possibilities are pursued. The fact that the melancholy of literature bears its own aesthetics raises the question of how literature relates to aesthetics more broadly, but the significance of melancholy is precisely that its experience cannot be generalized as it remains contingent on its materiality. So any attempt to approach literature from a broader aesthetic perspective would have to capitulate to the aesthetics that literature bears, which is inevitably linked to melancholy insofar as its fragmentary materiality prevents it from being fully conceptualized or rendered meaningful within a wider context. Such a sense of aesthetics is thus itself melancholic, as it is an experience of inescapable lack, of an implied but materially unreachable possibility of understanding or creativity. The possibility of such a singular aesthetics is made concrete in Blanchot’s writing insofar as it demurs from any explicit content but rather provokes a sense of what a literary work of art might be as an autonomous but indeterminate exemplar of linguistic exploration. That is, the literary work of art embodies a form of experience that remains irreducibly alien by virtue of the work’s autonomy, its ontological remove, and it is by way of the reflexivity of Blanchot’s récits that this view from elsewhere is made concrete. A view that necessarily arises from the negativity of language and thus from that which is ordinarily seen as the most transparent and immediate mode of expression but which exposes itself in the form of a singularly inordinate topography, a material image space of unrelieved refraction.

5 Unmade in its image

The problem with negativity is that it cannot be understood simply, as it does not appear without negating itself and does not negate itself without undermining that negation, which is why it is endless and why any attempt to think it will fall short unless, like Blanchot, it is willing to follow it through to that extent. But there is a further problem, for if negativity cannot be understood simply then thought and language cannot respond to it simply. As a result, the ambivalence of negativity can only be responded to by realizing the ambivalence that takes place in thought and language as they endure this endless self-­negation. This is not to revert to mere vagueness and confusion but to seek a way of writing that can convey this ambivalent self-­negation without turning it into meaninglessness or a renewed positive description of negation. Thus writing cannot just express or describe this ambivalence but must actualize it in a form that renders its ambivalence concrete, as a problem, and the word that will come to focus Blanchot’s thoughts on this problem will be neutre, thereby indicating that the movement of unresolved self-­negation occurs in such a way that it is neither positive nor negative. Blanchot’s explicit usage of this term starts in the early 1950s, but his works demonstrate an awareness of the necessary reformulation of thinking and writing in the face of such negativity from the very beginning. And it is the singular significance of his writings that this awareness is expressed not only thematically, through thoughts and images, but also in the form of his writings, through the way that it affects his sentences, which actualize their aporetic self-­negation by turning back on themselves, not fully positing or negating themselves but leaving them exposed or suspended in another space. It is thus that Blanchot is able to follow through on the movements of negativity by developing a concomitant movement between the images and the forms of his writing, as well as its words and thoughts, which realizes this self-­negating dissimulation, and it is this movement that will be followed in this chapter in order to understand how the images and forms of Blanchot’s writings come to affect each other. In the late 1950s Blanchot’s writing changed as he moved away from the very dense forms of fiction and critique of his early years towards a unique

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and fragmentary combination of narrative and theory. This change has largely been discussed by commentators in terms of the external factors affecting his writing but it also takes place as the literary image, which is a key focus of his work of the 1940s and 1950s, gives way to a more elusive and minimal form of writing that appears in/as the fragmentary writings of the 1960s. To understand this change it is necessary to understand how the image is replaced by the fragment, which also demonstrates why this change has occurred by indicating its internal necessity. Examining Blanchot’s thought of the early 1950s in its fictional and non-­fictional deployments reveals, as has been seen, that language gives rise to images that are both sensible and abstract, which means that the image is not just a feature of the imagination but also constitutes a reflection and critique of linguistic relation. As writing seeks to respond to this critique it is changed, since the reflexivity of the image, which occurs as a kind of spacing (écartant, which anticipates but necessarily does not coincide with the similar notions studied by Merleau-Ponty and Derrida due to the specific context in which it is developed by Blanchot), exerts a formal pressure on the sentence from which the later fragmentary writings will emerge. However, this spacing is not merely formal as it arises from a concrete but elusive undecidability, as can be seen by looking at his early writings. To trace this development I will examine one of the most enigmatic images in Blanchot’s works, which appears in Celui qui, and begin to explicate it through his contemporary critical writings before turning to his first book, Thomas l’Obscur, where the spacing of the image reveals an aporia in language and thought that is not just a sceptical impasse but also mortal.

I In discussing the nature of the image, its place and status in the work, Blanchot makes use of some distinctive figures, most notably the cadaver in his 1951 essay ‘Les deux versions de l’imaginaire’, which I will discuss shortly. But at the end of Celui qui there is a sequence in which the image appears and strangely begins to affect the very language that attempts to convey it. It starts abruptly and almost by accident when the narrator’s unseen companion, who is also unable to see, says, ‘You’re tall, aren’t you?’ [CQ: 162/334]. The relation between the narrator and his mysterious companion, which had seemed to be fraying, is suddenly restored as if the words had the power of antedating it with an involuntary memory: ‘I didn’t realize where these words were coming from, or why they enveloped me once again with the impression of naturalness that had always marked our relations. I didn’t realize it because it seemed to me that I heard him in the tranquil simplicity of the past’ [CQ: 162–63/334]. Now that the relation is re-­established the companion wants it to be substantiated, so he asks the

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narrator to describe what he, the narrator, looks like. But just as description is supplanted by memory so too is memory supplanted by imagination, as the narrator finds that he is only able to respond to such questions indirectly: ‘I thought [pensais], in fact, that there was on the other side of the table, on the wall, a mirror, though I couldn’t think [songeai] about looking at myself in it, but the memory of that mirror helped me’ [CQ: 163/334]. But, in being thus doubly refracted, the words that fill out their relation also appear as images, which then affects how the companion responds to them: ‘he seemed so occupied with letting the word “young” come to him, profoundly, in a disturbing way, that he repeated it as if he wanted henceforth to keep himself in it’ [CQ: 163–64/334]. The difference between words and images has become unclear as it is not clear whether they exist through exteriority or interiority, that is, if they are to be understood by linking them to others or approached on their own terms. The space of their relation thus becomes disturbing as it cannot be decided if it is abstract or concrete, and by way of this instability a form of dialectic arises through which words and images take place by changing places. For as soon as the narrator remarks that ‘the face is very bright [clair]’, the companion responds by asking if it ‘does not also have something dark about it’, the contrast having arisen through the differential negativity of words. Equally, the face is no longer described by the narrator as being his face but is now the face; its appearance in language has led to it becoming its own image, as if ‘something like a portrait had been released [se fût dégagé]’ from him [CQ: 164/334–35]. In response to this imminent loss the narrator attempts to gain greater control over the image by a more extensive description, but this only leads to more ambiguity as the descriptions he provides are excessive: his gaze is bright, perhaps astonishingly so, but also cold and very calm. Such an excess is unconvincing or at least distracting, lending the image only greater uncertainty, and so the narrator tries once more to give it a decisive stroke, ‘to make it more expressive, bring it closer to the truth’. To do so requires finding a trait that would render its instability apparent without dissolving it, to ‘show him that this face was usually very gay, that this gaiety penetrated even the darkest moments, from which, even then, arose the glimmer [reflet] of a joyful brightness, perhaps distant, almost absent, but all the more tangible [sensible] because of that’ [CQ: 165/335]. And it is thus that the narrator remarks that there is a smile on the face. The companion is very pleased with this thought, almost too pleased, as if its excess were contagious, for he asks if the smile is in the eyes and if it remains there when he is asleep, suggesting that it has become mobile and autonomous, a free but tangible figuration. In trying to accommodate this enthusiasm the narrator realizes that his companion now has possession of the face and is on the point of removing it to a sphere beyond his power. Considering this new space, the narrator becomes aware of ‘the abrupt lightening of our relations’, which, although it does not indicate any actual change in their relations, does not

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confirm that they themselves have not changed [CQ: 166/336]. Thus, the interpolation of this sphere or space unsettles the sense of identity, leaving it to float freely from its relations as the sheer possibility of change, a thought of difference, which emerges just as the smile had done. Struck by this thought the narrator becomes fascinated, allowing himself to be drawn into its terrifying depths, terrifying because they reveal its indifference and formlessness that is also its ‘frenetic [effrénée] vitality’, as within this thought he discovers something [CQ: 167/336]. Before going on to examine what has been found it is worth clarifying what has taken place. The narrator attempts to describe himself by way of the memory of a reflection, which, in its indirectness, reveals a new kind of image-­space. But, as it takes shape, the image slips from his grasp so that every feature of it is as foreign and intriguing to him as it is to his companion, for each word or line of the portrait strikes him with the force of a new thought, one whose origin and form escapes him insofar as it arises from and bears an indifference and a vitality, which is what he now faces: I noticed that my eyes were open on something that I didn’t at first grasp, a point, not a point, but a blooming, a smile of the whole of space, which expressed, occupied all of the space, in which I recognized precisely what I had wanted to describe to him, a free smile, without hindrance, without a face, which radiated softly from this absence, illuminated it, gave it a resemblance, a name, a silent name. I looked at it without surprise, without disturbing it, without being disturbed by it, as if this calm had gradually been penetrated by the revelation that at this moment the figure was entering the sphere, that there it was being welcomed in the form in which it had been described, that the smile now belonged to the distance, that I had really given it to it, that in this gift it would find nourishment and a temporary safeguard against forgetting, which had as a corollary this idea that, in some way, this smile, this face, were now lost to me. CQ: 167–68/336 The smile has become the name, albeit a silent name, mute and so neither fully concrete nor abstract, neither word nor image, of the distance between them insofar as it resembles this distance, it is its figure, and thereby bears a movement in which the spacing of the word and the image convey a relation while also naming it. While the thematics of loss and distance are familiar parts of Blanchot’s writings, the presence of a smile seems unusual.1 But this is not the same smile as the one on the face he had earlier projected; it is rather a smile of the space that has opened out in the thought of estrangement from his companion. The terrifying strangeness of this thought derives from the fact that his companion might no longer be the same, that he might not bear an identity, and this thought, in its formless and unlimited vitality, suggests that the narrator has touched upon the outside of form in coming

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up against that which is simply different, which is what has opened in/as the space of the smile. It is thus not any kind of human smile but simply a curvature of space as it reflects (on) itself, a resemblance of the space between as the spacing of difference: the tranquil smile of no one, which no one saw and near which one could not dwell near oneself, not an impersonal smile and perhaps not even a smile, the presence of the impersonal, the acquiescence to its presence, the evasive, immense, and very close certainty that no one was there and that no one was smiling, which was yet expressed by an infinite, fascinating smile. CQ: 168–69/337 But the tranquillity of the smile holds an uneasiness, as if ‘it wasn’t yet free from all faces’ but still desired one. Nevertheless, it still evades the narrator’s grasp by approaching and receding and it is thus that he begins to understand that it is an image of resemblance as such, which is nothing but ‘the moving reflection of all space’ (just as Blanchot would write in relation to Mallarmé’s late works, that ‘moving indecision is the very reality of the space unique [propre] to language’) [LV: 293/241]. For while the smile affirms the immensity of resemblance and loses itself in it, resemblance itself is lost as the smile becomes a resemblance without resemblance, without ground or model, an errant differentiation of space, a trembling and infinitesimal fissuring [CQ: 169–70/337]. In this way the linguistic nature of their relation is made abstract insofar as it becomes the mere thought of difference, just as this abstract relation is made (minimally) concrete in the smile. This is not simply a dialectical sublation of relation but rather a fragmentary neutralization in which the distance and its name reflect each other without converging. Relation is thereby broken up into word- or image-­like fragments that are undecidably conceptual and sensible and constitute its spacing. Recall how the face is described as bright and dark, cold and joyful, and that out of the tension between these states another form arises, the smile, which removes itself. This is the negation of one position after another that language conveys, its capacity ‘to attach a negative or positive sign indifferently to each of its moments and each of its results’, which releases an image that is not fully negated or posited but neutre and, insofar as it departs from the totality of relation, finds its own fragmentary and indeterminate space [PF: 328/341]. As a result, the space imparts itself as an emptiness that smiles and a smile that is empty, both an image and a word, with the calmness and tension that accompanies this resembling such that ‘it is joy for itself’, a minimally autonomous reflection and affirmation of its empty depth, a formless gesture that underlies the verbal opening of affirmation (the ‘yes’ studied by Derrida) [CQ: 171–72/338]. The spacing of words and images is of language but also exceeds it into an anomalous exteriority, which is the thought of its appearance as difference

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and the divergence that is marked by the notion of écart. But this is not the corporeal spacing that unfolds the thinking of the flesh in Merleau-Ponty’s late works, nor is it the displacement that writing brings to the thinking of being in Derrida’s works, although there is some resemblance to these thoughts in Blanchot. For where Merleau-Ponty and Derrida begin with phenomenology, even as this is transformed, Blanchot begins with the indissoluble ambiguity of negativity, which means that, insofar as his thinking is not grounded in the parameters of human subjectivity but rather the endless plane of literature, it is bound to pursue this negativity without end. And what becomes apparent as this thought is explored is that it is not just affirmative, not just an opening, not just linguistic, but is instead a nullity or impasse that is undecidably negative and affirmative, cognitive and fatal: both the exposure of thought and a thought of exposure. Typically, a smile is a curved line or crease, a slight change in the angles of the face, that seems to bridge the gulf between the animate and the inanimate, the human and the nonhuman, and, moreover, cannot be witnessed without triggering a mimetic response or reflection. Whether this is understood as ethical or aesthetic, the (im)material relation of the smile occurs as a space between its participants whose force is suspended between the centrifugal and the centripetal, neutralizing rather than negating its material pressure, at least when it arises without prescription. This raises the question of what takes place when a smile appears on the face of the non-­ living: the statue, the photograph, the mask, or the corpse, for this would perhaps be an entirely free image, one released from any relation. In his 1950 review of Malraux’s La Psychologie de l’art Blanchot writes about the image in relation to the artwork and again makes use of the figure of the smile, but this time in regard to its material–temporal rather than linguistic–spatial relations. For Malraux, the artwork demonstrates the ability of the artist to make something that stands outside the world and outside time, and in doing so indicates the triumph of the artist over the natural course of things. The locus of this triumph lies in the presence of the artwork, as its apparent transcendence of history and context suggests that it lies beyond the vicissitudes of human finitude and exists in a world of its own, a timeless world of masterpieces that refer to each other more than to anything else and that he metaphorically organizes under the name of ‘the imaginary museum’. It is this notion of exteriority that interests Blanchot; a removal from the unending passage of time that creates its own form of presence and distance. But, contra Malraux, this is not to eternalize the ephemeral, since an image is not a means of imitating life, but rather of rendering it inaccessible, of establishing it in a fixed double that escapes from life. Living figures, men, are without resemblance. One must wait for the cadaverous appearance, the idealization of death and eternalization of the end, for a being to take

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on the great beauty that is its own resemblance, the truth of itself in a reflection. A: 42–43/32 That is, in becoming a corpse the human figure finds itself becoming like an artwork not because its form is made concrete but rather its finitude, since in becoming dead the human figure realizes what is remote by becoming distant to itself within its own presence, resembling and dissembling itself, exposing it from the present into another mode of time. Such thoughts are made more forcefully but perhaps less clearly in ‘Les deux versions de l’imaginaire’, which appeared after the essay on Malraux but in this instance Blanchot makes a point that helps explicate his thinking of the image, for he states that a portrait does not resemble because it makes itself similar to a face; rather, the resemblance only begins and exists with the portrait and in it alone, it is its work, its glory or disgrace, it is tied to the condition of work, expressing the fact that the face is not there, that it is absent, that it appears only from the absence that is precisely the resemblance, and this absence is also the form that time seizes on when the world moves away and when there remains of it only this gap [écart] and distance. A: 43/32 The smile that we find on some classical sculptures, like Praxiteles’ Hermes, expresses this relation to time, the indifference and freedom that ‘affirm the defiance that the expression of the ephemeral [. . .] brings to duration by enclosing itself within the unreal’. But again Blanchot undoes the possibility of seeing this distance in terms of the opposition between the ephemeral and the eternal, as the ‘absence of time that designates art only alludes to the power we have of putting an end to the world, of standing before or after the world [. . .] a power that is perhaps a sovereignty, but that also affirms itself in all situations in which man gives up mastering himself, accepting that he will not recover [ressaisir] himself’. Thus, this is not just the mastery that appears in the movement of absencing but also that which arises when one submits to this movement and is drawn into its gap and distance, the material abstraction of resemblance in which the negation of the whole occurs, and it is this absence that the artwork seeks (in vain) to realize in the image without turning it back into a world [A: 43–44/33]. Part of the reason for the impossibility of realizing this absence lies in the nature of the move that underlies it, for in establishing itself at a remove from the world the artwork remains in relation to it, not just socially and historically but materially and artistically. Thus the image must address itself not just to its relation to the world, but also to the way that it is placed in its stead as an inversion that reflects and refracts the world in both its

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presence and its absence, not as a particular negation but as a negation of the whole, ‘a realized universal emptiness’ [PF: 86/81]. As such, Blanchot remarks that Malraux’s term for the relation between the artwork and the world, ‘metamorphosis’, is ‘insufficiently rigorous or too evocative’ and does not reflect its dialectics of absence and presence, a dialectics that is both ‘powerful and powerless’ insofar as it reflects ‘the presence of pure matter arranged in such a way as to capture absence’ [A: 28/18, 48/37, 47/36].2 It is surprising to find Blanchot endorsing a dialectical understanding of the artwork, although as can be seen this is qualified to such a degree as to render it distant to any conventional use of the term. For in this relation of material presence and absence the work of modern art ‘is essentially that which contradicts itself and that which posits itself at the same time in this contradiction that it nonetheless cannot accommodate and that it does not want to appease’ [A: 48/37]. Praxiteles’ statue of Hermes will thus ‘eternally resemble itself in its smile, because this resemblance, detached once and for all from the life from which it is presumed to have been borrowed, is placed, by the force of the sculpture, in the shelter of the marble, in some way behind the marble, which is solid but not eternal, and also in the shelter of the sculpture’ [A: 46–47/36]. Thus, just as the smile removed itself from the portrait in Celui qui and appeared in/as the distance and the resemblance of the space between the narrator and his companion, the resemblance in the statue is given by the sculpture to the marble just as it is given by the marble to the sculpture, not so as to render their unity immaculate but rather to expose the restlessness of the implacable contradiction at its heart, the moving indecision of its space that opens its presence to ambiguity. Furthermore, and in contrast to the portrait in Celui qui, the materiality of the statue is such that any resemblance it bears is ‘detached once and for all’ from human life, that is, by virtue of the remoteness of the materiality of the statue from any kind of life the estrangement of the image is made more extreme than it was in Celui qui. And it is by this quasi-­dialectical (unresolved) negation of negation that the smile finds itself free from both form and materiality and finds its own mode of appearance. It is unusual to find Blanchot discussing non-­literary artworks by way of a dialectics of materiality and ideality, but he is doing so to show how the image releases itself from any fixed relation to either, becoming sheer image insofar as its resemblance cannot be located at the level of either its formation or its materiality. Hence the smile of Praxiteles’ Hermes (and it is barely a smile at all) is detached from life, taking shape in an absence or unreality that ‘is also a form of time’, which cannot be understood as an eternal present for in its sheer resemblance it is ‘never complete, always made and unmade [défaite]’, requiring a persistent restaging to prevent its dialectics from stabilizing [A: 46/35, 48/38].3 Equally, modern artworks that seek to approximate the thickness of materiality without anything beyond may have abandoned the ideal instant of appearance that the classical image

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aims to preserve, but they still find a transformation of materiality, as Blanchot notes, in the work of ageing and decay that makes apparent the absence at the heart of the image, its divergence from presence [A: 48/37– 38]. Nevertheless, we are no closer to approaching this absence because such artworks manifest their materiality more obtrusively; instead, the relation of absence becomes more apparent when it is more intimate, when it occurs at the level of the language that seeks to broach it, as was seen in Celui qui, where it leads to a breakdown of presence whose unsettling ambiguity is discussed further in ‘Les deux versions de l’imaginaire’. In this subsequent essay Blanchot extends the contrast between classical and modern art by seeking to differentiate the image as that which presents objects to us in their absence – following the logic of representation that is both consoling and deceiving, as it gives us the illusion of mastery in terms of the distance it establishes between ourselves and objects – from the image that presents the absence into which the object has disappeared as it is displaced by the image, revealing the troubling emptiness that underlies our gaze as the nothingness that ‘is’ when there are no objects, that which the world has to negate and resist in order to affirm itself. Such an image resembles the strangeness of a cadaver, which is neither a person nor an object but is rather the remnants of life, that which has been cast off (la dépouille), the formless and elemental materiality that has been left behind (that which does not come with me: celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas) and remains as an absence, outside of presence [EL: 267–68/255–56]. In place of the person there is only a dissolution in which the cadaver comes to resemble itself insofar as it is impersonal and inaccessible, that which is like nothing, but to an absolute degree. Hence the cadaver appears as unknown; its strangeness made manifest as that which is without relation or use but is neutre [EL: 270–71/257–58]. For insofar as it is an image of absence the cadaver is unable to fully negate itself, leaving it as an indeterminate dissolution that is neither present nor absent, concrete or abstract, but useless and abandoned. This is what grants it the power to haunt, for it lacks its own place or presence and instead wanders restlessly, an errant image that dwells nowhere [EL: 272/259]. Thus the presence of the cadaver indicates that the human is made in its image, according to its finitude, but also that it is ‘unmade’ (défait) in its image, as it does not reveal any truth or meaning but is rather the undoing of sense, which is why there arises the desire to control it; to sublate its indeterminacy into a configuration of values and meanings [EL: 273/260]. This point is not easy to grasp but it can be made more tangible through the Schillerian notion that beauty realizes itself in life, leading to the harmonious syntagm of a beautiful life. Hence, if the human is made according to its image it is insofar as form realizes itself in it, brings it to life, as the unity of form and sense. So, if the human is also unmade in its image, this means that the realization of form cannot escape its own undoing and that death indicates the rupture of the

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teleology of beauty and the necessary unity of beauty and life. The corpse demonstrates both aspects of this deformation of the image as it is an estrangement from anthropomorphism and an autonomous material fragmentation. Thus, the process of idealism that classical art pursued, in which the object is negated in favour of its truth, is unsettled by its opposite in which the void that subtends the object is made present in the image not by sublating it but by rendering its dissolution manifest in an image without relation. Thus Blanchot states (in a phrase that emphasizes the inassimilable nature of its terms, which will be explored further below) that to live an event as image (en image) is to be taken by it, not to gaze at it from a distance but to be removed into that distance and its sovereign power. This idea needs to be distinguished from the kenosis in Hegel’s understanding of Entäußerung, as well as Heidegger’s recuperation of death as a possibility that affirms the being of Dasein, and the psychoanalytic belief in appropriating unconscious desires, all of which seek to take up these forces of estrangement in order to direct and control them and thereby affirm one’s own position [EL: 274–75/ 261–62]. For in its endless remove the cadaver (like suicide) confounds these manoeuvres by showing that death is inappropriable. Coming to think this incommensurability of relation and non-­relation in the image, Blanchot had remarked at the end of his essay on Malraux (and he repeats this point at the beginning of ‘Les deux versions’) that the image is happiness but next to it is nothingness, for on the one hand the image is the limit against the indefinite but on the other hand all its power comes from the nothingness that founds it and that confronts us in the emptying out of the neutre image [A: 50–51/40].4 Thus the ambiguity of the image is not such that we can choose between idealization and materialization since its ambiguity makes choice itself impossible as the image is always both, which is to say that its ambiguity is not the movement from one meaning to another, or from meaning to its absence, but the movement from meaning to its neutre outside that is neither one nor the other. It is thus that the image bears upon language, for in this dissimulation of meaning there is a ground more basic, and abyssal, than negation or the oscillation between negation and meaning [EL: 276/263]. For insofar as language manifests this dissimulation as a language of images, it becomes its own image, an imaginary language, and if the image emerges through the absence of the thing, then the words that convey this are not just signs with meaning, but ‘images of words and words where things turn into [se font] images’ [EL: 25/34]. Understanding this movement by which words become images and images become words without their equalization or sublation is key to understanding how and why Blanchot’s approach to writing changes in the 1950s. For it is a transformation that is at once philosophical, insofar as it bears on the dialectic of subject and object, and literary, insofar as it concerns the space and form of literary expression. This transformation is given shape

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in an article from 1959 on Bachelard’s La Poétique de l’espace, in which Blanchot examines the way that images take place in language. For instance, the word ‘vast’ is in Baudelaire the word that makes a figure on its own and suffices to carry all ‘the power of words’. Vast like the night and like clarity. In this case, where would the image be, if there were one? In the word vast, where the night expands to attain its nocturnal dimension, where clarity destines itself to clarity by way of the always unclarified expanse, without night, clarity mixing or joining, being never ‘vast’ enough to measure the birth, in this word, of the image that is each time the entire presence of this counter-­world that is perhaps the imaginary. EI: 475/3245 The image appears in the word as a spacing that affects the form of the sentence, but as it is an imaginary opening it cannot sustain itself as fully present. Thus, the sentence becomes a reverberation of the apparition, in Bachelard’s words, introducing a spacing into language that renders it neutre and fragmentary, unable to posit or negate itself and thus not entirely sensible or insensible. Such a trembling is neither simple nor static but is always separating from itself, not to bear its semblance into a synthesis or integration but leaving it as a figure of the unfigurable, a dissembling in which there is no single image but rather a world of image. It is thus that language bears a thought of the neutre, as the sentence that reverberates with the image is the form in which the neutre comes to thought as the exposed whole (the outside) that cannot find a fixed form or meaning. Finally, there is a remark in ‘Les deux versions’ that draws together these meditations on the image and the language that seeks to broach it by, surprisingly, comparing writing to the act of poisoning. This aside is made more distracting by the name of Feuerbach, which is not a reference to the Hegelian philosopher but to his father, the legal scholar Anselm von Feuerbach, who wrote the definitive history of Kaspar Hauser along with many other case studies, including that of the Bavarian poisoner Anna Zwanziger who was executed in 1811 and had a notably fetishized relation to the arsenic she used, as Blanchot describes.6 This description makes it clear that Blanchot sees poisoning as analogous to the work of the artist as he had discussed it in the essay on Malraux, except that it concretizes the ambiguity of finitude with greater mortal resonance. For the happiness of the poisoner does not come from the death or suffering they bring about ‘but, by poisoning time, by transforming it into an imperceptible consumption, they touch upon the indefinite that is death; they brush against the horror, they live furtively underneath everything living in a pure decomposition that nothing divulges, and the poison is the colourless [blanche] substance of that eternity’ [EL: 272/260]. Aside from its effects on presence, it is not clear if we are to view poisoning in terms of writing or vice

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versa, for while poisoning seems to be understood on the basis of writing this affects the understanding of writing, leaving an image of mixed abstraction and concreteness that gives poisoning a philosophical depth and writing a fatal materiality and thereby grounds what was ostensibly a critical-­theoretical discussion in a very unusual way. After all, what are we to make of a text that, in discussing literary images, compares the process of (its own?) writing to arsenic poisoning? This is not a Surrealist provocation akin to Lautréamont’s metaphors but a more disturbing reconfiguration that emphatically removes the theoretical distance of conventional analysis. For writing, in conveying this image, becomes changed by it in both its sense and its form, as the image is not simply an innocuous thought or word but an actual material spacing that is concrete but elusive, abstract but piercing. The uncertain status of the image thus has an effect on the separation of theory and practice, and critique and narrative, as it is no longer just a description of a state of affairs but also its contamination and disruption.

II To understand how the ambiguous presence of the image comes to have a quasi-­dialectical effect on language that leads to its fragmentation, it is necessary to turn back to Blanchot’s earlier works where this approach finds its first formulations. The sense of a dialectic as ‘matter arranged in such a way as to capture absence’, a logic that posits itself in a contradiction that it cannot accommodate, emerges not just at the level of images but more basically in the way that individual sentences emerge and disrupt themselves [A: 47/36]. Consider the way that the following sentences take place: A sort of integral ventriloquist, wherever I cried out, that is where I was not and also just where I was, in all parts being equal to silence. My speech [parole], as if made of the highest vibrations, first devoured silence, then speech [. . .] I threw myself into the pure fire that consumed me at the same time it made me visible. I became transparent to my own gaze [. . .] I found myself with two faces, glued one to the other. I was in constant contact with two shores. With one hand showing that I was indeed there, with the other – what am I saying? – without the other, with this body that, superimposed on my real body, depended entirely on a negation of the body, I gave myself the most complete questioning [la contestation la plus certaine]. Having two eyes, one of which had an extreme visual acuity, it was with the one that was only an eye through its refusal to see that I saw everything that was visible. And so on, for all of my organs. TO: 110–11/114–157

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In each sentence the image is given in a form that conveys a contradiction without resolving it, which leaves the sentence unstable, neither meaningful nor meaningless, broaching a space it cannot fully describe. But just as the image takes on a verbal form that falls apart under its contradictory pressures, so the sentence takes on an image-­like thickness that seems to negate itself, and together this becomes the form of its breakdown in the face of such dissembling ambiguity. This example is one among many from Thomas l’Obscur, but it becomes more significant through its context, for here the relation between the image and its writing, the sentence and its deformation, resonates with the space of death, a space conveyed without resolution or appeasement as it is the very form of its aporetic ambiguity. And as there is no final image in which writing appears, so it is not possible to determine whether it is the image or the words that have priority, instead, the space in which they appear is a distancing without horizon, an endless spacing of words and images. If there is a change in Blanchot’s works over time, it is in relation to his awareness of this spacing and its effects on writing, which is why it may seem that this absence is conveyed more explicitly in his later fragmentary writings. As this sequence from Thomas l’Obscur develops it reveals the extent of the spacing and negativity inherent in what Blanchot called living the event as image. Standing by Anne’s dead body, Thomas attempts to understand what its presence entails and, aside from all the manoeuvres that would assimilate it to the course of life, he is forced to confront the primary and inescapable fact that death exists. Not as an isolated event but as a pervasive and elusive negativity that exists alongside life in an incommensurable, non-­complementary relation; a negative spacing of life. In considering the enigmatic reality of Anne’s corpse, Thomas realizes that he too ‘could die but death shone forth perfidiously for me as the death of death’. Death does not solve the problem of dying, it only avoids it, ‘I would die’, he goes on, but as ‘a dead person so alien to death [mort si étranger à la mort]’ that it would be impossible to die, for it would be as though he had missed the crucial moment [TO: 103/111]. Death appears as a companion, an impossibility that exists coextensively with him: All my being seemed to mingle itself with death. As naturally as men believe they are alive, accepting as an inevitable movement the regulation of breathing and the circulation of blood, so I ceased living. I drew my death from my very existence and not from the absence of existence. I presented [montrais] a dead person who did not restrict himself to the appearance of a diminished being, and this dead person, filled with passions but insensitive, requesting his thought from a lack of thought and yet carefully removing [écartant] whatever there might be in it of void or negation in life, in order to not make of his death a metaphor, an even weaker image of ordinary death, showing [figurait] to its highest point the paradox and the impossibility of death.

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Whether it is considered existentially or linguistically, this situation is difficult to fathom in its lack of metaphor, ‘my death was the same thing as death’, when it is also a condition in which Thomas is unlike the dead, since ‘at every instant [. . .] I had to find the sense and the definitive explanation of my death’, and unlike the living, since ‘neither night, nor loss of consciousness, nor indifference called me away from life’ [TO: 104/111]. Which is to say that, dead, Thomas still seeks the sense of his death, and alive, he has found some other way of departing life, such that he exists in and alongside his death, just as the space of the image invades and evades, informs and deforms the sentence with its negations. Death thus becomes the ‘index’ of his existence as he finds that he is ‘real only under the name of death’, while under ‘the name of Thomas [. . .] I had the look of a living thing’. Language brings about a split between a death that is real but inapparent, and a life that is only appearance and so is more like death, as the name of ‘Thomas forced me to appear, while living, not even the eternal dead person that I was and on which no one could gaze, but an ordinary dead person, a body without life, an insensitive sensitivity, thought without thought’ [TO: 105/112]. But amidst this linguistic negation and estrangement there is a discovery, for ‘in each human act, I was the dead person who at once renders it possible and impossible and, if I walked, if I thought, I was the one whose complete absence alone enables the step and the thought’. Hegelian negativity has affected Heideggerian finitude as much as vice versa, as the attestation of Dasein’s existence in its death is marked as its impossibility as well as its possibility, just as the negativity underlying activity is marked as the reality of undying death in every word and thought, so that every step is accompanied by its ‘dead double’ [TO: 106/112]. This double aporia is as much a fact of Thomas’s existence as of the writing that seeks to broach it, since it is language that enables Thomas to say that he is and is not, as well as conveying this to him, for these words do not simply describe his condition but also actualize it in its self-­negation: ‘wherever I cried out, that is where I was not and also just where I was, in all parts being equal to silence. My speech, as if made of the highest vibrations, first devoured silence, then speech’ [TO: 110/114]. There are already intimations here of how this dialectic of negativity will unsettle the positing of thought, but Blanchot takes it to extremes in trying to understand the effects of linguistic negation, which lead to a doubling not just in language, between the word and what it says, but also between what is and is not, and the impossibility of extricating one from the other, which is why literature is never just a question of writing, and death is not just a fact of living. In discovering his dead double in language, Thomas comes up against an image that is both real and apparent, abstract and concrete: ‘how could I reach him? By killing myself, absurd plan. Between this corpse, the same as a living person but without life, and this unnameable, the same as a dead person but without death, I could not see any kind of kinship [aucun

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lien de parenté].’ There is literally no relation between the one and the other, even as they are mutually pervading, for this elusive negativity ‘could not be designated by the opposite of its opposite, nor like a relation however it was conceived’. By appearing and negating itself in the same moment the image is neither positive nor negative but neutre, ‘an indiscernible nullity that I nevertheless joined to the name of Thomas. Was it then a fantasy, this enigma, the work of a word maliciously formed to destroy all words?’ [TO: 112/115]. By no longer being just a word but also being its nullity, this double aporia of death and language has become an image that undermines both while remaining indefinable and unlimited, and in coming up against this impasse Thomas arrives at an image of my enigma that would have been at once nothingness and existence. And, with these two words, I would have been able to destroy, incessantly, that which was signified by the one by that which was signified by the other, and by that which both signified, and I would have destroyed at the same time, by their opposition, that which was the opposition between these opposites and I would have finished, mixing them endlessly to merge that which could not be touched. In this radical dissolution of position and relation there is a concrete rupture of language, an aphasia, which expresses itself in a thought of negation: ‘the madness of the taciturn thinker appeared to me, and unintelligible words resounded in my ears, while I wrote on the wall these sweet words: “I think, therefore I am not” ’ [TO: 114/116]. Compelled by the force of the unspoken and unknown Thomas comes to think his own absence and finds the ‘form’ of negativity to be an overwhelming contradictory elusiveness, ‘a delicious vision’, both terrible and wondrous, repulsive and attractive, a sublime of positing as such.8 It is a vision of an immense self-­annihilating sun in which the light of the cogito endlessly consumes itself and that says to Thomas: I think: where thought joins to me I am able to subtract myself from being, without diminishing or changing, by a metamorphosis that saves me for myself beyond any hideout from which I could be seized. It is the property of my thought not to assure me of existence, like all things, like the stone, but to assure me of being in nothingness itself and to invite me not to be in order to make me then feel my marvellous absence. I think, said Thomas, and this invisible, inexpressible, nonexistent Thomas I became meant that henceforth I was never there where I was, and there was not even anything mysterious about it. My existence became entirely that of an absent person who, in every act I performed, produced the same act and did not perform it. TO: 115–16/117

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At the apex (or nadir) of what happens Thomas is both there and not there, and in not being there, there is ‘Thomas’, the two are inextricably but incommensurably linked. In this fatal event Thomas has come up against an aporia that is coextensive with life and thought, inflecting every movement and word with imminent rupture and reversal. In its negation of presence, the ‘life’ of this aporia (the event as image) is found in the writing itself, where every sentence is that which cannot go on and that which cannot cease attempting to do so, and that which emerges in the form of this anomaly. This aporetic imperative, in which the necessity of going on is coupled to its impossibility, enables us to understand how the movement of sentences comes to fragment under the pressure of insistent negativity. Although it is necessary for each sentence to be followed by a further one, writing disables any confidence in the nature of that continuation, which is why the appearance of negativity in writing entails an encounter with the Cartesian cogito, as the pre-­eminent attempt by thought to determine a ground for itself that would refute such aporetic scepticism and provide a basis to go on. But the form of the cogito is such that it only confirms the inescapability of scepticism as it appears both as an image that does not ground itself but dissolves in a negativity that undermines any necessary conjugation of thought and being, and as an estrangement that reveals that any positing of thought only occurs on the basis of (its) absence. It is thus only further doubt that is found in the cogito, not certainty, and doubt that has become concrete and unavoidable, an obscurity that shadows thinking, and this image, in becoming an impasse, is made explicit as a thought of negativity in the inverted cogito. Encountering this reality of non-­existence Thomas finds the cogito to be a limit-­experience that is both existential and cognitive, which means that it is as much sensible as it is conceptual, as much a material spacing of thoughts into images as a reflective spacing of images into thoughts, rendering it not only undecidable and aporetic but also a concrete image of thought as negativity.9 As writing cannot go on and cannot not go on, it fragments, firstly, as is shown here, through the pressure of the material images that permeate it, disrupting the sense of the sentence, and then in Blanchot’s later works, as this pressure is rendered more explicit, through its formal breakdown into fragmentary utterances. As a result, progress from one sentence to the next takes place not through continuous agreement or dialogic accumulation, but through a recursive estrangement in which statements diverge from each other (it is this écart that takes the place of mediation in the Hegelian dialectic). And if language or thought cannot guarantee the passage from one sentence to the next, then there is a gulf between them, a gulf that may be immeasurable and indeterminate but is also concrete and actual, and couples the unravelling of each sentence that passes with the appearance of its obscure negativity, its own image, in which negativity bears its own

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dissimulation. Negativity takes on a pervasive force in scepticism as any attempt to realize thought or understanding comes up against the problem that there is no natural or essential continuity between language and the world that guarantees their connection. But this is not to retreat into an Idealist or Gnostic disembodiment, for what Blanchot finds is the reality of the negative that arises in place of this assumed inter-­relation. What scepticism reveals is the suspension of judgement (epocheˉ) that is entailed by this lack of inherent reason, a suspension that is endless (an entretien infini) as it never finds the point at which it can be relieved but rather exposes thought and language to an unending uncertainty in which negativity takes on a concrete form, casting each thought into an ever-­changing abyss of ambiguity. The relevance of scepticism can be developed by way of an analogy between the mind and the room in which the cogito or writer seeks to define itself (this will be taken up more extensively in Chapter 7). Insofar as writing carries out this phenomenological reduction of thinking, it is able to uncover the thought that lies before the cogito, the thought of the neutre that precedes the elaboration of being. For if, as in Descartes, the discovery of thought enables the positing of being, then the thought of writing is one in which the writer discovers the obverse of being. Language undermines being through an insistent negativity, which indicates that it is already scepticism, as Levinas wrote.10 This negativity does not draw the writer into Cartesian abstraction but into the formlessness of materiality, which is the individual in its decrepitude alongside the unruliness of words and things. The room in which the writer works is not an isolated monad, hermetically sealed from the world, but the space in which thought uncovers its milieu with materiality and the world beyond. Scepticism is also the imperative that pushes the writer to go on, the inorganic virulence that persistently asks whether it can go further, despite its aporias, because, as it negates any position or proposition placed before it, it remains unsatisfied. Such scepticism takes its effects on writing, as is found in Blanchot’s later works, by forcing it to fragment under the pressure of its aporetics, and doing so leads to a different kind of space, a different form of writing, which in its fragmentation exposes the parataxis of words and things, the relation without relation that enables Blanchot to rethink the possibility of community as neutre. The nature of such inner contestation lies in its persistence, which is to say that it only exists for as long as it contests itself, by way of its halting progress. The room is a model for the mind because it seems to be an enclosed space in which the writer can compose himself. But it is impossible for the sojourn in the room to remain cut off from the world, even if there is no difference between the wasteland within and that without. But within this finite space there is the possibility of beginning, of writing the first line, because it is a space from which everything superfluous appears to have been removed. This initial abstraction or reduction comes about because of

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the aporias of doubt and scepticism, which prevent the belief in generalization taking root. There is what is here, within the room, but – and there the thought and the sentence stops, only to start again. There is no sterility to this space, for despite its abstraction thought cannot remove itself from the degradation of its own developments, which leads to its endless declination, the iterations of its own stuttering. Scepticism does not lead to a vacuum as it is equally scepticism of itself, of its own abstraction and reduction of thought, which unsettles it from within by showing how its negativity bears traces of its own dissimulation and reveals an endless negative dialectic, corroding itself and thereby persisting. If Descartes was confident in moving from doubt to thought, and from there to being, then it is precisely the sense of conjugation that is lost in the radical scepticism of Blanchot, which suspends the possibility of an ergo that would unify thought and being. Without this conjugation, there is only the absence of being that accompanies each isolated moment of thought, for thought does not guarantee anything about itself, all that can be said is that there is thinking, il y a penser, thus indicating how thought becomes enveloped in the obscure space of the neutre. In the beginning there is a beginning, and it is from this moment that the problems begin, for in starting there is the obligation to carry on. The sense of perversity or recidivism involved in this compulsion to repeat and to go on is echoed in the expression attributed to Seneca: ‘to err is human, to persist is diabolical’ (errare humanum est, perseverare autem diabolicum).11 There is no reason that subtends this persistence, it has no purpose or goal, and it is this discovery that is found at each step, which condemns us to persist and also to persistently question this persistence. In both cases there is a confrontation with what takes place in the obscurity of persistence, which becomes real despite its lack of substance. For as soon as the cogito is posited it negates itself by virtue of being a positing of thought rather than thought itself; doubt does not lead to the security of an unassailable position in the thinking subject but instead unravels that position. As Hume helpfully remarked, such unfettered scepticism, ‘were it ever possible to be attained by any human creature (as it plainly is not) would be entirely incurable’.12 Blanchot would agree with Hume here, as the life of scepticism is one that can only be borne by literature; doubt at this level only occurs in the language of literature as it is able to uphold the ambiguity of what is and is not. But in doing so literature draws the writer into this netherworld in which the reality of non-­existence is such that it undoes every ending: negativity exposes an endless dying in which the reality of death annihilates the possibility of ending, and so it can only go on. And if, in pursuing this doubt we find that nothing is beyond doubt, then we are led to ask where such ambiguity comes from but, as Blanchot remarks, ambiguity is its own answer, since ‘we cannot answer it except by rediscovering it in the ambiguity of the answer’ [PF: 328/341].

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It may seem odd that Blanchot is concerned with scepticism, but it is a critical point of reference for him even if he does not succumb to ontological doubts. After discovering phenomenology in the late 1920s Blanchot’s direct engagement with philosophy seems to slip, but between his reading of Sein und Zeit and the beginning of his work on Thomas l’Obscur he had written on the early Sceptics. To move from Heidegger to Sextus Empiricus is unusual and without knowing the exact contents of his dissertation it is not possible to speculate too broadly but it could be said, in the light of his later thought and writing, that what attracted him to the work of the early Sceptics was the way that the negativity that (un)grounds Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein could be articulated in linguistic terms as an inherent aporia of understanding. This leads to an emphasis on the materiality of scepticism and its formal consequences for writing, since at each step there is a not (pas) that inserts itself into thought and language that cannot be overcome, although a means can be found if this ‘not’ itself becomes the manner of proceeding. In this way Blanchot works towards the point where the deterioration of thought and materiality in the word converge in an image that, in its dereliction, reflects the endless doubt of scepticism. Thus, the method of Descartes is emptied out and extended by virtue of the inescapable negativity that it bears, indicating the void that comprises such philosophical enterprises in a secular world, something Descartes himself realized when it became apparent that all that prevented his scepticism from being all-­ consuming was his faith, thereby revealing, not the worthlessness of doubt, but its ongoing obligation despite the consequences of such doubt in the absence of an underlying reason. The existential drama that characterizes Blanchot’s writing in Thomas l’Obscur should not distract from the movements of his thinking as this drama is the way that the images of negativity are explored, that is, it is at this level that the formal difficulties of negotiating persistent negativity are examined such that the writing becomes an expérience of its own material images. What will be addressed in later texts by way of fragmentary writing is addressed here through images whose ambivalence is such that they undermine any attempt to determine them according to abstract–concrete, conceptual–sensible distinctions. Equally, the impossibility of delimiting their negativity affects the status of their appearance so that there is an uncertainty over whether the aporia is linguistic and not existential as well. From this ambiguity the inversions and contradictions of Blanchot’s prose arise as it attempts to bring a negativity to language that affects both its form and its possibility. Thus, while his language does not appear to be engaged in formal experimentation in these early works, it is doing so at the level of the narrative, which becomes estranged as its sentences seek to take account of their disruption. As the sentences take on these self-­negating movements, each phrase undoes itself in an image without relation (like a smile or corpse) but in this lack of relation the image conveys a relation to

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what is not, what is outside relation, so that it is no longer simply a word but a material spacing of thought. Each sentence is a thought that unfolds and thereby unravels itself, finding its own form under this aporetic pressure that is specific to its interruption. Although the writing of Thomas l’Obscur or Celui qui can appear wilfully perverse in its persistent self-­negation, it does so in order to bring the thinking of language into language. It is thus as a mode of thought that Blanchot’s sentences are brought to change by undergoing these aporias, so that their material spacing becomes an exposure of thinking through language. But this is an exposure to that which cannot simply be thought as it persistently removes itself from thinking, since it ‘remains exposed [demeure à découvert], where space is the vertigo of spacing’ [EL: 22/31]. As a result, the fragmentation of the sentence is also its temporalization, and that of the thought it bears, as it is an opening to a radically unknowable writing to come and its inevitably mortal resonances. It is this move that Blanchot will have to engage as he attempts to grasp what is at issue in fragmentary writing.

6 White noise

In the early 1950s, Blanchot’s writings, both critical and fictional, began to exhibit what Michael Holland has called ‘an obsessive and dirge-­like’ quality.1 This is not simply to criticize the monotonous tone that has become distinctive of his writings but to recognize that he seemed to have been led into a kind of an impasse in which his thinking and writing were revolving around the same themes and tropes. To some extent this was the inevitable result of the way that his writing proceeded, in which there was a necessary intimacy between the mode and form of his writing and that which it was seeking to approach. But, as Holland points out, it risked leading to an ‘essentializing paralysis’, which was notably criticized by Derrida in ‘La parole soufflée’, and it was partly because of this apparent impasse that Blanchot’s writings changed in the late 1950s to pursue a more fragmentary approach, again, thematizing the problem in order to address it by way of its own mode and form.2 While much could be said about the ‘magical’ effect of this reflexivity, and the way that it became the target of Henri Meschonnic’s critique of Blanchot’s ‘myth of language’, I will instead proceed more indirectly in this chapter by examining what such an obsessive, dirge-­like quality might imply, and thereby seek to address the issue of how much this became a problem for Blanchot, and for his readers.3 I will focus on Blanchot’s last récit, Le Dernier Homme, which seems to occupy the peak of this issue before the move into fragmentary writing in L’Attente l’oubli.4 But before doing so it is necessary to elucidate something of what is meant by a dirge-­like way of writing. A dirge is traditionally a funeral song expressing grief and mourning and by its enunciation acting as a memento mori. The word derives from the Latin dirigere (to direct) as it is used in the Matins sequence of the Office for the Dead prayer cycle, which features the line (from Psalms 5:8) ‘Direct my way, oh lord my god, in your sight’. But its usefulness for present purposes comes more closely from its popular sense as a term for a slow, repetitive, and lugubrious singing. Although it is meant as a mode of mourning, that is, as a way of expressing grief and thereby satisfying and relinquishing its effects, the more popular usage refers precisely to its endlessness, which expresses an

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obsessive inability to move on. In addition, the repetitive and sombre aspects of the dirge lead it into a form of noise in which the sense of the individual words seems to give way to the overall rhythm, an indistinguishable murmuring, whose effects have become echoed in a certain kind of response to Blanchot’s writings. So, where the element of monotony in the dirge arises from the need to lead the mourner safely out of the company of the dead, in Blanchot’s writings this sense of a persistent treading of the same path does not guarantee safety but rather its opposite. The step beyond is never certain and so leaving the company of the dead is not, as Orpheus found, straightforward.

I Le Dernier Homme was published in January 1957, although extracts had appeared in various journals in the previous sixteen months. As such, it not only comes at the end of a cycle of récits stretching back over ten years but is distinguished by being the first one written after the appearance of texts by other authors who seemed to be operating with a broadly similar approach, namely, Beckett, Duras, and Robbe-Grillet. Of particular importance is the first critical work by Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture, which came out in 1953, as this was clearly written in awareness of Blanchot’s works but sought to develop ideas that tended in a very different direction. Blanchot’s critical essays on these authors would later appear in Le Livre à venir, but it is possible to see that in his last récit he was also thinking through a response to the way that others were reacting to his works, both to deepen his inquiries and to demonstrate their necessity. It is as such that the difficulty and monotony of his writing becomes accentuated at the very point where its significance is most at issue. While much has been written about the Nietzschean (and Kojèvian) resonances of Le Dernier Homme in relation to its title, my concern here is with the kind of language that emerges in this récit, which seems to emerge in the attempt to respond to a certain thought of silence and absence.5 It is useful to look at the opening of the text to help situate these thoughts, for, as with many of Blanchot’s récits, the opening marks the way that its particular mode of linguistic expérience will develop: As soon as I was able to use that word, I expressed what I must always have thought of him: that he was the last man. In truth, almost nothing distinguished him from the others. DH: 7/1 If one were to consider the style of Blanchot’s language, for want of a better word, a passage like this is as representative as any other. And this is part of the problem, since any familiarity with Blanchot’s writing quickly leads the

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reader to a position of recognition of this mode, a recognition that can be as frustrating as it is enthralling. His style is very distinctive, but isolating its elements is less easy, and it is only in the process of examining these elements that it becomes possible to understand how this mode is a response, a necessary response, to a very specific question. The first sentence itself starts with the discovery of a response, as the narrator finds the word for that which he has always thought, even if this knowledge was unknown to him beforehand, thereby encapsulating the problem of how knowledge relates to language. Is it possible to know something without having the words for it, and what takes place when a word is found that appears to give expression to a previously held idea? This retroactive formation carries a persistent doubt, even if it is not acknowledged, as it is not possible to return to the thought before its naming to assess whether it resembles the thought as it is now named. Language covers over this disturbing absence, which this opening sentence draws out by coupling a definitive statement, ‘he was the last man’, with the uncertainty of its meaning: how could such a definition have arisen in the narrator’s thoughts when the notion of the last man is itself so undefined? What is at the absent origin of such a thought? While the recursive ambiguity of the sentence appears resolved by its definitive ending, this only unravels into further obscurity since, in its recursiveness, it leans back into that from which it appears to arise: ‘As soon as I was able to use that word, I said what I must always have thought of him.’ In reading this sentence we hover in the moment before its enunciation, and our thoughts are directed towards the moment before, at the very point where it is displaced by the index of the present, but not completely. By starting with this sentence Blanchot registers temporally what was marked more spatially in the opening sentence of his previous récit, Celui qui: the almost unsurpassable difficulty of beginning a text when it is necessary to remark on that beginning in doing so, without erasing its opening, for only thus can it remain open instead of merely presenting itself. But the style of this sentence arises from the rhythmic quality of its sense, in which there is the subtle conveyance of a quasi-­dialectical movement from one clause to the next, as it moves from a word through a thought to a man. This would appear to be an eminently dialectical development except for the manner in which each position of the movement is undercut by the voiding of its sense: the word arises through its own retroaction, the thought was already present in a past that is no longer accessible, and the man towards which the statement is oriented is named in such a way that his definition is only deferred. Each aspect of the dialectical positing is rendered temporally uncertain so that its appearance is not clearly present. In phenomenological terms, this voiding of the dialectic of appearance is familiar from Heidegger’s works as they are taken up by Blanchot, but the effect on reading is made more concrete when it is considered as noise. What takes place through this persistent undercutting of sense is that each position

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is countered so that in its reading there is no clearly defined sense or lack of sense but rather a form of noise, insofar as there is a materialization of language that neither emerges into meaning nor lapses into silence. There is a rigorous suspension between the position and negation of sense that renders the writing neutral, forming an écriture blanche that could be seen as a form of white noise. It is the opaque and disorienting quality of white noise that makes it resemble what is so distinctive about Blanchot’s writings and that is most difficult to engage with, since they evade or resist being drawn into definite meanings. It is possible to discuss this neutral resistance by examining the interplay of abstraction and materiality in Blanchot’s language, as I have done above, but the quality of being like a form of noise makes the avoidance of meaning concrete in a more tangible manner, and also raises the issue of its legibility in relation to that which it is seeking to mark and remark. In extenso, such neutral writing may suggest a form of meditation, a blanking of meaning by which the participant seeks to remove themselves from subjectivity and agency. But this approach risks generalizing Blanchot’s form of writing into a transcendental praxis, whereas the materiality of his writing is concerned with specific questions, however lacking in definite meaning. In the case of Le Dernier Homme it is remarkable that the récit begins with such a clear introduction of its subject matter: the last man is named and made present in his ambiguity but nevertheless made present, and it is here that the questions of temporality that the sentence has already started to mobilize come to focus on the issue of mortality. Whether in terms of its usage by Nietzsche or Kojève, the last man is the one who is at the end of history or humanity, the one after whom there are no more, no others, which is to say that in the state of being the last all the others have gone, and it is here that the dirge-­like quality of Blanchot’s writing begins to derive its necessity. But, as he emphasizes, ‘almost nothing distinguished him from the others’, there is very little to separate the ones who have gone from the last man, making it almost impossible to designate his position definitively, and it is this subtle and uncertain margin that also marks the position of writing in relation to that which it is seeking to approach. This ‘almost’ is the nearly imperceptible difference that registers the text as noise rather than silence in relation to its absent origin, it is the mode of its hesitant temporal appearance, a marker that is inherently written and as such material in terms of the difference between, for example, A and Aʹ, which are identical except for the fact that we have to mark the second term in some way so that it is not the same. In this ‘almost’, writing appears, not as meaning or language, for that would be to move too quickly into its definite present, but as a textual noise, a marker of its presence to come or incomplete disappearance, which could only be named insofar as it had distinguished itself.6 It is this movement that is being sketched out in these first lines. But it is important not to reify the opening, although it introduces the intensity and instability of the forms that will appear in what follows. For

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example, the character of the last man has few identifying features since each time a description arises it is accompanied by a counterpoint that does not simply negate the first meaning but renders it uncertain. While he is described as being reserved, old, weak, and quiet, he also has a strange gravity, a weight that affects his step and his voice, as well as his gaze, so that he is both demanding and withdrawn. Hence, he does not seem to be fully present when he is there, and even if he talks very little, his appearance still seems to ask questions, to raise difficulties, as if his very existence was a problem for thought, for himself as well as for others. A problem he articulates through one of Zeno’s paradoxes: ‘it’s like an arrow, coming from too far away, that won’t reach its target, and yet when it stops and falls, the target, in the distance, quivers and comes to meet it’. At these moments, he talks very fast and with a sort of low voice; great sentences [phrases] that seem infinite, that roll with the sound of waves, a universal murmur, an imperceptible planetary song. This goes on, is terribly imposing in its gentleness and distance. How to answer? Listening to it, who wouldn’t have the feeling of being that target? DH: 8–9/2 If, in Zeno’s paradox the arrow cannot reach its target, for at any single moment it is not moving but stationary, then in Blanchot’s version it is the configuration of space rather than time that is the problem. In being constituted by its distance, space collapses at the point that this distance fails, and only thus can the target and arrow meet. This is a vision of space without continuity: there is no gradual movement from arrow to target, but a sudden transition from flight to arrival that is constituted by its rupture or failure. In much the same way that I have mentioned in an earlier text, the cadence of this movement is critical, for the movement through which the sentence ends is indistinguishable from its failing movement.7 Does the arrow hit the target because it has fallen, or does it fall because it has hit the target? The undecidable convergence between the two is the margin of resonance that gives rise to the noise that the narrator seeks to express, the uncanny, inhuman sound of space turning on itself. Whether in the deformation of waves crashing, or the planet revolving, space here is not absolute but deformed by the movements that constitute it, and expresses itself in the form of noise, a discordant, self-­consuming version of any Pythagorean music of the spheres. In its failed attempts to fold back on itself, this noise is unable to either cancel itself out or to emerge as a pure form but remains as a neutral materiality, which in answering to its own deformation appears in a writing whose legibility is then in question, since such noise cannot be read.8 Technically, white noise (bruit blanc) is not just a form of sound but any kind of signal where the intensity is the same across different frequencies. It

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presents a form of sheer materiality, which is nevertheless not without some minimal level of form and movement, and only exists in a finite sequence where the random variables exhibit a mean of zero. Thus, it is not simply static but an active production of a field of noise that cancels out the difference between positive and negative, leaving a form that is neither sound nor its absence but their neutral combination. As ‘white’ noise its sense is derived from the combination of different colour wavelengths in white light, but also from the roaring chaos of a snowstorm, where sound, vision, and touch are absorbed in a field of swirling excess. Either way, the experience of such noise is not just an auditory phenomenon, since in its excess it presents a problem as it confuses the senses by not appearing in only one sensory field and so cannot be reduced to sensibility alone. White noise is a confusion at the level of knowledge as well as sense in that it appears as a conceptual and aesthetic impasse. It is thus that it is associated with an idea of cleansing, of wiping away all specific sounds to leave a field of pure thought. The experience of reading some of Blanchot’s writings, in their excess of contradictory, ambiguous, and abstract phrases, leads to a similar aesthetic and conceptual impasse. This excess occurs not just through the familiar vocabulary of absence and loss and failure, and the themes of darkness and silence and isolation, but also in the way that the language of these phrases actively subverts its own meanings by presenting images that are then undermined. This logic of persistent negativity creates a profound sense of disorientation but in doing so leads the reader into the field of disorientation, into that which arises in the absence of meaning and order. As noted there is a risk that this experience is seen as a meditative counter-­experience, an apophatic experience of the absence of experience, but the critical point is that these discussions are not purely abstract but motivated by specific questions of mortality, community, and language. The challenge is to understand how this logic of negativity arises from and answers to particular problems, how the disorienting experience of a kind of textual white noise is focused, however elusively, on an issue that seemingly can only be addressed in this way. Recognition of this challenge arises as a result of thinking through the problem of legibility in Blanchot’s writing, where each sentence seems almost irretrievably ambiguous and obscure, and over a few pages this effect becomes quite overpowering. One can either focus on the sentences to try to discern what is happening but then progress is halted by their manifold possibilities, or one can attempt to move across the surface of the paragraphs, blinding oneself to their microscopic structure and hoping to discern a greater level of meaning in the narrative, but this approach also comes to halt as the surfeit of uncertainty only leads to greater and greater disorientation. But the rationale of such a form of writing can be grasped when it is seen how the movement between the sentences and the paragraphs deliberately engages this movement of disorientation in order to reflect something of the encounter that the text is discussing.

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II Insofar as a récit in Blanchot’s thinking is drawn to its origin, what is found in it is not the presentation of a form but the opening of language to the absence from which it appears to arise. Language seeks to approach this absence by trying to empty itself, to find the silence that will allow it to speak of that which is its source but this silence and absence are intrinsically elusive. Moreover, the form in which they make themselves felt is disturbing and alien, and it is thus that a language that seeks its own source finds that, as this source is no longer present, its voice is that of the dead. The language before is not really language at all, just as the language of the dead can be nothing human or linguistic. Thus the writing in Le Dernier Homme seeks to empty itself by its own, necessarily endless, negation, as its attempts to unravel itself are condemned to fail, and yet the sentences continue, trying again and again to undermine themselves. This movement is conveyed most obviously in the tropes of decline – of tiredness, sickness, aging, and so on – whose imperative comes from the demand that ‘what had been thought in such a strong way should be thought again and rethought on the level of extreme weakness’ [DH: 34/17]. But this negativity also occurs at the level of the sentences in their movements of self-­contradiction, their persistent attempts to elude positive or definite meaning, and it is as such that the erosion of language leads to a form of noise, not any ordinary sound but an anomalous materialization like ‘a cold groaning, a singular noise, severe, slightly wild’ [DH: 10–11/3].9 This description is used to convey the way that the last man coughs, ‘like a wolf, he said’, and as with many of the descriptions in this récit it is repeated, which only makes it less compelling for in its repetition we are drawn to the words rather than that which is being described, and the words become stranger with each iteration: we would hear his cough at night, among all the others, that wild sound that sometimes evoked a groan, sometimes a triumphant cry, a howl that did not seem to belong to such a weak creature, but from a whole horde that stayed close to him and passed through him: ‘Like a wolf’, he said. Yes, it was a terrifying noise that I had to protect her from, and yet she was waiting for, that she said she could hear coming out of me, crossing me, passing from me to her to reach her with a force that shook her, that she did not resist. Then came the silence, a moment of happy calm in which everything was forgotten. DH: 38–39/19 Any sense of this cough remaining within a familiar sphere has been removed, it is now more like a force of nature than a sound and certainly not a human sound (or even any recognizable kind of wolf), a force that does not fit into

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any sensory field but traverses individuals as a disruption that seems to indicate the sphere from which it has arisen. But attendant upon this noise is a calm that will also recur through the récit, becoming more and more like the noise that initially seemed to be distinguished from it. Sounds and noises are particularly prominent in this récit, and appear to operate as ways of exposing the underside of language, which is thematized by the fact that it takes place in a kind of sanatorium, a place where people are ill and dying, where language has been replaced with the more basic, less human sounds of cries and groans. Such a situation might suggest an allegorical status to the récit in which, as in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg, the sanatorium stands in for the world, for, as Bataille pointed out, the sanatorium, like the world itself, is a place where people die.10 But consider the transformation occurring in the following lines, where the experience of calmness is unravelled: a calm resembling that which one imposes on oneself around people who are very sick and suffering a great deal to spare them any painful vibration, a calm that could not entertain any question about them, any uneasiness and barely a thought. But this did not result in any calm, only a ruder silence and a rough, hard noise, a silence and a noise deprived to a terrible degree of any musical quality and that made the frequenting of places and people here so difficult. Even the moans, the calls at night retained something dry that didn’t attract pity, didn’t call anyone, didn’t reach anyone, a slow torment, an insensible wasting away that had to be related to his own suffering, the suffering that had silently worn him out with an infinite patience: it was there around us, all the heavier as it was lighter, pushing us back, moving us away, attracting us, scattering us. DH: 95/52–53 What might have seemed to be a fairly acceptable description of a hospital setting has become strange and elusive, the sounds have transported it into an ambiguity that defies certainty. Something non-­human and pre-­linguistic has been uncovered, but despite its alienating force (that echoes or derives from the last man’s own decline, which is thus revealed as not merely mortal suffering) there is a sense that the calmness has remained in the lightness of its estrangement. Calmness is no longer separate from the terrible noise of dying, and the cries and moans now appear as forces of erosion and dispersal. No one responds or listens to these cries, they are merely rough, hard noises that mark a space of repulsion, an interval that they both create and bridge. And in the short second part of the récit, where the narrator, now alone, develops a monologue around this anomalous noise, he ponders this problem: ‘It is a strange voice, a stifled murmur that comes from the earth, a dry, arid cry; this disturbs us, obliges us to hear, and who utters it?’ [DH: 136/77]. As has become evident, the last clause here is no longer a question, as there is no

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subject behind this voice; it ‘is weak, shrill like a lizard’s squeak. Our own has the volume and strength of worlds added onto worlds, but it is also silent. The other has something of the animal, too physical. Imperceptible, it shakes us’ [DH: 120/67–68]. Like a wolf, he said, that is, not a wolf, not an actual specific animal, but only like one, bearing its physicality but not its form, and thereby its lack of humanity and its almost imperceptible difference and presence, it is barely there, and barely noticeable. The key to this transformation is that the narrator is seeking to understand how to approach the last man, and the effects that such an approach would have: ‘I don’t know what could have reached him and whom one would still have reached in him’ [DH: 10/3]. And conversely, ‘He wasn’t addressing anyone. I don’t mean he wasn’t speaking to me, but someone other than me was listening to him.’ Although the last man remains unique, despite his refusal of definition, the narrator experiences an opposing tension ‘as though, in confronting him, what had been me had strangely awakened into a “we” ’. While this sense of expansion seems allied with ‘the presence and united force of the common spirit’, as a kind of singular plurality that is more and less than one man, it is also ‘the earth, the power of the elements, a sky that is not this sky’ [DH: 9/2]. Such is the force of negativity inherent in language, its materiality and abstraction as elements that are not themselves, which the narrator (and writer) experiences in seeking to approach its source. This is not a generalized, essentialized source, but the particular occasion that has given rise to its response, its own uncertain origin, which is figured in its extremity as the last man, the one who is coming not just from very far away but, due to his endless decline, from ‘down there’. The horizonal relation between the two is thus not only constituted by their remoteness but also by their abyssal derangement: ‘There are moments when I rediscover him as he must have been: a certain word [phrase] that I read, that I write, moves aside [s’écarte] to make room for his own’ [DH: 10/3]. The last man makes his appearance felt by undermining language, not by approximation through space but by a discreet but emphatic, albeit retroactive, unfounding, which displaces the narrator. It is a spatial relation of discontinuous rearrangement in which subjects become disrupted in the same way that ‘one word with disconcerting promptness hid [dérobée] behind another’ [DH: 11/3]. In a space where there is no true sense of depth there can be no transitions, only shifting displacements, rendering it much like digital space, except that it is not digital, that is, it is not made up of identical, interchangeable, and immaterial parts that provide a substrate of endless uniformity. Instead, the relation here is one of mortal sensibility, which inflects what may be understood as its noise. The last man is not simply dead, and writing is not simply necromancy. But the presence of the dead, as Blanchot made clear in ‘Les deux versions de l’imaginaire’, is uncanny as they lack any kind of locus. The dead are neither here nor there, but strangely nowhere and everywhere, which is why

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the horizon of finitude is not to be placed at some remote point but, like the dead, wanders restlessly, creating its own form of disruption. And as he concludes, ‘we do not cohabit with the dead on pain of seeing here collapse into the unfathomable nowhere’, which provides some explanation of the strange gravitational effect that the last man holds [EL: 272/259]. It is as such that the auditory understanding of noise is insufficient, as the narrator discovers: ‘is he still coming? Is he already going? The ear doesn’t know; only the beating of the heart discloses it’ [DH: 11/3]. If there is to be any telling of this relation, narrative or otherwise, then it can only occur by way of a mortal recounting, in which its finitude is ever present. What is discovered is the peculiar form of relation, both spatiotemporal and linguistic, that occurs in the company of the dead for, as Heidegger inferred, there is an undecidability that occurs in our relation with the dead in which it is not possible to be certain about who has been left behind, who remains [SZ: 317–18/229–30]. The only point that is certain is that there is a difference, but its manifestation occurs with the dislocation that is found in the interaction between similar magnetic poles, as the forces of both cannot occupy the same place. This rearrangement of spatial and linguistic relation is marked quite explicitly by the narrator, and demonstrates the mode of their relation: ‘he hesitates almost constantly; only his hesitation allows me to be somewhat sure of myself, and to listen to him, to answer him. Yet there was something else: a canal lock would open, we would change levels with each other’ [DH: 11/3–4]. This mutual disruption generates a form of interference that is not merely of sense but encompasses a more fundamental disruption of time and existence, which the writing is trying to convey by seeking to respond to it in kind. Only in its hesitation, its incomplete presence and absence, can it reflect that which is already going and still coming, that which is almost finished but not quite. While this sense of disruption will become understood as the relation without relation of mutual interruption in Blanchot’s thinking shortly afterwards (as the next chapter will show), both in terms of its effect on ethics and as part of the basis for fragmentary writing, in this récit it is the problem of its mortal intimacy that is strongest. It can be understood how broadly Blanchot is attempting to gauge this relation when it is recalled that the last man had spoken with a universal murmur, an imperceptible planetary song, and why this peak of negativity could not be sustained and would give way to a thinking of the community that responds to the world of the dead.11 Within Le Dernier Homme this community emerges as the narrator begins to triangulate his relations with the last man through the presence of a female companion, but in the first few pages he is still concerned with trying to establish the ramifications of their mutual syncopation. After speaking of their shifting positions in space and time, he returns to the mortal resonance of this displacement by trying to think it in terms of ‘a sleep that is never altogether closed, open on one of its sides: a sleep that I imagined by thinking

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of the blackness under the eyelids that fades [décolore], whitens a little when one dies, so that to die would be to see clearly, for a moment’ [DH: 13/4]. This is then followed by a phrase that tries to describe the last man’s lack of responsibility: ‘he was a burning in the eyes’ [DH: 13/5]. Although the lightening in these two images appears to converge on a point of metaphorical decoding, this only occurs to the extent that we fail to read the lack of coincidence between them. The images are not the same, burning is not fading, even if both involve a lightening, and so in their non-­coincidence they only expose the instability and poverty of their own formulations, which is registered in their fading senses. These lines are not designed to converge but to deflect or counter each other; seeming to operate out of the same set of images they only displace each other, creating discordance rather than harmony. If this is an écriture blanche, then it is not placid but finds its ‘whiteness’ through the way that the erosion of meaning in dying punctuates it with an extreme lack of unity, a material sickness of sense as it is disrupted by its own aporetic hollows, dead spots where meaning cannot form itself and begins to fragment, and that can only be rendered tangible through a field of noise. Of special interest in this regard is the extensive use of black and white contrasts in this récit, with descriptions of the intense darkness of the night and the brilliance of the corridors and the snow-­covered exteriors. But, as with the peculiar manifestation of sounds, there is a relation between what takes place in the behaviour of the last man and what takes place around him, a sense of uncontainable transformation where the usual distinctions between words and things are removed: I had sometimes noticed a rapid change of level during his speech. What he said changed meaning [sens], was no longer directed towards us, but towards him, towards someone other than him, another space, the intimacy of his weakness, the wall, as I said to the young woman, ‘he has touched the wall’, and what was most striking then was the threat that his quite ordinary words seemed to represent for him, as if they risked stripping him bare before the wall, which was conveyed by an effacement that whitened what he said as quickly as he prepared to say it. DH: 40/20 The distinction between world and page seems to have broken down, as the interference of sense crosses both in a way that is neither purely material nor purely linguistic. The contrasts of black and white mobilize these overlapping disruptions, but within the récit they become part of the movement between the living and the dead, between what appears at the level of meaning and what resists or withdraws from it. By these modes language is seeking to expose its underside, that which no longer appears as meaningful but is mere noise, whether considered in sensory, signifying, human, or mortal terms. At

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this level of convergence the simplest terms carry the risk of bringing about huge changes as they affect the reality of what is experienced, exposing the point at which word and thing can no longer communicate but are both exposed to meaninglessness. There is no speculative synthesis of language and reality but its inverse, the wall and ‘the wall’ are stripped of any common ground and find themselves dislocated into a sheer absence of sense; whether concrete or abstract, metaphorical or literal, the definition of sense has been undermined: ‘the walls had fallen, those that separate, also those that serve to transmit signals’ [DH: 29/14]. Meaning is no longer directed safely between word and thing, but set adrift, leaving a directionless field of things without name and words without reference, which leaves language and reality almost indistinguishable even as they do not combine or merge. Any approach to such ‘language’ is very far from what is human or sensible.

III The notion of écriture blanche is introduced briefly by Barthes towards the end of Le Degré zero as a way of talking about a writing that has freed itself from the historical and ideological conventions that condition language use and in its place found a form of innocence, a utopian state that is drawn from the supposedly natural quality of spoken language (its degree zero), which opens it to a new future. In place of language, which is socio-­ historically conditioned, and style, which is personally conditioned, writing emerges as a third term that enables a decisive intervention in history. And, of all the forms of literature, it is the bland, colourless, neutral form of an écriture blanche that converges on this zero degree and makes its utopia most tangible, albeit elusively: writing at degree zero is basically an indicative writing, or if you like, amodal; it would be accurate to say that it is a journalist’s writing, if it were not precisely the case that journalism in general develops optative or imperative (that is, pathetic) forms. The new neutral writing takes its place in the midst of these cries and judgements without participating in any of them; it is made precisely of their absence; but this absence is total, it implies no refuge, no secret; one cannot therefore say that it is an impassive writing; rather, that it is an innocent writing. The aim here is to go beyond Literature by trusting in [se confiant] a sort of basic language [langue], equally far from living languages and from literary language properly speaking. This transparent speech [parole], inaugurated by Camus’s L’Étranger, achieves a style of absence that is almost an ideal absence of style; writing is then reduced to a sort of negative mode in which the social or mythical characters of a language are abolished in favour of a neutral and inert state of form; thus thought retains all its

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responsibility, without being overlaid by a secondary commitment [engagement] of form to a History that does not belong to it.12 As Barthes recognized, at least partially, the problematic aspects of this ideal are not hidden, for in associating itself with natural speech writing does not find freedom but only further ideology, and in seeking to remove itself from history it is only led into a self-­deceiving impasse, which is neither utopian nor decisive but simply aporetic, écriture blanche thus only emerges as a mirage on the horizon of this failure. It is unsurprising that Blanchot would respond to such thoughts, but he is severe in his criticisms, as any return to immediate or instinctive language is hopelessly misguided: ‘Immediate language is not immediate, it is charged with history and even literature, and above all, this is essential, as soon as the one who writes wants to grasp it, it changes nature in his hand.’ Beyond the impossibility of removing language from history, Blanchot criticizes Barthes’s failure to recognize the actuality of the experience of writing, in which words relate to the world very differently from how they do in ‘natural’ speech: What I have through fiction, I have only on condition of being it, and the being by which I approach it is what divests me of myself and of all being, it even makes of language no longer what speaks but what is, language becomes the idle [désœuvrée] profundity of being, the milieu where the name is made being but does not signify or reveal. LV: 282–83/207–8 This ontological language may seem equally ideological but, as he shows, thereby indicating part of what is at stake in Le Dernier Homme, the transformation of the writer or reader into language evacuates any essence from their position. Where there was a subject, now there is only the facticity of language but a facticity stripped of any identity or substance, an empty relation without terms such that it can no longer support subject or object, position or negation, but nevertheless without becoming less real. Language is no longer a means nor a form of communication, it expresses no meanings as it no longer speaks, which is to say that it has become material and unsignifying, and thus closer to the status of what is there. The notion of ‘a universal murmur, an imperceptible planetary song’ serves to restate the depth and strangeness of what is exposed in the neutrality of an écriture blanche, a term that is not Blanchot’s own but with which he has an unavoidable intimacy.13 It is not the utopian state of innocence that marks his style but a whiteness closer to the insomnia of la nuit blanche, a more disorienting and inhuman absence of definition, a writing of blank noise. Significantly, Blanchot goes on to gloss this position of literature to the world in terms of the Marxist thought of alienation, not just because the

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humanity from which literature is alienated is itself alienated but also because literature alienates itself by betraying its own demands, in both senses of the word, by deceiving and disclosing them. This point reflects the ambivalence in the relation between ‘natural’ speech and the materiality of literature, and the mode of their convergence, which is helpfully captured in Benjamin’s ideas about the nature of language: ‘Because it is mute, fallen nature mourns [trauert]. 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 [Sprachlosigkeit] and this is infinitely more than the lack of ability or desire to communicate. That which mourns feels itself thoroughly known by the unknowable [Unerkennbaren].’14 This idea was sketched out in 1916, and then reappeared in Benjamin’s study of the baroque Trauerspiel. But what is of interest is the tonality of language in this alienated expression, which is that of mourning, and the way that mourning relates to that which is being mourned, which returns Blanchot’s thinking in Le Dernier Homme to the point of its relation to death, and the dirge-­like tone it necessarily begins to assume. If there is a dirge-­like quality to Blanchot’s writing in the 1950s, then the gloomy and repetitive nature of the dirge is there by necessity rather than by default. In this monotonous drone writing is seeking an approach to the elusive actuality of the dead, not, as in the conventional form of the dirge, to release the participant from the effects of being in the company of the dead, but to find a way of broaching its own absent origin which will also allow the voice of the dead to express itself. As Benjamin points out, in relating language to mourning, there is a relation between the reality expressed in the impoverished language of mourning and that of the absent voice that is being mourned. However, this relation is not given or perfect but only exists in the materiality that is exposed in the breaking down of language through its dirge-­like impoverishment, which is experienced as the noise of the text, that which bears no meaning and reveals nothing, and in doing so offers no relief or satisfaction. In this relation Blanchot finds a language that remains with the dead, insofar as its weakness and decay removes it from human existence. But this language of absence exerts considerable demands on comprehension and endurance as it does not lead to any cognitive realization, for all that is found is the placeless materiality of the dead and the noise that disrupts sense, which forms Blanchot’s own kind of écriture blanche.15 This is why this period of his writing reaches a limit in Le Dernier Homme, from which he can only go on by changing direction. But it can also be seen how the fragmentation of his writing that occurs in the following years takes up the resistance and demands of the white noise that has appeared in this récit. In this way Blanchot exposes both the difficulty of this form of neutral writing and also the natural-­historical affirmation that it bears; how the company of the dead draws out a different mode of relation to materiality and time, and thus to relation as such, which the writing of his subsequent works will endeavour to draw out.

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The way that the work carries itself to this limit indicates why Le Dernier Homme is Blanchot’s last récit and why its generic designation is removed later, as this is a work that has carried the form of the narrative, as that which is narrated, to the very limit of its possibility; it hovers on the border of narrative nihilism, of its own material emptiness. And the mode of speaking that then emerges erodes not only its form: He didn’t have a precise idea of what we call the seriousness of facts. The truthfulness, the exactness of what has to be said astonished him. Each time, this surprise was marked and dissembled by a rapid flutter of the eyelids. ‘Now what do they understand by event?’, I read the question in his movement of recoil. I think his weakness couldn’t bear the hardness there is in our lives when they are recounted, he couldn’t even imagine it, or was it that nothing real had ever happened to him, an emptiness he concealed and illuminated by random stories? DH: 15–16/6 Such a withdrawal from the field of what happens means that the last man cannot be approached directly, instead he seems to exist as a blind spot of thought and language, a concrete nullity that slips out of any identification, even for himself. Hence, any definition or term that might be applied to him falls short, and yet he exists and in doing so raises a question, a demand, but one that manifests itself as ‘a thought that won’t let itself be thought’ [DH: 21/9]. Another kind of approach is needed in which curiosity is replaced by ignorance, attention by forgetting, faith by neglect, there is no reassuring plenum that opens itself to thought (contra Barthes and Breton), only an irritating absence at the edges of sense. Moreover, the possibility that he might not be the last man persistently hovers at the limit of thinking, destabilizing it still further, both echoing the ambiguity of his situation and removing the last possibility of finding a form for it [DH: 22/10]. Such a thought of uncertainty is thus the only kind of name that can be given to him but it is one that cannot be thought. And, necessarily, entering into some kind of relation with this absence will have its effects on the reader as well as the narrator, since its resistance and evasion will come to affect the possibility of definition or identification in the reading, which will also undergo an evacuation of sense and a material rendering of its subject. For just as the disturbance of sounds within the récit provides a way of grasping the disturbance of its language, so the attempts of the narrator to approach the last man echo that of the reader approaching the text, with the concomitant evacuation of terms that this entails. But, as Blanchot suggests, it is only through this erosion that the last man can become the last man; that his absence can avoid asserting itself and becoming a position and instead realize its negativity absolutely, without relation. It is the reader who brings the text to this possibility of annihilation, indirectly enabling it to

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materialize as meaningless, the dead air of literary noise that can only take place through betrayal and inattention, and thereby manifests its thought of nullity. But when the reader begins to experience the same estrangement as the narrator (and writer), the text becomes a form unrelated to either, a material language without sense that can only occur as ‘a noise so impersonal, so inhuman’ that it can only occur in texts as extreme as ones like those of Sade, where it appears as ‘a gigantic and haunting [obsédant] murmur’ [PF: 324/336].16 Such a noise does not develop according to the natural ratios of celestial harmonics, but instead follows a different kind of spatial-­linguistic interval. In the second part of the récit the narrator is alone with the other residents, and cut loose from his interlocutors his monologue becomes a free affirmation. Like the last man himself, the narrator seems to find the ‘happiness of always saying Yes’ [DH: 131/74, cf. 12/4]. Considering the atmosphere of the récit, and its persistently frustrated development, such an affirmation seems out of place but it arises out of the fact of relation as an almost infinite natural-­historical expression of finitude, which in being discovered through the interactions with the last man is conveyed to the reader. We do not learn anything in reading Le Dernier Homme, we do not even have an experience to speak of, but what takes place is an engagement with that which is not present, a necessarily open-­ended relation, a relation without relation. In this récit Blanchot has set out a field that the reader enters into, and in its remarkable conclusion he leaves something like a present for the reader, a moment of infinity, which both encloses the reader and releases them, exposing the space of the interval that is its open-­ended relation: Later, he wondered how he had entered the calm. He couldn’t talk about it with himself. Only a strange joy at feeling in accord [en rapport] with the words: ‘Later, he . . .’ DH: 157/89 By folding back into itself, without fully coinciding, the récit yields to an endlessness that is not sheer monotony but rather joy (the corrected edition of 1971 omits the word ‘strange’). Much like the locked groove sometimes found at the end of vinyl recordings, this isolated moment is both singular and repeated, a specific interval that involves the reader in its opening. This is Blanchot’s present, as this last standalone paragraph cannot be read without engagement, without drawing the reader into its immeasurable excess, for it quite evidently does not and cannot end.

7 To articulate the void

There is an announcement or declaration and, in the space of a sentence, as we say, it is over, or it is begun, something happens. The sentence conveys this transience and irreversibility in the abruptness of its appearance. But what is this space, and what does it mean to say that something occurs in the space of a sentence? A sentence arrives and departs, is stated and disappears, and yet everything changes even if only a trace of it remains. The sentence is an event, a rupture, and although it passes away it also takes place, as we also say, it has a momentary spatial appearance that overlays what is there. It is thus the space of a decision, but one which despite its imperious manner cannot substantiate itself, and so it leaves an uncertainty over whether the decision was asserted, whether it actually took place. In the space of the sentence the decision is suspended so that it may happen, or may have happened, but meanwhile the space and the sentence is in limbo. Such is the space that Blanchot introduces in L’Attente l’oubli, but this is not simply to explicate the line of linguistic thinking developed from Hegel and Mallarmé in which the word is that which negates reality and imposes itself in its place. For Blanchot pushes this thought further by showing that, on the one hand, language unveils the movement of negativity through its operation, and on the other hand it is not immune to this movement itself. This means that language falls prey to its own negativity as its sentences cannot substantiate themselves without further negation, but in doing so they take on a form that parallels that of the reality that is being negated. As a result, the strangely indefinite space in which language takes place is not simply an arbitrary obliteration of reality but is rather the reflected form of its indeterminacy. Thus, within the space of the sentence there is a possibility for thinking that which fails to be fully present, and Blanchot finds this most acutely in fragmentary writing. The parallel between the (space of the) sentence and the (language of the) room enables an understanding of this enigma of literary space, in which the milieu of the work and its linguistic mode slip into each other, an enigma that is of lasting concern to Blanchot but is examined most subtly and thoroughly in L’Attente l’oubli. This enigma involves both the literary nature

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of space and the spatial nature of literature, with the implication that there is a constitutive inter-­relation or undecidable convergence between them, but with the caveat that this relation is not given but is always in question. Literature involves a relation between thought and writing in which space is their field of encounter or expérience, that which is both discovered and invented, which means that its experience is never simple or unified but elusive and disruptive. When L’Attente l’oubli appeared in September 1962 it was not marked as a récit or roman and any consideration of the text, however brief, would confirm its lack of generic conformity. This anomaly has made it one of the most difficult of Blanchot’s texts to discuss as it operates across or between narrative and theory, that is, as both fiction and reflection but also as neither, given how attenuated these have become. For what begins as a conversation between a man and a woman is exceeded by numerous interjections that cannot be ascribed to the dialogue or its narrative, turning it into something that is at once more strange and more expansive, the only trace of its dialogic opening remaining in the fragmentary utterances and their gendered perspectives. He attempts to describe their encounter, in speech or writing, to which she responds and most often disagrees, but in doing so a space is created in their dialogue, another room, distinct from the room that they inhabit. Thus, while there is some sense of drama in this disagreement it is displaced into a philosophical milieu where these questions are pursued at the level of their conditions of possibility and impossibility, the space and time that would enable them to come together, as if it had not already happened but still needed to be recounted. But rather than being a reflexive exercise that simply discusses its own emergence, such fragmentary writing makes this attempt to think intrinsically provisional; it cannot guarantee its own emergence or success, just as the characters cannot be certain that they have met the conditions that would enable them to come together. It is thus not just a récit, as Blanchot understands the term, as it is not only concerned with seeking the point of its emergence for it also finds that this approach obscures or undermines itself, which is why its temporal dimensions are as provisional as its spatial ones [LV: 13/6–7]. Waiting and forgetting emerge as the contours of a new fragmentary kind of occurrence, and the writing thereof, which would never be present to itself. A man signals to a woman and she comes to him. No more detail is given about this gesture so while there is a specific act at the basis of their encounter, it remains ambiguous and pre-­linguistic in its lack of definition. Nevertheless, it is a gesture, however uncertain, and as such bears its unavoidable ambiguity into what follows, for such gestures are not only open to misinterpretation but there is also an inherent uncertainty as to whether they are even gestures at all, and so whether they actually happened. This opening resembles that of Aminadab, where another ambiguous gesture draws Thomas into a boarding house. But the situation in L’Attente l’oubli

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is different insofar as it is the man who gestures to the woman and also because they are both residents in the same hotel – he had seen her resting on the balcony and had waved to her (il lui avait fait des signes) [AO: 8–9/2].1 A hotel is not a home, not a house where people ordinarily live for a long time, but a place of transition, much like the rooms here as well, which in their narrowness and unusual length appear more like corridors. Thus the space where they come together is marked as a place to pass through rather than to dwell, and it is from the periphery of these spaces that they first see each other.2 As such it concentrates the opening of Aminadab, where Thomas is passing through a town when he sees a woman make signs to him, or appear to do so, from the upper window of a boarding house. But it also echoes the compressed encounters that open Au moment voulu and Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas and that address the difficulty of establishing an encounter, so it is a mistake to move too quickly into assimilating the relation in L’Attente l’oubli to that of an Orphic encounter in which a man seeks to draw a woman to himself and to hold her there. Instead, at the root of these opening scenarios is the very possibility of beginning, of opening a relation when it cannot be said to have existed or to have not existed, a relation that is thus not just of language but of something more meagre although still as ambiguous, like the transient and silent mark of a wave, something writing appears to resemble in its nearly insubstantial material signification, and perhaps precisely because writing is, as Blanchot notes, recalling Plato’s Phaedrus (275a), a speech of forgetting (parole d’oubli) [AO: 68–69/34].3 This may explain the feeling of restraint in their encounter, for it seems as though the man and the woman came together for no other reason than to discuss their encounter, as if it were never meant to be a relation but only an examination of its possibility. And, if they had not met, then this would not be possible, but because there is no assurance of such precedence the conversation cannot progress but turns about on the spot, tirelessly recapitulating itself as it attempts to pursue its self-­examination, which only further prevents it from taking place. Reflection is thus a force of negation and interrogation and the encounter stutters and fragments by way of this dual tension. Hence the fragmentation of the text is not just a formal device but one that has arisen out of the material as a necessary result of its reflective tensions, which should give us pause before adverting to other fragmentary styles in discussing Blanchot’s work. He may have been intensely interested in the notion of fragmentary writing but this was because it reflected his concern with the nature and possibility of narrative as a manifestation of these aporetic dynamics that insist in writing. So his understanding of fragmentary writing is very different from the aphoristic writing of Pascal, Schlegel, and Nietzsche (whom he would not start to discuss until after his own fragmentary experiments), as it is not designed to be fragmentary; rather its internal tensions prevent it from being anything else. If we take a

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sentence like ‘Thomas sat down and looked at the sea’, it is perfect, nothing more needs to be said, and yet language will not stop there, and so it becomes a question of how another sentence can come after it, how the writer is to carry on. If there is another sentence, then what happens in the first is lost, so to be faithful to it is to return to this sentence rather than go on, but to return is to write more, which is to move away from it again, unless a way of writing is found that can do both, for only then can what is said in this sentence be brought back such that it is not lost in the proliferation of words. Part of what is at stake in this recursive pressure can be felt in the key sentence of the work, the demand that the woman repeatedly raises: ‘Make it so that I can speak to you’ (Faites en sorte que je puisse vous parler), which seems to undermine itself by turning back on itself. But this aporetic imperative also makes itself felt in the space that the characters inhabit, in which they can never be sure that it has actually taken place, and which leads to the indistinction between the language and the space of their encounter. For the conditions of possibility that this sentence evoke are as much spatiotemporal as they are linguistic, but in their reflexive problematization they reveal a literary space that fragments and diverges from itself. It is thus that there is something in the narrative that goes beyond language and gives an indication of how this aporetic imperative arises for, after all, he made signs to her and she came. There had been others in this room, she says, but she avoided them [AO: 8/2]. An unspoken but mutual attraction exists between them, an attraction that is decisive since it involves both of them in decisions, but it is not clear whether it could be termed erotic even though there is a sense of passion in taking a decision that is to be endured come what may. In this regard, it is worth recalling an earlier essay by Blanchot on the relation of Tristan and Iseult, who are subject to a passion that binds without form or necessity but through its exposure to the outside, to that which is beyond the level of thought, and in L’Attente l’oubli the experience of this exposure is one of the silence and emptiness of a hotel room, which, like the time in which they persist, only reveals itself to a disinterested gaze, a gaze of désœuvrement [EI: 284–88/190–93; AO: 16/6].4 This is why Blanchot’s discussion of Tristan and Iseult comes at the end of a piece entitled ‘Réflexions sur l’enfer’, for hell is the milieu of the limit-­ experience, the experience of thinking what cannot be thought, what remains outside of thought, and in the sparse modernist version of L’Attente l’oubli this experience manifests itself in the désœuvrée awareness that the encounter will never end and that everything spoken there will be a lie, so nothing will ever be known [AO: 17/6–7]. And so, in an inversion of what was said above about the internal necessity of fragmentary writing, in being exposed to this space the narrative finds that its effects are evacuated, providing a tendency that works alongside but contrary to the formal difficulties of sentence progression. These two dimensions model the spatial and temporal vectors of waiting and forgetting as a paratactical non-­relation rather than

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a unified syntax: the narrative that opens and yet empties the space of waiting, and the sentences that return to themselves in the time of forgetting. That is, space and time, narrative and reflection, are not coordinated but diverge from each other, creating unexpected (inattendu) conjunctions and disjunctions so that it is no longer simply a récit.

I When the nouvelle version of Thomas l’Obscur was published in 1950 it was prefaced by a brief note explaining its relation to the much larger version that had appeared nine years before. As has been widely discussed, this note states that the new version is identical to the earlier one, despite its reduction in size, ‘if one is right in making no distinction between the figure and that which is, or believes itself to be, its centre, whenever the complete figure itself expresses no more than the search for an imagined centre’ [TO: 7/53]. This relation between the figure of a work and its imagined centre, in which the former is no more than the search for the latter, is distinctive of Blanchot’s understanding of the récit and governs his work until the late 1950s, as can be seen by the note that prefaces L’Espace littéraire as well as in the discussion of the récit in the essay that opens Le Livre à venir. In fact, the latter volume seems to chart the transition that occurs as this approach exhausts itself for by the end of Le Livre à venir the question has become one of where literature is going now that it is disappearing beyond the zero point, and thus what the form of the book to come might be. Such an impasse is marked even more decisively by the repetition that closes Blanchot’s last récit, Le Dernier Homme, which seems to conclude that if there is no distinction between the figure of the work and its imagined centre, then the search for the latter can only occur by each sentence turning in on itself. Given this impasse, it is not surprising to see that Blanchot’s next book would separate itself from the récit as much as from the novel, and also from the essayistic approach to critique. If we are to understand what has occurred in the writing of L’Attente l’oubli we must consider how this structure of searching for the imagined centre has become transformed, for the fragmentation of L’Attente l’oubli seems to indicate that the centre has exploded, or otherwise been lost. Thus it is now a question of what the nature of such a literary space might be, if it lacks a centre towards which we are drawn as readers or writers, and thus what the thought of such a text would be in the face of this absence. That is, Blanchot’s turn to fragmentary writing has not occurred simply because of the exhaustion of his former approach, but because the lack of a centre imposes its own form of space and thinking. An aporia is a point of doubt, confusion, or difficulty, whose complexity or obscurity creates an impasse so that thought or language cannot go on.

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In the face of demands that cannot be resolved or satisfied thought or language stops dead, unable to proceed. There is a blockage, that which affords no passage (poros), which is then associated with a lack of productivity or fruitfulness leading to idleness and impotence. For this impasse to have an effect on the nature of the space that literature exposes and is exposed to, is for it to encounter a space that cannot be crossed or opened up. Such an encounter is more perplexing than it might at first appear, since space is primarily that in and through which movement occurs. But the notion of the aporia also implies the necessity or demand to move, for there would be no blockage unless there were an imperative. We are perhaps more familiar with the bodily and cognitive aporias that fill Beckett’s works where the imperative to carry on is coupled with the impossibility of doing so. But there are also aporias at the level of the sentence, which have a very different effect on literary space, and it is this that concerns Blanchot in the period of L’Attente l’oubli. In this mode of writing the aporia arises within each sentence as it attempts to give expression to its event, even as this disappears, so that it fails to proceed from its very opening gesture and thereby fragments. But within this fragmentation a different form of space arises, and the void that inserts itself in place of the interrupted sentence is the absence or neutral space that is only given to thought through such ruptures. It is thus that we can come to understand the peculiar nature of the room where the characters stay, a room that only reveals itself in a language or thought that is ruptured or workless, in waiting and forgetting its appearance, such that it is never fully there but only emerges fragmentarily, aporetically. If we start from the first fragment, then it is possible to see how this aporetic logic begins to take place. After the opening preamble, which begins like a narrative and then ends after its fifth paragraph, there is a break before the first fragmentary piece, which is marked by an emblem like almost all the pieces that follow. This emblem (v) is less significant for its specific form as much as for the way that it enables the text to operate in its fractured capacity: by showing how it is broken up into pieces that can be identified but underscoring their lack of linear order since the emblem does not operate like a number or letter that provides a sequential system. Instead, each fragment is simply placed next to the others in a way that does not determine its relation to what is spatially before or after it; the emblem indicates that it exists in a space apart rather than in a sequence. In effect, this emblem is a deictic that marks an opening, here, it says, and again, here, and here, in parataxis. v He was looking at her furtively [à la derobée]. Perhaps she was speaking, but on her face no good will in respect to what she was saying, no consent to speak, a barely living affirmation, a scarcely speaking suffering.

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He would have liked to have the right to say to her: ‘Stop speaking, if you want me to hear [entende] you.’ But at present she could no longer keep silent, even saying nothing. He understood [se rendait] quite well that she had perhaps forgotten everything. That did not trouble him. He wondered if he did not want to take possession of what she knew, more by forgetting than by remembering. But forgetting . . . It was necessary that he, too, enter into forgetting. AO: 12/3–4 As the first fragment this is to some degree privileged as it comes after the opening preamble, rather than existing as part of the fragments that follow, and it orients the reader quite carefully. The first paragraph could not be more clear in its aporetic approach, as each statement concerns an approach that does not succeed but is broken or blocked leading to a failure of communication: a glance is stolen, an expression is unwelcoming, words arise only with difficulty. This sense is also conveyed in the way that the sentence, in concerning itself with this inability, finds that it is stuck in it and begins to stutter from phrase to phrase, just as the woman’s attempts are neither fully alive nor fully speaking and yet they continue. The interjection that the man considers reflects and further expresses this blockage and although it does not break the impasse it seems to offer a moment of insight. This is a crucial point as it not only expresses something of what will need to be absorbed (interruption, silence, saying nothing) in order to respond to what is going on but equally, by way of its emergence from this impasse, it indicates that such aporias are not inexpressive but find their own way to speak, albeit, as it is here, only by way of reflection. For through this rupture the man realizes that it is not by holding (seizing and comprehending) that he will understand but by forgetting, and so find what is known in forgetting, even if this only leads to an ellipsis, an opening of uncertainty. Blanchot is thus providing a means of understanding his approach in these first few lines by showing how the move into this uncertain space expresses itself in a breakdown of language. That is, the fragment does not so much develop or explore a space, as slowly and repetitively sketch out its contours by showing what is happening through what is not happening. A delicate and inverted field of encounter is thereby found, in which we observe more of what is not possible than what is, but in doing so another form of space is exposed, an endless penumbra of negative or non-­relation. In the fragment that comes next we find that a voice arises out of this non-­relation: v ‘Why do you listen to me as you do? Why, even when you speak, do you still listen? Why do you attract in me this speech [parole] that I must then say? And never do you answer; never do you make something of yourself heard. But know this [sachez-­le], I will say nothing. What I say is nothing.’

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Undoubtedly she wanted him to repeat what she had said, only repeat it. But never did she recognize her words [paroles] in mine. Did I change something in them without knowing it [à mon insu]? Did something change from her to me? In a low voice for himself, in a lower voice for him. Speech that must be repeated before it has been heard, murmur without trace that he follows, nowhere-­wandering, everywhere-­residing, the necessity of letting it go. It is always the ancient word that wants to be there again without speaking. AO: 12–13/4 Without following what has gone before but perhaps tacitly responding to its call for silence, this time the fragment starts with the woman but with as much emphasis on the collapse of communication, for again the problem lies with the fact that while he continues to listen, she says nothing. So although speech seems available it nevertheless fails because there is no sense of exchange between them, even when their relation is reversed, since the possibility of a shared relation is breached from both sides by an invisible rupture. This double failure will be termed dissymmetrical by Blanchot as the relation of the man to the woman deviates from itself (insofar as it is a non-­ relation) as well from its other, and in a way that is not symmetrical to how the relation of the woman to the man also deviates from itself and from its other. But alongside this double breach (and perhaps indicating its form) there is a third voice that is neither that of the man or the woman, nor is it fully within the narrative or without. This other voice is not that of another narrator, or meta-­narrator, as it is almost disconnected from what is taking place and instead seems to be reflecting from a great remove, from outside the text. This strangeness comes from the fact that in the third paragraph Blanchot is citing and adapting lines from two poems by Saint-John Perse, thus it is the ancient word of poetry that has erupted between them as the turning, or verse, that language always carries with it.5 Hence, the fragmentation of speech also comes from the pressures of this speech from elsewhere, which makes itself felt as the approach of an unknown outside to which it is now exposed. We recognize this intrusion of another voice but it remains enigmatic and only reinforces the disturbance of textual development, as these lines do not declare their provenance or purpose but simply and obscurely refer elsewhere as a divergence that is always possible and that is called poetry. But this other voice is also the appearance of a kind of thought as the oscillation between third and first person in the sentences of the second paragraph suggests, however obliquely, a thought that arises from the encounter to reflect what is occurring. Not necessarily to reflect on, but just to reflect, as the subsequent lines of poetry imply, for these thoughts do not cast light on what is taking place but restate it elsewhere, or state it otherwise,

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in another space or line or fragment, deferring and estranging the development of thought. In a few lines we have entered a very different field of reading where the source and direction of the narration are as unclear as the matter of what is being narrated, but while this lack of clarity might prevent reading from progressing something else happens in its place. For reading finds itself moving into a space that is anomalous but not empty, as the void in relation to which the narrative is moving is not without its reverberations, which language conveys in these unplaceable echoes of poetry as well as in its errant form, so that it only appears through its repetition. A work that is made of fragments and the spaces between them already indicates that it is concerned with the roles of presence and absence, of what is there and not there in writing as that which constitutes its spatial form, and such concerns are further borne out by the relation between the characters and between them and the space that they inhabit. And, as this space is figured as a hotel room that is unnaturally long and thin, like a sentence, it highlights the issue of a space that is physical but also literary and, moreover, mortal, insofar as the room/sentence becomes the site of an absence, as if it were also a tomb: ‘Poor room, have you ever been lived in [habitée]? How cold it is here, how little I live in you. Don’t I remain here only to efface all the traces of my stay?’ [AO: 13–14/4–5]. To enter this space is deceptively easy; after seeing her on the balcony he had waved to her and she had come to his room. But immediately the relation between them is complicated for she insists that he describe what happened, as if (literally) it had not taken place: ‘Perhaps in order to reinforce the certainty that she was really there. Perhaps because she had the feeling that this description would conjure up [ferait surgir] the same room inhabited by someone else’ [AO: 16/6]. Through the force of this interrogation he is led into a different kind of space that undecidably implies both her presence and her absence, and when he tries to describe the room he finds it is empty but in such a way that its distinguishing characteristic is its emptiness. That is, this absence takes on a strange presence so that the contents of the room (the bed, the table, the armchair) reveal themselves only insofar he looks at them disinterestedly, absently, par désœuvrement, in a kind of negative or non-­relation. This is no longer a room with a purpose or form, other than its abnormal length, and so his attempts to express this can only apply (recouvrent) to its emptiness [AO: 16–17/6–7]. And, just as it is only by gazing at the room absently that it reveals itself in its absence, so writing can only respond to this non-­relation by exposing what is not there as it insists alongside what is there, much as the fragments are interleaved with blanks. Thus the space that emerges through description is not the space of the room but something else that supervenes on it unclearly: He would close the room as soon as she had entered. He would put another room in its place, the same one and just as he had described it to

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her, yes, just like it, he would not deceive her in this respect, only more barren [pauvre] on account of the very barren words, reduced to the space of some names outside of which he knew she would not go. AO: 28/12–13 Although language evokes the space, in doing so it evokes its absence as much as its presence, and perhaps more so when it is itself impoverished, but it is this imbrication of what is there and not there that provides the measure of the room in its appearance as that which both provokes and eludes its interrogation (which is why it is a ‘poor’ room: unfulfilled, unsuccessful). But to exist in such a space or spaces is to exist in neither one nor the other but in their midst, in the space of decision (or intercision) that is their unspoken bond, the mark or gesture that divides and holds them together so that they cannot leave, even as their words exile them from this space in seeking to describe it: ‘Neither one of us is here. Only some of your words have entered, and we listen to them from afar’ [AO: 30/13]. The language that emerges here is impoverished as it is barely language at all, that is, it hardly rises above the level of the inarticulate or mute, or, conversely, it is an utterance that is so thin and pale that it is hardly there, ‘a barely living affirmation, a scarcely speaking suffering’ [AO: 12/4]. It is thus that writing deviates from living speech, by either diminishing its expression or its vitality, and passes closer to a level of almost indiscernible material ambiguity (of writing), as we cannot say of it that it is life approaching language, or vice versa, as it fails to make this appearance fully manifest. But, in this inability, words reflect the space of their encounter, and so the characters seek the most meagre appearance of language, fewer words and words that are less rich, and find that abstract words are more suited to respond to this ambiguity as they evoke nothing [AO: 19/8]. This would seem to be an apophatic version of speculative thinking, as it finds that words that are less tied to the concrete are more able to speak of what is not there, not to thereby vanish into an untrammelled fantasy but to find that which words speak of when they hardly speak at all, and thus to find a way to think this barely existent space. But this space is also a form of life, however minimal, as is shown by the affirmation it carries, which is found in the barest of utterances, ‘yes’, a word that ‘is so transparent that it lets what she says pass through, including the word itself’, such that in its expression it effaces itself, leaving nothing more than the mark of this disappearance, which is nevertheless the trace of its passage, its mere opening [AO: 22/9]. Words like this have no history or future and so their space (like the room) is transitory as well as empty as it consists of nothing but an opening that erases itself, a relation that is no more than a gesture and so is used up in its appearance [AO: 24/10]. The word that can be used only once, that disappears in its utterance, is not singular because it resists change and inter-­relation but because it is

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nothing but relation, as Derrida remarked in his discussion of the poetic quality of idioms. The idiomatic is the trace of a particular place and moment that is lost as soon as it is translated, but the idiom that Blanchot is exploring in L’Attente l’oubli is the idiom of language in its barest material form, its minimally open and abruptly interrupted gesture, which in the loss and pain (douleur) of its aborted appearance takes shape in and as the space of thought, like the momentary gasp of sorrow that is neither language not thought but finds the element in both that is mere expression [AO: 23/10]. Derrida notes that the idiom attempts this undecidable union in a ‘literality of the vocable’, the moment in which form and meaning combine in a speculative poetics of the literal.6 When Blanchot refers to the parole neutre et blanche that occurs here, it is as the attempt to express thought literally, as we say, the opening of thought in writing as a mark of thought, its own deictic [AO: 27/12]. Such a form would be the space of thought as it is thinking it out and no more, a sheer relation whose possibility is what is at stake in L’Attente l’oubli. But as we have seen the words that open this space do so only to the extent that they separate themselves from the writer or speaker, leaving a void that the work can only seek to approach. So it is necessary to reduce speech to its barest, to remove the support of existence from what is said, and speak at the limit of the living so as to leave room for the void as that which is not expressed [AO: 35/16]. In doing so the space imparts itself to workless (dis)affections that touch but fail to relate to each other, like weakness or distraction, which provide a different kind of focus: ‘it was around this point that everything he had written and had had to live through had, by an ill-­perceived necessity, been arranged and oriented, like a capricious and moving force field’. The field of work shifts in line with the attraction and repulsion exerted by its changing focus that is at times threatening and at others joyous, or even threateningly joyous (gaîté menaçante), thereby marking it, if its solitary remoteness needed any further elaboration, as sublime, although in a form that brings out its secular minimalism and unending strangeness [AO: 33–34/15]. For this is a limit-­experience of thought that cannot be assimilated to a supersensible idea but is rather a sensible experience of the void, an anomalous suffering or passion that refuses to be thought but exposes a lacuna that provides a place within thought for what cannot be thought, and that language holds open in certain modes of disinterestedness, in the waiting and forgetting of the fragment to finish.7 Thus the aporetic form of the fragment, its ruptured progress, becomes the form in which this lacuna is expressed, as the absence that takes the place of the sentence and imposes itself as another form of (un)ending, an abrupt opening onto the outside rather than the premature closure of its intended goal. It can be seen that this notion of literary space is quite different from that of L’Espace littéraire, where Blanchot was still speaking in terms of an approach to an imaginary centre, for as there is no centre, the text has

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become eccentric, exposed, ruptured. In such a form it is not possible to find the relation between general and particular that Hegel, for example, hoped to achieve in his written works, where the whole is reflected in each part just as each part is to be understood by way of the whole, leading to the development of dialectical thinking through reading.8 In L’Attente l’oubli the fragments do not reflect a greater but invisible whole, instead they are simply parts of an irregular and ever-­extendable field that will at no point reach the summation of a whole. It may appear that there is a consistency of tone across the work that unifies it, but this is only to respond to the fact that each fragment is on its own terms legible, but in concert they become intractable as there is no theoretical or fictional horizon towards or from which they are coordinated that would grant them an underlying consistency. It is thus that the text becomes aporetic in extenso as well as in its parts, and so instead of the syntheses performed by Hegel in Phänomenologie des Geistes or Wissenschaft der Logik, this exploded and eccentric space is closer to another project that interested Blanchot around the time he began L’Attente l’oubli: that of Mallarmé’s late works. Indeed, it is precisely in terms of Mallarmé that Blanchot speaks in 1957 of ‘a new understanding of literary space’, an understanding partly drawn from Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard but also from the sketches for the Book that Mallarmé worked on until his death. Although the project for the Book was never fulfilled, Blanchot sees the notions of space developed in Un Coup de dés as indicating the path that Mallarmé was pursuing, for here was a work that existed in dispersal: A movement of diaspora that must never be repressed, but preserved and welcomed as such into the space that is projected from it and to which this movement does nothing but answer, an answer to an indefinitely multiplied void where dispersion takes the form and appearance of unity. Such a book, always in movement, always at the limit of scattering, will also always be gathered in all directions through the dispersion itself and according to the division essential to it, which it does not make disappear but appear, by maintaining this dispersion so it can accomplish itself there. Much of this essay is relevant to L’Attente l’oubli but perhaps what is most helpful is the way that language is discussed as the ‘silent movement of relations’, where ‘words are only there to designate the extent of their relations: the space where they are projected and that, scarcely designated, is folded and bent, not existing anywhere it is’ [LV: 286/235]. Such a notion conforms to the idea indicated above that words form the transient and self-­ diverging contours of space so that the work, like Un Coup de dés, ‘exists only insofar as it expresses the extreme and exquisite improbability of itself’, its presence voided by virtue of the fact that it ‘is identified with the

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announcement and expectation [attente] of the work as it is, without content other than the presence of its infinitely problematic future [avenir]’ [LV: 284–85/234]. The Book thus only exists à venir, it is to come, ‘here anticipating, there recalling, in the future, in the past, under a false appearance of the present’ [LV: 278/230].9 This new understanding of literary space comes about because Mallarmé was able to discern ‘the space unique [propre] to language’ [LV: 287/235]. Instead of seeing literature in terms of ‘a simple surface crossed by a uniform and irreversible movement’ that its sentences unfold, Mallarmé saw it as a depth that exists at many levels and in different movements, in which sentences are not inter-­related by a grammar of syntactical subordination but expose a space operating with a different kind of logic, one of endless errancy and superimposition, in which (recalling Un Coup de dés), ‘to the extreme point of dispersion, only the place is affirmed: nothingness as the place where nothing took place [le rien comme le lieu où rien n’a lieu]’. Thus, such a depth is not pure nothingness but the ‘indefinite stirring of absence’, a dissolution of presence that persists as it cannot dissolve its own movements of dissolution [LV: 287–88/236]. And so, like its space, the present of the work is also hypothetical since ‘instant never follows instant according to the horizontal unfolding of an irreversible future [devenir]. One does not recount in it something that would have happened, even fictively. Story [histoire] is replaced by hypothesis.’ This point bears directly on L’Attente l’oubli, as it implies that the ‘event the poem makes its point of departure is not given as historical and real fact, fictively real: it has value only relative to all the movements of thought and language that can result from it’ [LV: 291–92/239]. Thus it is only in the aporetic movements of thought and language that this hypothetical space expresses itself, for this ‘moving indecision is the very reality of the space unique to language’, the undecidable oscillation between meaning and materiality, and reading and seeing, in which ‘doubt belongs to poetic certainty, just as the impossibility of affirming the work brings us close to its own affirmation’ [LV: 293/241, 291/239].

II Leslie Hill has shown that the changes in Blanchot’s writings in the late 1950s were influenced by a range of pressures – political, literary, critical, and philosophical – but this complex neglects to show how the development of fragmentary writing also arose out of the pressures and tensions of his own writing, as we have seen.10 In this case it is a question of understanding how the sentence breaks down from within, how it bears its own aporias that lead to it becoming fragmentary as it cannot do otherwise. As soon as the sentence starts it begins to undermine itself with its own negativity,

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which means that even as its own appearance is suspended it necessarily calls forth a further sentence that seeks to respond to that negativity. This mode of appearance corresponds to Lyotard’s understanding of the ontology of sentences (phrases), in which the failure of the sentence to authorize its own presence leads it to displace or defer this negativity by calling for a response.11 But for Blanchot this is not primarily an ethical gesture but rather syntactical insofar as it concerns the nature and possibility of its occurrence as relation. And what he has done in L’Attente l’oubli is to focus on this stuttering of language in order to understand the kind of relation it entails, not just interpersonally but also in terms of its effects on space and time, and their exposure to the outside. To turn back to the key sentence of the work, ‘make it so that I can speak to you’, it seems to invalidate itself on two counts, firstly, as a request for that which it would appear to be already demonstrating; secondly, and consequently, if the request nonetheless still stands it is impossible to know how to respond to it if it is not requesting the kind of speech that it is already demonstrating. The sentence seems to abort itself in this double bind, but does not. It has appeared, it is there, but it also seems to negate or deny that appearance in the same moment. This resistance to presentation renders the sentence opaque in a way that only makes it more obtrusive. Whatever this sentence is, it will not go away, and so despite its denial of linguistic relation it still calls for a response. Through this self-­interruption the sentence has made itself akin to what is not language insofar as it is without relation, but in doing so it makes apparent a different kind of relation, the relation without relation found in waiting or forgetting, or in minimal gestures where thought upholds a space for what is not thought, like a wave. Waiting and forgetting disclose temporal relations that are indeterminate as they are not attached to particular moments, but they do not disclose this in a positive form: they do not give an image of the indeterminate as a form of time but rather convey that indeterminacy in a manner closer to its own lack of presence, as an exposure to the outside. The sentence that destabilizes itself into such an opacity is thus, in Blanchot’s words, ‘the proper [propre] determination of indeterminate and meaningless existence’, which is not nothingness but instead the event of ambiguity as such, a kind of ontological sublime, as was indicated above, in that it is an experience of the limits of occurrence, the very possibility of something happening that resists resolution or comprehension (which indicates how Blanchot’s thinking of the event will begin to approach the issue of the revolution, especially in relation to the anomalous events of May 1968, as will be discussed in the next chapter) [PF: 320/331].12 If we return to the key sentence, then it is possible to find this exposure in the sequence that follows it: v ‘Make it so that I can speak to you.’ – ‘Yes, but do you have an idea of what I should do to accomplish that?’ – ‘Persuade me that you hear me.’

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[. . .] ‘To hear you or to hear in general?’ – ‘Not me, you have understood that well. To hear, only to hear.’ – ‘In that case, may it not be you who are speaking, when you speak.’ And therefore in a single language always to make the double speech heard. AO: 14–15/5 For there to be speech there must be more than just hearing, but for this to be the case there must be more than just speaking, which is inevitably accompanied by forgetting, and so in this doubly dissymmetrical speech it would be ‘more by forgetting than by remembering’ that each will find a way of approaching the other, of grasping what is unsaid in their speech, what disappears within each utterance [AO: 12–13/4]. If what is said in general is displaced by its saying, then this can only be apprehended by something other than hearing, something that hears what is not said. Thus, he ‘started hearing to the side of what she was saying, and as if behind it, but in an expanse without depth, without top or bottom, and yet which was materially locatable, another speech with which hers had almost nothing in common’ [AO: 25/11]. This other form of language arises in place of their own as they find that their utterances, however simple or impoverished, leave their own idiomatic trace, the mark of their transparency, as when the woman says ‘Give me that’ in a way that is neither a request nor an order, and then apparently follows this with, ‘But this thought, it’s always the same thought!’ [AO: 27/12]. These empty phrases reveal the deixis in/of their blankness, that which is singularly but materially locatable as this or that, and in being exposed to this neutral space language is no longer that which communicates or represents, it neither speaks nor conceals but gives signs, as Heraclitus wrote.13 A language that is neither direct nor indirect, neither clear nor obscure, is one that by way of these neutral signs gives onto its conditions, its ‘initial distraction’, the opening écart of the narrative, which, in turn, ‘would only let itself be reached when dissimulated and dispersed in acts of extreme attention’ that ‘should be exerted as it were by the récit so as to slowly tear it [l’arracher] from the initial distraction’ [AO: 21/8]. Instead of a beginning, there is only the aporia of a space in which hypothetical sentences fragment and dissemble in their ‘energetic refusal to let the story begin [l’histoire débuter]’, but in doing so they hold to the sense that both ruptures and initiates language, like the signs he had made to her in the first place [AO: 22/9]. These signs operate like the poison in Nessus’ shirt, attaching language to the spacing in and from which it arises in its opening gestures, and that it cannot remove itself from without obliterating itself. A point made clear by the deictic in the very first line of the narrative: ‘Here, and on this sentence that was perhaps also meant [destinée] for him, he was forced to stop’, since its aporetic form renders the narrator its subject but

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also its object, preventing and yet compelling him to go on, and thereby exposing him to its fragmentary space [AO: 7/1]. In a later essay on Nietzsche’s notebooks, Blanchot discusses this textual deixis of thinking in a way that casts light on L’Attente l’oubli and its emblematically marked fragments, as he sees punctuation marks as ‘modes of space’, that make space ‘a play of relations where time is at stake [en jeu]’. Such marks do not represent anything but rather figure emptiness (that of the page as it is thought, that is, of literary space) by preventing it from being lost in indeterminacy yet without giving it form, for on the one hand they provide an impulse (élan) to the writing and on the other they suspend it, without positing or negating its terms. Juxtaposition yields a discontinuity ‘that is unfigurable and without foundation’, and so lets the writing ‘articulate emptiness by emptiness [le vide par le vide], to structure it as empty by detaching from it the strange irregularity that always from the outset specifies it as empty’. An irregularity that appears as the aporetic imperative under discussion, for these marks do not ‘translate this emptiness or render it visible in the manner of a musical notation’, but instead indicate the rupture ‘through which the inside eternally turns back to the outside’, and by which it diverges from any apparent meaning or origin [EI: 253–54/ 169–70]. It is in this way that fragmentary writing lets the outside be thought, but as that which cannot be thought, that which takes place in the interruptions of the page as a different kind of polarization or punctuation, where its negations appear alongside its positions as innumerable voids that undermine its development as an organized or systematic work, for at every point it is as workless as it is worked. The thought that then emerges cannot be the thought of philosophy, as it does not posit or negate but renders any movement of thinking neutre by suspending its accumulation, exposing it to what is outside, what is not there, what remains nameless and meaningless in existence. This indeterminacy is often figured as formless materiality or negativity in Blanchot’s early works and the concomitant space of death as an inescapable companion, but it is telling that the fragment appears in his writings at the same time as he starts to write dialogues. The convergence of these forms shows that it is the indeterminacy of the encounter, and the very possibility of relation as a spatiotemporal event, that now concerns him, which is another reason why it takes place in and as a room (or stanza). For in its repetition the fragment restages this encounter with each insistent attempt and aporetic rupture, leaving a form of space that in its stuttering and porosity appears very differently from the obscure and endless dying that marked his earlier works, and in its place reveals a mode of thinking as persistent insidious inquiry. Part of the impetus for Blanchot’s interest in the nature of conversation was the work of Levinas, for whom the self is defined through its discourse with the other. The dialogues that feature in the first part of L’Entretien

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infini pursue a subtle but insistent critique of this point by showing how discourse is not grounded in an asymmetrical relation between the self and the other, where the other is that which calls the self to its responsibility (but not vice versa). Instead, as noted above, Blanchot finds a space that is dissymmetrical, in that the distance from the self to the other differs from its reverse as language renders a space that is negatively rather than positively curved on both sides, so that movements diverge from each other without ever converging [EI: 104/73]. Thus, this is not a space of conversing but rather dispersal in which points of repetition do not return to themselves but perpetually deviate into other spaces. Later, in reference to Klossowski’s reading of Nietzsche on the Eternal Return, Blanchot will speak of a circle deprived of a centre that is ‘uncurled along a straight line rigorously prolonged’, the ‘circle out of circulation of all circles’, but such a thought does not need to wait for these later works for already in L’Attente l’oubli he is writing of a circle in which ‘the innermost and outermost coincide’ such that language forms sentences by way of these interruptions [AO: 20/8; cf. EI: xvii–xviii/xviii, 112/79; ED: 8/2].14 That is, the line does not unfold around a centre where it rejoins itself but proceeds eccentrically as it is exposed to a space of indeterminate rupture and dispersal that the book sustains. In this space there is no centre; instead the text operates by way of the outside that makes itself felt in each sentence as that which prevents it from fulfilling itself and so leads it to deviate. Such topological deformations are not metaphorical but manifest themselves in the deviations of narrative and reflection that are found in L’Attente l’oubli, as well as in the appearance of space and time, the attempts at dialogue, and the forms of waiting and forgetting themselves. It is thus that there is no sense of agreement here; the characters do not come together as the fractured spatiotemporal dimensions of their encounter indicate. Hence, alongside its formal necessity, this space has appeared in Blanchot’s writings at this time as a response to ontological and ethical discussions about the nature of events. An event takes place, it happens, whether it is an encounter between a man and a woman, or the literary opening of such an encounter, but the nature and form of this event is not such that thought or language may converge on it, partly because the event does not fully present itself but lapses into the absence of the not yet and no longer, not here or there, and partly because thought and language cannot bring themselves to expression without being interrupted and distracted by their own occurrence. But it is thus that some form of negative correspondence between the two deviations can arise, and precisely insofar as they are exposed to their own neutrality, the outside that is neither this nor that, neither there nor not there. Such would be the rigour of a work that would attempt to assemble these lines of dispersal and thereby give form to their thought, a thought of negative or non-­agreement that for Blanchot expresses more of what is at issue for ontology and ethics in modernity. This non-­agreement is not simply

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violent, nor is it one of passive abdication, instead it is a thought of persistent contestation, for if its negativity is rigorously pursued, then it will only persist in its deviations, which leads to a refusal in thought and language that perpetually challenges agreement by deviating from it. But it is not as if this is a conscious choice for Blanchot, rather this development has been imposed on him by the way that language conveys this deviation and rupture through its negative curvature or eccentricity, and if we ignore or deny this we are not only deceiving ourselves about the indeterminacy of linguistic relation but are also limiting our ability to realize and respond to its possibilities, to what it expresses in and as endlessly differentiating forms of space and thinking. The aporia is there from the beginning, the sentence inescapably fails to reach its goal, but in doing so, in falling away from successful completion, it enters a different kind of relation that is marked by its interruptions as it continues to fail to proceed, but also by its eccentricity, its extravagance and errancy, as it persists in turning aside into a line rigorously prolonged away from any centre.

Afterword

In December 1937, after the collapse of the Popular Front, the bombing of Guernica, the Italian domination of Abyssinia, the belligerence and expansionism of Germany, the Japanese invasion of China, the ongoing purges in the Soviet Union, and the conciliatory approach of Britain, Blanchot’s last signed article as a political columnist called for a new form of political voice. What is important, he writes, is not to be above political parties, but to be against them, whether they are of the right or the left, what is needed is a profoundly radical dissidence, for ‘the true form of dissidence is one that abandons a position without ceasing to observe the same hostility in regards to the contrary position or rather that abandons it in order to accentuate this hostility’.1 Such a position has often been seen as fascist in its rejection of democracy but in criticizing all political parties and positions he is not seeking to install a new political power. Instead, this is a complaint, which has perhaps become more comprehensible recently, that democracy as a genuine form of political power has been betrayed by party politics and other vested interests. His response may have been extreme, and it was not without its own violent quasi-­nationalistic rhetoric, which he would later reject, but it follows from the necessity of rejecting a status quo whose iniquity had become complete. This uncompromising attitude, which is nevertheless not unreflective, would come to mark all of Blanchot’s political thought so that politics as such could only be pursued by what he would call in 1960 a ‘total critique’, one whose possibility he would uncover through literature insofar as it offers a persistent contestation of the world and of itself. At this time, which would also find itself at a particularly difficult national and international turning point, he called for a new form of criticism, a review that would be political and scientific as much as it would be literary, a review ‘where all the structures of our world, all the forms of existence of this world, would enter into the same movement of examination, research, and contestation, a review where the word critique would thus also recover its meaning, which is to be global’.2 Despite these claims the ambitions of this critique were not to dominate, it did not seek to establish a new norm but to introduce a form of critical instability that, in being global, would remain pressing as there would be nothing that would be unaffected by it. Such a thought has a significant impact on any possibility of a revolutionary or political programme, and the

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kind of power that it would unfold. Rather than being a power that seeks to take control it emerges as a force of internal fragmentation, which affects any kind of formation, be it linguistic, artistic, or social. It thus becomes very difficult to determine the ‘success’ of this endeavour, since its appearance coincides with its own breakdown and loss so it can only perpetuate itself through its ruination. But this is not merely nihilistic since it arises out of a strong regard for contestation as such, regardless of the consequences. The aporetic imperative that yields this fragmentary development thus has implications that reach beyond the literary work and into the world, indeed, into the very possibility of the formation of the ‘world’ as a conceptual and spatiotemporal structure. For Lyotard, there is a radical contingency to the sentence that means that, before anything else can be said about it, it is there. Outside any semantic or linguistic analysis, a sentence exists in its sheer eventuation; it is that which has happened. But in doing so this appearance undoes itself, as the sentence is split between its facticity and what it presents (the universe of its singular meaning, with its sender, addressee, and referent), in which the latter comes to obscure the former. The sentence carries its own oblivion but this is restated in every subsequent sentence, which arises out of an inevitable succession that in each case remains contingent in its appearance. Thus, the sentence’s autonomy arises and disappears with each new sentence and gives rise, however fleetingly, to the demand for justice for that which has been obscured or forgotten. But succession does not entirely obliterate what has gone before, for at each point there is a chance to retain or recapture the sense of the contingent in each sentence, but this requires a form of writing that can hold itself back from its onward movement and drive to cumulative meaning (the hierarchical coordination and subordination of sentences by genres of discourse, in Lyotard’s terms) in favour of resituating itself within each sentence as it appears. Neither complete resistance nor complete domination is possible in this inter-­relation as the linkage of one sentence to the next is as inescapable as the singularity of its appearance. But there is no necessity to this linkage, for, as Lyotard writes, ‘to link is necessary, but a particular linkage is not’. What comes after is in each case contingent, which opens a more difficult question, for if ‘metaphysics struggles against oblivion, what is whatever struggles for oblivion called?’3 Another way of looking at this instability is in terms of how the sentence emerges from its material background, as Blanchot finds in the writings of Heraclitus. At the time that Heraclitus wrote, the notion of philosophy was itself beginning to emerge and, as a result, the ideas of logos and thought were not yet crystallized in their relation to language, as a result the movement between writing and logos, and language and philosophy, became the focus of his thinking such that his fragments express this tension in its duplicity. That is, the fragmentary nature of his writings is not simply

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contingent but arises from the concrete ambiguity between word and thing, and thought and language, which they seek to express and that place his writings at the crux of this uncertainty. So, before the logos of philosophy became clarified and formalized, the writings of Heraclitus were engaged in trying to explicate the movements by which things struggle to express themselves, and thought forgets itself in words. Thus, the sentence becomes a fragment because this internal tension renders it fragile and enigmatic, both more and less concrete than is expected: We are constantly reminded that when Heraclitus is there, things are there. When he speaks of the river whose waters flow over us, never the same, this is not an example given by a professor. The river itself is teaching us in an immemorial fashion through its call to enter into the secret of its presence: to enter it, but never twice and not even once, as into a sentence that has always already closed upon itself as soon as we pretend to keep our footing there and hold onto it. EI: 124/88 To turn away from the universe of meaning towards the facticity of sense, its contingent fragmentation, is not just to expose thought to its evasive grounds but to undo the possibility of founding a universe of meaning and to release an entirely different kind of meaning. Twenty years after Le Très-Haut came out Blanchot had the opportunity to study another city in the throes of revolution. Two pieces were written in the aftermath of the events of May 1968 that tried to come to terms with what had happened, both as regards the revolution itself and also its counter-­ reaction. One of these pieces was published in Les Lettres nouvelles along with essays by Duras and Mascolo, and the other was found in Blanchot’s papers. The latter piece is a brief examination of the way that State power transformed into virulent paranoia in the face of the revolution, and Blanchot makes a striking case for the epidemic of disorder that is unveiled when the police operate undercover and civilians operate as vigilantes. In these cases, it is not possible to know who is part of the police and who is not, and so all become implicated in police work. On the reverse side, activists find themselves targeted for arbitrary reasons, including membership of defunct or fictional clandestine groups, so that it becomes impossible to demonstrate one’s innocence. Proving that one is not a member of a non-­ existent group is not only impossible but all of one’s actions become suspect when they are compared to invented and ever-­changing criteria, for whether one behaves normally or not, everything becomes evidence of clandestine activity. On one side there is activity without clear identity, on the other there is identity without clear activity. It is thus that the State mobilizes itself against its enemies, who are always and merely other, while in itself it is always and merely enforcement. Despite the apparent parallel between

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the two sides, there is no transition between them but rather the potential for a sudden and undecidable switch if conditions should change with the emergence of another other. Exteriority thus becomes the key to the movement between the two slopes insofar as it introduces a changing pressure. It is intriguing then that Blanchot’s response in 1968 should diverge quite markedly from the emphasis on contagion that pervades Le Très-Haut, for he concludes this later piece with a rhetorical question: should we make use of the repression that is developing to oblige all the repressive functions – tolerant, intolerant – at work in society to spread and so become more apparent? Or will we respond to paranoia, which always takes itself excessively seriously, by a strategy of unseriousness, by the undermining [ébranlement] of a game that escapes the very spirit of play, or again are we entering a war, a war certainly wholly new and whose rules the powers do not even suspect?4 Much of the division here between the first and the third options repeats the logic of the two slopes that had been apparent since Blanchot’s early reading of Paulhan’s essay on rhetoric, where it was a question of whether writers should respond to clichés by seeking to eliminate them or by transforming them. For, in the face of the dissembling authority of the State and the elusive opportunities for revolt, one way of responding would be to try to make these situations clearer, more transparent. But, of course, in doing so not only are the methods of such coerced appearance suspect but also its consequences, considering that these may well become uncontrollable. On the other side, the possibility of a new kind of conflict, whose rules are still unknown, only perpetuates the problems of the current disorder and risks accentuating them further by exposing them to a field of unknown conditions and possibilities. Thus, it is Blanchot’s second suggestion that is perhaps the only genuine alternative, and although the thought of play has a considerable heritage by this point (Caillois, Fink, Lefebvre, Axelos, and Deleuze, as well as Bataille and Klossowski) it is notable that Blanchot carefully phrases the strategy of unseriousness (du non sérieux) as one that escapes the spirit of play. This would seem to place his thought at a distance from Situationism, or at least from its more popular currents, as well as from the game of revolt and repression that the State is pursuing, and instead suggests that the two slopes need to be negotiated through a different mode of topological dynamic that treats their aporetic relation with a lightness that would unravel their aims and means. Certainly play seems inadequate when dealing with brutal acts of suppression but Blanchot’s point is made clear by his earlier line that the paranoia of the State, which leads to this febrile and disordered situation, derives from the paranoia of a reason that wants to subject everything to itself. Only by confronting this reason can the State functions that it supports be answered successfully, and in this case it is not

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simply a question of rendering its dissembling apparent or seeking to combat and dissolve it altogether, but of drawing out the ways in which dissembling dissembles itself into ever greater disorder. This would seem to be a Maoist form of nihilism but the other side of the argument is presented by Blanchot’s other article from this time; the piece published in Les Lettres nouvelles and called ‘Sur le mouvement’. If a revolution does not want to seize power, then it begins to operate in a very different mode, one that does not desire to establish new structures or institutions, or even to establish itself. As such, it becomes difficult to know whether it actually took place insofar as it has no grounds and cannot be repeated or perpetuated, instead, it appears to exist in the order of impossibility, of that which did not take place even as it is that which will leave nothing as it was. If the revolution does not seek to take control, then its effects are limited to its appearance, which because it does not exist within the order of possibility is precisely that which cannot be limited in its appearance. What happened in May 1968 was thus not a failed revolution, since its aims were primarily to appear, and yet in its appearance and its demands to remain an appearance it consigned itself to nothing other than ruin, which had unexpected results: destroying everything without any destruction, destroying, rather than the past, the very present in which it was accomplished and not seeking to give itself a future, extremely indifferent towards the possible future, as if the time that it sought to open up was already beyond these usual determinations. This took place. The decision of a radical, one might say absolute, discontinuity was made, separating not only two periods of history but history and a possibility that already no longer belongs to it directly.5 So, to the degree that it was averse to replacing one regime with another in a mere revolution of power, it was a different kind of movement, whose formless idealism has led to its endlessly contested persistence. Although it appeared as if nothing changed, for despite the radical breach everything seemed to return to normal, the movement instead revealed a different relation to history, a void exterior to history, which entailed a different kind of end of history, as its unbridgeable discontinuity disrupted the perspectives of historical materialism and revolutionary socialism, as well as neoliberal progress. Hence May 1968 was not simply an event but an abyss that will always have been part of the burden of thought and language in their relation to ideology, a void of historical meaninglessness that could not be crossed without deception and dissembling. This much was demonstrated by the sham success of the reactionary forces, which could not reassert themselves without attempting and failing to cover over their own emptiness. The victory of de Gaulle was simply a retreat into delusion, which could no longer feel

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comfortable with itself as it now knew that it was a retreat and a delusion. ‘ “We invented happiness” – say the last men, blinking.’6 This was nothing more than a fabulous coup, the assertion of fiction in place of reality, without the consciousness of realizing this experience as part of its dissembling [PF: 309/318]. It is thus that literature not only conveys this experience but also provides the means for its contestation as it opens itself up to its own lack of grounds, to which thought and history are then exposed. This notion of a pervasive but absent present is what lies behind Hill’s description of this mode of appearance as that of the extreme con-­temporary. Like literature, the revolution seems impossible until it appears, and then it does so suddenly, hypothetically (as Blanchot had written in relation to Mallarmé, anticipating the early reading by Badiou), appearing in the mode of possibility, of reality reconceived as possible reality, a concrete rather than abstract possibility. A critical rupture takes place, and there is that which is of the order of a presence that is not present but exemplary, which marks its relation to the law by the ambivalence of the barricades that are as important for literature as they are on the streets. This would be the place of transgression as such, which is what makes it vertiginous and overwhelming, as ‘it bears the necessity of violence, makes violence, discloses a violence suffered too long that is suddenly intolerable and responds to it with the decision of an infinite violence, which is sometimes terrible, sometimes calm’.7 In some ways what happened in May 1968 was the actualization of what Blanchot had sought in the Revue internationale in 1960: it was the irruption of a language that was anonymous, fragmentary, and incessant, a language without origin or propriety, a language of the streets with all the disorder and intransigence that its contingency conveys. Significantly, this is no longer a language of dialogue or of the book, but a language of rupture, of the outside of thought. Such a language does not signify the end of politics or philosophy but rather that from which these discourses must (but cannot) separate themselves in order to exist, and it is thus that it is a language of the outside. What Blanchot has shown is that this outside insists within all forms and structures of language, and it is upon this that his thinking of politics and philosophy converges, to such a degree that writing at this point is indistinguishably philosophical and political. In a letter written to a Yugoslavian journalist around this time, Blanchot restated the importance of Mallarmé’s question about what is at stake in the fact that something like literature exists, and the answer to this question was implicit to the events of May 1968: it was the fact that it opens and closes the world with a sovereign power, and that sovereignty, as Bataille had said, is nothing.8 In two of his earliest and most important articles on literary critique Blanchot makes use of the rhetorical form of transition, ‘De la révolution à la littérature’, and ‘De l’angoisse au langage’, and in both cases the form of this transition is of critical importance. These movements are not simple

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transformations but much more complex in that the revolution, for example, gives rise to literature only insofar as the latter reflects the former. That is, the literature that emerges is a literature of revolution in both senses of the genitive, which is to say the revolution is not left behind in giving rise to literature but is reformulated by way of it. Except that this is to stay too closely to a dialectical sense of transition when what is at issue is a sense of repetition without transition, an awareness that in the instance of there being revolution and literature, or anguish and language, there is the same force of rupture, without mediation. The only echo that can be found in the movement from one to the other is one in which their separation is repeated. Hence, in being faced with this transition in literature, for example, as reading moves through the text from image to image, and scene to scene, there is the sense of missing something, of there being an abyss between the moments that reading has passed over, but, as Blanchot had remarked in reference to this problem in Paulhan’s discussion of rhetoric, ‘have we really gone over it?’9 The same aporia is found again and again in Blanchot’s critical works (in relation to Sade, Lautréamont, and Kafka): that the change from here to there, the apparently smooth progression towards meaning, is suspended in these texts, which only reveals how far this smoothness is from being real, how it barely conceals the sudden and irrevocable loss of sense: ‘Between the point of departure and the point of arrival, nothing, nothing more than an abyss that seems uncrossable and over which Lautréamont has nonetheless passed in a logical and coherent movement.’ Since, ‘the search for metaphors ends up in the production of metamorphoses whose strangeness is explained by the destruction of any image of passage, of all intermediary, by the sudden leap of thought or the simplest feeling into a stupefying reality that is its distant result’ [FP: 210/176]. To understand how this approach to transition has its effects on the passage of history it is helpful to turn to one of the most revealing accounts of the experience of living through the events of May, Duras’s text on the birth of the Comité d’action étudiants-écrivains. At first the committee is well-­attended, but numbers quickly dwindle as its activities become apparent, or rather do not become apparent, since the popularity of the committee is impeded by its random constitution and seemingly aimless activity. No one seems to know what it is doing or why, and this opacity is exemplified in its only recognizable activity: its collective development of texts. People come and go, some stay, others do not, but the committee continues with its project of generating collective texts through repeated rejection and criticism. It is precisely the difficulty of continuing with this constant refusal that constitutes the committee and that makes it impossible. Lacking any structure or position they only share this refusal, a refusal to be identified or defined in any way, and remarkably they carry on for two months, long after the events have ended. But in this extraordinary persistence a different form of time arises:

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Every meeting becomes the precondition to the one that follows. In such a way that the newcomer has difficulty, presently, following what we are saying, understanding what is happening at the moment, and what is the object of our concerns. Our sessions, even spread out, no longer circumscribe our relation, which overflows them. We become incompre­ hensible to those who have not joined us in time.10 This is not development but speciation, a lateral movement of secession through recapitulation, without aim or progress. There is no unfolding of an inner essence or a progressive refining of a form but a constant process of estrangement by way of an endless self-­critique. It has to be recalled that the events of May 1968 were the largest demonstration in French history, and the most widespread general strike, affecting all aspects and levels of society and bringing the whole country to a halt for weeks. De Gaulle fled to Germany, before returning to take control by threatening civil war and suspending the National Assembly in an act of sovereign desperation, thereby re-­enacting his coup from ten years earlier in his own Eighteenth Brumaire. It was this crushing return to normality that has supported the view that May was an event without issue, but what happened was not an ordinary revolt as it failed to develop according to the interests of specific groups. Instead, it was an intensely political uprising, challenging the very nature of politics and the structure and status of the working life, and so uniting different sectors of French society in a non-­partisan, popular revolt. Such a challenge to politics (la politique) by the very force of the political (le politique) necessarily could not sustain itself, nor could it emerge in tangible, concrete forms, since it existed only in the form of refusal. As Duras wrote, ‘nothing links us but refusal’. But it is as such that it remains an intangible reminder, an inassimilable awareness that there is always an alternative, that this is not the way things have to be, that there is a form of resistance to the globalized neoliberal reality principle. But intrinsic to this refusal is its alternate mode of time, its rejection of history as passage, which reveals what Trotsky called the accidental, insignificant part of the revolution, where ordinary life is suspended and the revolution itself is devoid of meaning [A: 85–86/295].11 If philosophy is not to be attuned to a therapeutic task, to the job of making whole and healthy, then it is because it cannot do so without first attending to the pathological, to the contingency and senselessness of a life without form other than its self-­critique and secession. Just as Sorge sought to resign from all work in Le Très-Haut, Duras recalls that the endless critiques of the action committee were in turn criticized as being nothing but a waste of time, but they had instead become a concrete proliferation of accidents. In Blanchot’s novel, Bouxx writes to Sorge after the latter warns him that he risks being outmanoeuvred by the State as it is able to recuperate all actions into itself. But this does not disturb Bouxx, he has heard it before, along with other criticisms:

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‘They tell me that I don’t want anything, that it’s nothing to take over the material system of the State. They remind me that nothing more can happen. So be it. If that’s a challenge, I accept it. Nothing will happen [Il ne se passera rien]. So we are sure that what will come out of our activities and our mud and our tears will go beyond the stage of things that happen.’ So he got out of it with a joke. And really, how do you answer a joke? It was written, that’s all, and all I had to do was read it; I reread it; to make it true, I wrote it myself. At that point something unusual happened. TH: 194/201 As has been found already, a joke for Blanchot is never just a joke but a rupture of sense in both time and language. And what it leads to is the paradoxical alliance between the anonymous and uneventful occurrence of the clandestine group, and that of the solitude and emptiness of the couple, since what happens to surprise Sorge is the arrival of Jeanne, who appears in a strangely objective form. For in both there is a singular relation that goes beyond preconditions, which persists for only as long as there is this disavowal. It is for these reasons that the activities of both the group and the couple, which Blanchot comes to understand under the name of friendship, of a relation that has no justification or purpose, run counter to the course of things that happen, and form a dis-­course of the contingent.12 In 1965, shortly before France’s first direct presidential election, Blanchot was invited to contribute a preface to a reissue of Sade’s 1795 manifesto, ‘Français, encore un effort si vous voulez être républicains’. While much of this preface repeats what Blanchot had already written in his 1947 article, ‘À la rencontre de Sade’, the times gave a greater resonance to his thoughts, and also offer an insight into how he would respond to the events of May 1968. Principle to Sade’s manifesto is a diagnosis of the essentially criminal nature of the republic: it is founded in crime, and can only persist if these crimes are strengthened and repeated, both in relation to what is exterior and what is interior to the republic. It is the presence of laws that suppress this life of crime, so it is against the laws that true republicans should fight if they are to maintain the life and the freedom of the republic. Consequently, Sade sees this fight to be one of permanent insurrection against the force of the laws, and an insurrection that is as much moral as it is political, which is how this thought coincides with his broader libertine perspective.13 By referring to Sade’s thinking on this point in 1965 Blanchot is not only referring to the way de Gaulle engineered a change in the constitution that granted him greater powers but also to the peculiarity of Sade’s account of this republican demand.14 Far from simply endorsing his libertinism, Blanchot sees in the profound force of Sade’s writings a much more challenging mode of insurrection, a mode of writing ‘without equivocation, deprived of any ulterior motive, which says everything without fuss and leaving nothing feigned’ [EI: 328/221]. This might seem distant from

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Blanchot’s own rather obscure and ambivalent writing, but what he is responding to is the force and the persistence of a writing that knows no limits, which brings about a moment in which the revolution encounters philosophy, a moment that brings together ‘two hiatuses of history, certainly very different, the one founding an era and opening history, the other being that from which history will always want to close itself off’ [EI: 329/221]. He may be referring to Robespierre (or Napoleon) and Sade in this encounter between the revolution and philosophy but the contemporary implications are clear; as this writing without end is a form of freedom that ‘can coincide with the movement of real freedom, when the latter enters into a crisis and provokes a vacancy in history’ [EI: 330/222]. Why should the freedom to write take on such a powerful role? Blanchot is not making an argument about liberal freedoms, but something much stronger, for the law is that which withdraws from people their rights, and fundamentally their right to exist and their right to death. The force of Sade’s writings is not just one of endless libertine excess and the breaking of all prohibitions but, more radically, the force of a writing in which the right to death is implicit, the force of a persistent insurrection as the affirmation of endless negation. This is the sense of sovereignty that Blanchot finds in Sade’s writings where the writer or reader becomes one who ‘is no longer only himself, not only nature – natural man – but that which nature never is: consciousness of the infinite power of destruction, that is to say of negation, through which it makes and unmakes itself without end’ [EI: 336–37/226]. This is what is released when literature is pursued by way of the right to death, a rupture that suspends history, and thereby makes it possible to conceive of a future that is not mortgaged to the law. This force is made apparent quite directly as Sade’s pamphlet occurs two-­ thirds of the way through La Philosophie dans le Boudoir. That is, it is inserted into the erotic dialogue and thereby demonstrates its communication between the interior and the exterior, as well as the mode by which this communication takes place: that of the bodily passions, which pass from practice to theory and from the boudoir to the streets. In the same way that Blanchot sought to bring about a movement between personal and civic pathologies in Le Très-Haut, Sade seeks to bring together the passions of the body and those of the political. This is not to move into the arena of convergence that is found in fascist body-­politics but rather its inverse, the always turbulent and toxic disruptions of the passions, from which Sade attempts to understand politics as permanent insurrection. This relation makes it easier to approach the movement of pathology Blanchot is trying to extend from the personal to the political, which in turn responds to Mascolo’s initial question of how to negotiate the dialectic involved in relating the personal world of values to the public world of needs. This is to find the medium of their communication, how passions pass through divergent processes of materialization and externalization as sounds and

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gestures of eccentric disruption and fragmentation, as well as sickness and decay. For what is discovered in the contingency of these elements is not part of any economy as they do not satisfy any needs or values; they are not for anything nor do they represent anything. And to the degree that such workless elements can be realized, they constitute a relation that is neither proscriptive nor repressive. This is not simply a case of finding that which rejects exchange, but of that which corrupts it from within by exposing that which is irreducible to it, which is not a substrate, since what is communicated is not just material but communicability, that is, the corruptibility of sense itself. What needs to be asked is how far this leads to a desert of wandering forms insofar as these processes are eccentric and in error, and how far the complication of these forms in their superposition leads to an ambivalent community of sense.

NOTES

Introduction 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1887–1889, KSA 13, eds Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), 222; The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufman, tr. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), §247, 143. 2 Marx wrote the eleven theses on Feuerbach in 1845 as part of his working notes for Die deutsche Ideologie but they were not published until 1888, five years after his death, when Engels included them as an appendix in his Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie. In doing so, Engels changed this particular thesis by including a ‘but’ (aber) between the two clauses to clarify and strengthen their connection. 3 ‘Etwas fehlt . . . Über die Widersprüche der utopischen Sehnsucht’, in Gespräche mit Ernst Bloch, eds Rainer Traub and Harald Wieser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 66, 68, 70; ‘Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing’, in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, tr. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 8, 10, 12. This discussion took place in May 1964 on Südwestfunk Baden-Baden. 4 John Worthington, The Works of the Pious and Profoundly-Learned Joseph Mede (London: Richard Royston, 1664), 3. 5 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Ausgabe, Volume 31, ed. Ellen Ritter (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991), 286. 6 Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, ed. and tr. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 392. See, Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 51, 64. 7 Gilles Deleuze’s remarks on Blanchot in Cinéma 2: L’image-­temps, Foucault, and Qu’est-­ce que la philosophie? are generally positive, but he attempts to distinguish Blanchot from Foucault by showing that the latter is more radical than the former, however the image of Blanchot that he uses to make these claims is largely drawn from Foucault’s essay, rather than from Blanchot himself. Equally, as is often Deleuze’s way, quotations from Blanchot are taken out of context and put to work to develop a thought of immanence that is quite foreign not just to Blanchot but also to Foucault, in that he is consciously developing a thought of the outside. See, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier,

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‘Image or Time? The Thought of the Outside in The Time-Image (Deleuze and Blanchot)’, tr. Matthew Lazen and D. N. Rodowick in Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy, ed. D. N. Rodowick (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 15–30. 8 Blanchot, ‘Le “discours philosophique”,’ in La Condition critique, articles, 1945–1998, ed. Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 334–35. In reference to the duplicity of language, Blanchot writes of the philosopher that he ‘is always the man of a double speech: there is that which he says, which is important, interesting, new, and appropriate to extending the interminable discourse, but, behind what he says, there is something that withdraws his speech, this dis-­course precisely without right, without signs, illegitimate, ill-­formed [mal venu, also, unseemly, untimely], of evil omens and, for that reason, obscene, and always of deception or rupture, and, at the same time, passing beyond all prohibitions, the most transgressive, the closest to the untransgressible Outside – in this way similar to something brute or wild (or stray) to which Merleau-Ponty made allusions’. In its ugliness a writing of such bad signs would be a writing of dis-­aster. 9 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1885–1887, KSA 12, eds Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), 350; The Will to Power, §2, 9. 10 Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, KSA 4, eds Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), 19; Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, ed. and tr. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 10. On Blanchot’s thinking of nihilism see especially, Leslie Hill, ‘D’un nihilisme presque infini’, in Maurice Blanchot, récits critiques, eds Christophe Bident and Pierre Vilar (Tours: Farrago, 2003), 77–93; and, Michael Holland, Avant dire, essais sur Blanchot (Paris: Hermann, 2015), 249–79. 11 Georges Bataille, Œuvres complètes V (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 76; Inner Experience, tr. Stuart Kendall (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 65–66. It is apparent from the way that he elaborates his response to Blanchot’s suggestion that Bataille is at this point thinking about the last man in more empirical terms, with the ethical and existential problems that this would bring to his thinking of communication when there are no others. It is for this reason that he comes to reject Blanchot’s suggestion, and thus that it comes to occupy Blanchot instead. 12 As Blanchot explained in a letter to Rainer Stillers in 1974, in his writing, ‘practice preceded theory, at least in the beginning, then later the relation is more complex’, cited in Holland’s very helpful état présent in French Studies 58.4 (2004): 533–38. Although discussion of Blanchot in English has taken place since the late 1940s (the earliest reading I have found dates from 1949), there are still very few extended studies of his works. By and large commentators seem to prefer to read Blanchot alongside other figures, rather than try to develop a sustained analysis of his works on their own terms. This reluctance would seem to arise from the intimidating coherence of his works, as I have pointed out, which presents a considerable challenge to explication. 13 See Maurice Blanchot, passion politique, ed. Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2011), 61. Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, tr. Bruno Bosteels (London:

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Continuum, 2009), 65–109. Badiou’s interest in Mallarmé centres on the relation between the event and the void, and the vanishing clinamen that passes between them. It would be very interesting to explore the differences between this reading and Blanchot’s response to Mallarmé, but this is not the place to do so. Its significance would lie in the way that this ontological reading converges with that of a (literary/political) revolutionary thought, marked by Mallarmé’s comment that ‘there is no explosion but a book’, in which lies the poet’s relation to the world and to history [ED: 16/7, 190/124]. To which Badiou responds by stating: ‘Nothing has taken place except the revolution. It is an impossible event’ (128).

Chapter 1 1 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, ed. Raymond Queneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 181; Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom, tr. James H. Nichols (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 54. 2 Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological, ed. Robert S. Cohen, tr. Carolyn R. Fawcett (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978), 108. 3 This argument was first stated polemically in What Should We Do With Our Brain?, tr. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 68–77, but recently Catherine Malabou has sought a more nuanced reading in ‘“You Are (Not) Your Synapses”: Toward a Critical Approach to Neuroscience’, in Plasticity and Pathology: On the Formation of the Neural Subject, eds David Bates and Nima Bassiri (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 20–34. The philosophical background and development of this argument can be found in Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality, tr. Carolyn Shread (London: Polity, 2016); and, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage, tr. Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).   While the study of the brain offers interesting suggestions about the effects of its contingency on thought, which in its materiality and temporality can never be experienced, since the brain cannot be sensed by itself, this does not justify Malabou’s claim that the brain is the outside in Blanchot’s sense, see ‘What is Neuro-­literature?’, SubStance 45.2 (2016): 78–87. Blanchot never precisely defines what he means by the outside, because its status as the outside makes definition impossible. Thus it makes no more sense to claim that the outside is the brain than to say that it is god, or materiality, or the body, or the unconscious. That which literature derives from and is drawn towards may bear elements of contingency in Malabou’s (and Hegel’s) sense but it cannot be reduced to it without wholly misreading Blanchot’s enquiries. Malabou’s neural reductionism is unhelpful and seems to have arisen out of a desire to broaden the significance of her understanding of neurobiology. To claim that Blanchot’s thought can only be rescued by ‘neuro-­literature’, that is, a neurobiologically-­ inspired understanding of the contingent origins of thought and language, because on its own literature cannot preserve the space of the outside, or of the neutre, entirely misunderstands his writings. Literature does not ‘preserve’ the

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outside, and thus cannot fall away from this position such that it now needs to be supplemented by some other strategy. Rather, the outside exists by way of certain forms of literature as they seek to approach their absent origin and fail, thereby exposing elements of their own inability, which necessarily arises in a form that is irreducible to experience, as exteriority. Literature is able to expose this exteriority insofar as it is a medium by which thought is exposed to its own alienation, in materiality, in language, in time, and in sense, and can thereby ‘experience’ its own exteriority as that which fails to be reducible to the forms of experience. It does not help that Malabou draws much of her argument from a hasty reading of Foucault’s essay and recruits Blanchot’s writings to his understanding of ‘the being of language’, which is a thought entirely foreign to Blanchot. Thus, she misses the far more subtle and complex negotiation between meaning and non-­meaning that pervades Blanchot’s work and that separates it from any idea of literature acceding to an authentic model in which the outside is preserved (even Foucault does not go this far). For Blanchot the singular force of literature is that it is never authentic, which means that it cannot harbour any thoughts of becoming a space of the outside without undermining those thoughts in the same movement. The outside cannot be preserved, and literature has no aims that it does not also undermine, hence it cannot find any purity, or bear any certain hopes of transformation, Blanchot does not say that ‘there is hope’, but only ‘if there is hope’. It is strange that Malabou, given her knowledge of Hegel and Derrida, should miss the dialectical sophistication of Blanchot’s thinking, and it is unfortunate that she has missed the critical edge to his readings of Rilke, and more importantly that she has overlooked Blanchot’s own inquiry into the possibilities of relating literature to science, which are much more challenging for both science and literature, see for example, ‘Le bon usage de la science-­fiction’, in La Condition critique, 289–98. 4 Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 304; tr. Richard C. McCleary as Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 239. 5 Blanchot, Lautréamont et Sade (Paris: Minuit, 1963), 47, 49; tr. Stuart and Michelle Kendall as Lautréamont and Sade (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 40, 41. I have examined Blanchot’s reading of Sade in Without End: Sade’s Critique of Reason (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), chapter three. 6 René Leriche, Physiologie et pathologie du tissu osseux (Paris: Masson, 1939), 11, cited in Canguilhem, 52; and, Ludovic Dugas, Le Philosophe Théodule Ribot (Paris: Payot, 1924), 100, cited in Canguilhem, 15. It is in terms of contingency, thought as the absent origin of language, that Blanchot cites Merleau-Ponty in an article from 1946 [PF: 72/67; PP: 214/189–90]. 7 Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the spatiality of the night leans heavily on the research of Eugène Minkowski, among others, and especially on the article, ‘Le problème des hallucinations et le problème de l’espace’, L’Évolution psychiatrique 4.3 (1932): 59–76, which would be included in his major work, Le Temps vécu (Lived Time: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies, tr. Nancy Metzel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), see esp. 427–33). It was during the period of this research that Minkowski was based at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris, where Blanchot was a student.

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8 Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, eds Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 78; tr. Robert Hullot-Kentor as Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 48. 9 In 1894 Mallarmé was invited to Oxford and Cambridge to deliver a lecture on the state of French literature. During the course of this lecture, which starts with the announcement that ‘verse has been tampered with’, he comes up against a fundamental question: ‘Does something like Literature [les Lettres] exist?’ That is, not literature in the sense of the practical refinement of a craft but in a more profound sense, and his answer is equally profound: ‘Yes, Literature exists and, if you will, alone, to the exclusion of everything.’ See, ‘La Musique et les Lettres’, in Œuvres complètes II, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 65–66; ‘Music and Letters’, in Divagations, tr. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 185–86. 10 F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, tr. Fritz Marti in The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays (1794– 1796) (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 193. 11 Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes I, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 1348. 12 Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes I, 474; Igitur, tr. Mary Ann Caws in Selected Poetry and Prose (New York: New Directions, 1982), 92. (Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.) The version of Igitur that Caws has compiled in this volume is drawn from Mallarmé’s notes and drafts, and so appears as more definitive than is justifiable. But in doing so she is following the lead of the first edition as it was published by Edmond Bonniot in 1925. The Pléiade edition collects all the different texts without seeking to turn them into a definitive work. The most substantial reading remains that of Robert Greer Cohn, Mallarmé: ‘Igitur’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). I have discussed the relation between Mallarmé’s text and Blanchot’s Thomas l’Obscur in Aesthetics of Negativity: Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 127–28. 13 Kevin Hart, The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 120. Hart does not use this formulation in reference to Mallarmé, but in a broader consideration of the cogito. 14 George Moore, in his memoirs, Avowals (London: Heinemann, 1919), 263–64, recalls speaking to Mallarmé around 1875 about a play entitled ‘Hamlet et le vent’, which the latter was apparently working on and that seemed to be a rethinking of Igitur. Within this play the protagonist holds a conversation with the wind, which can only respond with the word oui. 15 Aside from a few remarks in his late writings (see ‘The Simplest of Pleasures’, tr. Mike Riegle and Gilles Barbedette in Foucault Live: Interviews, 1961–1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotexte, 1996), 295–97; and, ‘The Risks of Security’, tr. Alan Sheridan in Power, ed. James D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 2000), 380–81) Foucault did not develop any consideration of suicide but it clearly fits into his studies of madness, medicine, and surveillance that converge into his thinking of biopolitics. A highly successful Foucauldian reading of suicide has been developed by Ian Marsh in Suicide: Foucault, History, and

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Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On Marx see, Eric A. Plaut and Kevin Anderson, eds, Marx on Suicide (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999); and, Thomas F. Tierney, ‘The Governmentality of Suicide: Peuchet, Marx, Durkheim, and Foucault’, Journal of Classical Sociology 10.4 (2010): 357–89. See also, Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 64–72.   Jacques Peuchet was in charge of the Police Archives in Paris until his retirement in 1827, after which he used material collected from his experiences to write his memoirs, which were published in 1838, eight years after his death. His discussion of suicide is clearly marked by his opening comments: ‘The annual toll of suicides, which is in some way normal and periodic among us, can only be considered as the symptom of a constitutive vice of modern society, for in times of scarcity and in hard winters this symptom is always more manifest, such that it takes on an epidemic character during industrial breakdowns and when one bankruptcy leads to another’ (Marx on Suicide, 103). Marx translated and silently amended Peuchet’s discussion in an article published in 1846. 16 The essay that is now known as ‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’ was originally published in two parts, entitled ‘Le règne animal de l’esprit’ and ‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’, and it is very revealing that the right to death is only discussed in the first part, not the second. It would seem that the second part assumes the conclusions of the first part, in taking on this title, in order to examine its implications for literature. 17 At this point Blanchot cites Friedrich Hölderlin’s line from the third version of his drama, Der Tod des Empedokles, where Empedocles says: ‘And, yes, I want to die. This is my right’ (Denn sterben will ja ich. Mein Recht ist diß). See, The Death of Empedocles, ed. and tr. David Farrell Krell (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 173. 18 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘New Writing in France’, Vogue 106.1 (July 1945): 84–85 (all following quotes are from this article). This is possibly the first published mention of Blanchot in English. Sartre’s opinions about Bataille and Blanchot are drawn from his earlier reviews of L’Expérience intérieure and Aminadab, later compiled in Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947); tr. Chris Turner as Critical Essays (London: Seagull Books, 2010).

Chapter 2 1 Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, 554–55; ‘The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel’, tr. Joseph Carpino, Interpretation 3 (1973): 137–38; citing Hegel, Jenaer Systementwürfe I, ed. Klaus Düsing and Heinz Kimmerle (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1975), 244. As Hegel goes on to state, ‘with sickness the animal surpasses the limits of its nature; but the sickness of the animal is the becoming of spirit; in sickness the fluidity of the universal has isolated itself; what the system lives is the absolute of the infinite concept of difference, and absolute only as one that is not its universality and life but can only end with death; in that in its contradictions it exhausted itself just as much as the life principle’

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(259). Hegel elaborates this point twenty-­five years later when he says of the animal that ‘its inadequacy to universality is its original sickness and inborn germ of death. The sublation of this inadequacy is itself the carrying out of its fate. The individual effects this sublation by imagining the universality of its singularity, but insofar as this is abstract and immediate, it only attains an abstract objectivity, in which its activity is dulled, ossified, and life becomes a stagnant habit, so that it brings about its own death’, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830), eds Wolfgang Bonsiepen and HansChristian Lucas (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1992), §375, 374–75; Philosophy of Nature, ed. and tr. M. J. Petry (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970), 209. 2 Particularly helpful discussions of this text can be found in Ann Smock, ‘ “Où est la loi?” Law and Sovereignty in Aminadab and Le Très-Haut’, SubStance 14 (1976): 99–116; Georges Préli, La Force du dehors, extériorité, limite, et non-­pouvoir à partir de Maurice Blanchot (Fontenay: Recherches, 1977), 93–109; John Gregg, Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 72–126; Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot, partenaire invisible (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1998), 259–71; and, Hill, Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 181–206. 3 Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, ed. and tr. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 7–9. Of course, Jesus was wrong, and presumably Lazarus had the misfortune to die twice. 4 Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, 434–38; Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 158–62. 5 When Le Très-Haut was issued as a paperback in 1988 Blanchot added a text on the back cover that suggested that this point about Sorge’s sister was the main concern of the work, for after discussing the relation between the State and the sickness that pervades it, he says, ‘forget all that, as it is just as well Antigone, the pure virgin, uniting with her dead brother so that the incest taboo, having been suspended, might also ruin the ideal law as well as the natural law’. Although this suggestion is interesting in its own right, it should not be taken as any kind of definitive statement, or explanation, about the events of the novel. For Louise is just as much Elektra as she is Antigone, and the slippage between the three female characters also suggests that we see them as the three faces of the Erinyes (or Eumenides). The implication of this slippage would seem to be that the sexual and political contagion that each of these women carries is intrinsically equivocal. In 2012, when the novel was reissued, this text on the back cover was replaced with a citation of the opening paragraphs. 6 In addition to this reference in Phänomenologie des Geistes, Hegel also discusses The Eumenides in Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 463–64, 471. See also, Kojève’s reading in Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, 251–54. 7 This passage in Le Très-Haut forms the basis of the analysis by Stephen E. Lewis in ‘A Law without Flesh: Reading Erotic Phenomena in Le Très-Haut’, in Clandestine Encounters: Philosophy in the Narratives of Maurice Blanchot, ed. Kevin Hart (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 119–55,

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although by linking it to a reading of Jean-Luc Marion’s understanding of eroticism the place of transcendence in relation to the body is emphasized without regard for its complications in Blanchot’s text. 8 Hegel, ‘Zur christlichen Religion’, in Frühe Schriften II, ed. Walter Jaeschke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2014), 190–91; tr. T. M. Knox as ‘The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate’, in Early Theological Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 229. 9 Aminadab, Blanchot’s previous work of fiction before Le Très-Haut, had appeared in September 1942, and Le Très-Haut was published in July 1948, a significant gap in his writing career (although extracts had appeared in July 1945 and April 1946). But during this period France had not only passed through the Occupation and the Liberation, which of course considerably disrupted his writing, but Blanchot had also come close to death, as he later recalled. Notably, the description of this incident in July 1944 also mentions the loss of ‘a sort of thick manuscript’, which could have been a draft of Le Très-Haut, which might explain the feeling of it being overwritten, or over-­ determined, and could cast light on the frustration he felt by the delays at Gallimard, which held the manuscript up for fourteen months. See, Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, tr. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 6–7; and, Hill, Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot, 184–86. 10 Bident, Maurice Blanchot, 158–66; Blanchot, ‘Pour l’amitié’, in La Condition critique, 469; ‘For Friendship’, in Political Writings, 1953–1993, tr. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 135. 11 Tactile vision also occurs in Thomas l’Obscur and Aminadab, see my Aesthetics of Negativity, 116ff, 152ff. This key aspect of Blanchot’s writings has escaped Deleuze, who instead feels that ‘Blanchot in a certain way remains Cartesian’, because his works apparently ‘confirm that speaking is not seeing rather than proposing in turn that seeing is not speaking’, see, Foucault, tr. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 140. 12 The association of this passage from Plato with Bataille’s thought of formlessness was noted by Denis Hollier in Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, tr. Betsy Wing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 99ff. See also Benjamin Noys, ‘Georges Bataille’s Base Materialism’, Cultural Values 2.4 (1998): 499–517. 13 Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, 384ff. 14 The significance of this section is emphasized by the fact that it seems to repeat the oracular quality of the Aminadab parable in Aminadab, where another apparently Jewish figure offers an ambivalent message of hope from within the depths of submission to the law. The emphasis on the burden of suffering, and its repetition, in Le Très-Haut however draws it closer to the figure of Sisyphus, for whom Blanchot has found a regard. 15 As Blanchot points out, in Hölderlin’s translations from Pindar, the Most High (das Höchste) is the law of mediation: since immediacy is impossible for mortals and immortals alike, strict mediacy is the law [PF: 126/124]. See, Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, tr. Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil,

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1994), 638–39. This complicated notion has been explicated by Robert Savage, ‘Between Heidegger and Hölderlin: The “Sacred” Speech of Maurice Blanchot’, in After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy, eds Leslie Hill, Brian Nelson, and Dimitris Vardoulakis (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 149–67; and, Hill, ‘“Not In Our Name”: Blanchot, Politics, the Neuter’, Paragraph 30.3 (2007): 141–59.

Chapter 3 1 Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, 569–70; ‘The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel’, 151. Hegel, Jenaer Systementwürfe I, 312, and, Jenaer Systementwürfe III, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1976), 221. The latter course has been translated as The Human Spirit: Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805–6), ed. and tr. Leo Rauch (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), 117. 2 The most helpful analyses of these changing ideas are: Lester G. Crocker, ‘The Discussion of Suicide in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas 13.1 (1952): 47–72; S. E. Sprott, The English Debate on Suicide from Donne to Hume (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1961); A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (London: Penguin, 1971); Olive Anderson, Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Georges Minois, History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture, tr. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Ron M. Brown, The Art of Suicide (London: Reaktion, 2001); Marzio Barbagli, Farewell to the World: A History of Suicide, tr. Lucinda Byatt (Cambridge: Polity, 2015); and, Margaret Pabst Battin, ed., The Ethics of Suicide: Historical Sources (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 3 Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, tr. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006), 372. See also, Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain, Madness and Democracy: The Modern Psychiatric Universe, ed. and tr. Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) for a study of Esquirol’s 1805 dissertation on the passions as a source and symptom of mental illness. Hegel refers positively to Pinel in his discussion of madness in Philosophy of Mind, tr. Michael Inwood (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), 116, 127. 4 As Marsh indicates in Suicide the diagnosis of these morbid impulses has been a major problem since the nineteenth century. Having failed to find any anatomical basis by examining the brains and organs of suicide victims, alienists sought signs in the physiognomies of the insane, particularly in the (apparently) peculiar nature of their gaze. The impulse towards suicide was also hard to conceptualize as it seemed to arise in place of the instinct towards self-­preservation, or through its weakening or perversion. As such, its appearance was likened to the sudden and violent nature of epilepsy, but this could not encompass the often dedicated and concealed nature of the suicidal individual. Thus, the suicidal impulse takes

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on the form of a fundamental perversion of reason, one that is able to continue to operate rationally but with an entirely different aim. 5 It is noteworthy that Foucault’s initial discussion of biopolitics in ‘Society Must Be Defended’, tr. David Macey (London: Penguin, 2003), 239–48, overlaps with his analysis of the challenge to the sovereign right of death posed by suicide in The Will to Knowledge, tr. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1978), 138–39. See Stuart Elden’s reading in Foucault’s Last Decade (London: Polity, 2016), 39–45. 6 It is for this reason that I will not be discussing the use of suicide as a military tactic. It is inherent in all military service, regular and irregular, that the individual accepts that their life can be used as an instrument when necessary. As such, the advent of suicidal military activity is merely an extension of this basic attitude, and bears little relation to the kind of suicide that I have been discussing, which is voluntary, conscious, and self-­determined, even if these terms find themselves undermined by the act itself. 7 While suicide (Selbstmord) is mentioned explicitly in the 1925 lecture course from which this section is drawn, see History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, tr. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 317, its appearance in Sein und Zeit is muted as eine Herbeiführung des Ablebens or, a bringing-­about of (one’s) demise [SZ: 347/250]. 8 Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, 93; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 53, where Freitod is a question of dying at the right time, au moment voulu, in the French [PF: 288/297]. Jean Améry, On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death, tr. John D. Barlow (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999) discusses the distinction between Selbstmord and Freitod at length. See also, David Daube, ‘The Linguistics of Suicide’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1.4 (1972): 387–437, who, among many other worthwhile details, relates how the use of Freitod was condemned by Hitler in 1934. 9 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons, ed. Ronald Meyer, tr. Robert A. Maguire (London: Penguin, 2008), 690–92. See also, Irina Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 143–51, for a very useful overview. 10 Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, tr. Meyer Barash (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 14–26. Blanchot positively reviewed this volume but was sceptical about the psycho-­social import of its categories, see ‘L’attrait, l’horreur du jeu’, in La Condition critique, 273ff. 11 Caillois, ‘The Praying Mantis: From Biology to Psychoanalysis’, tr. Camille Naish in The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 79. See my Aesthetics of Negativity, 169–70, for a discussion of how this mimesis of death relates to Adorno’s thinking of mimesis. 12 In relation to some of Kafka’s stories Hans-Jost Frey writes about the way that the daredevil appears to find a moment without end that suspends the movement of consequence and continuity. Like the trapeze artist, who finds the opening between swings and thus the possibility of flying on forever, such acrobats defy the mundane order of progression, see, Interruptions, tr. Georgia

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Albert (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 70–71. More broadly, Frey is seeking to understand the nature of fragmentary writing in this volume. 13 Jean Baechler, Suicides, ed. and tr. Barry Cooper (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 196. 14 Later, in an interview with Madeleine Chapsal in relation to the Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie that was issued in September 1960, Blanchot clarified the difference between a right and a duty: ‘Where there is a duty, we merely have to close our eyes and blindly accomplish it; then, everything is simple. A right, on the contrary, refers only to itself, to the exercise of the freedom of which it is the expression; a right is a free power [pouvoir] for which everyone is responsible, by himself, in relation to himself, and that completely and freely engages him: nothing is stronger, nothing is more serious’, Political Writings, 33–34. Étienne Balibar offers a detailed analysis of this point in Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology, tr. Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 259–66. 15 The relation of suicide and language finds a different formulation in an earlier work: ‘Language cannot be realized by being mute; saying nothing is a manner of expressing oneself, the illegitimacy of which throws us back into speech [parole]. Moreover, it is inside words that the suicide of words must be attempted, a suicide that haunts them but cannot be achieved, that leads them to the temptation of the white page or to the madness of a speech lost in insignificance’ [PF: 30/22–23]. This relation indicates the form of what emerges in scepticism. It is notable that it runs counter to the language-­scepticism of Mauthner, for whom the extreme lack of certainty in language, its lack of an ability to definitively ground itself or even to determine the limits of this inability, leads him to a position in which such a philosophy would involve a ‘suicide of language’ as the only means of passing from this uncertainty, and the longing for a death (Todessehnsucht) of thinking that it entails, into silence. See Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Leipzig: Meiner, 1923), volume I, 713. 16 See, especially, Martin Crowley, ‘Possible Suicide: Blanchot and the Ownership of Death’, Paragraph 23.2 (2000): 191–206, who provides a welcome scepticism towards this rhetoric but misses its voiding of itself. 17 Blanchot, Le Pas au-­delà (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 134–35; tr. Lycette Nelson as The Step Not Beyond (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 97. 18 Levinas, Totalité et infini, essai sur l’extériorité (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 262; tr. Alphonso Lingis as Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 235. 19 Jacques Rigaut, ‘Je serai sérieux . . .’, in Écrits, ed. Martin Kay (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 21; tr. Terry Hale as ‘Jacques Rigaut’, in 4 Dada Suicides (London: Atlas Press, 1995), 120. This piece appeared in the proto-Surrealist journal Littérature in December 1920. See also Foucault’s remark in 1981: ‘One should work on one’s suicide all one’s life’, see ‘Passion According to Werner Schroeter’, tr. John Johnston in Foucault Live, 318. Rigaut killed himself in 1929, and his last days were depicted quite moralistically in a novel by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Le Feu follet, which was made into a film by Louis Malle in 1963.

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20 For Jacques Derrida, Aporias, tr. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 75, the possibility of the impossibility of existing in any way at all undermines the possibility of taking anything ‘as such’, which means that it becomes impossible, in dying, to distinguish between the authentic and the inauthentic, or the human and the animal. It is this radical undermining of any possibility of determining sense that has been taken up by Blanchot, as Derrida recognizes, rather than just the inversion of the possibility of impossibility into the impossibility of possibility that Levinas borrows from Jean Wahl [TA: 165/70]. 21 See also, Antonin Artaud, responding to the question in the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste in 1924, ‘Is Suicide a Solution?’: ‘what would you think of a prior suicide [suicide antérieur], of a suicide that would make us retrace our steps, but on the other side of existence, and not on the side of death’. See, Artaud, Œuvres complètes I (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 246; Collected Works: Volume One, tr. Victor Corti (London: John Calder, 1968), 171. And, in 1955 (in reference to Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur), Roland Barthes wrote about the necessity for literature to accede to ‘a state of permanent pre-­suicide’, in that it should exist on the border of its own destruction, Œuvres complètes I: 1942– 1965, ed. Éric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 1217; Critical Essays, tr. Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 58. 22 Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’, tr. Martin Milligan and Dirk J. Struik in Marx and Engels, Collected Works: Volume 3, 1843–44 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), 272–79. In a recent and very helpful study alienation is discussed as a relation of relationlessness (Beziehung der Beziehungslosigkeit) in which the relation of the self to the world is perceived to be absent insofar as it has become distorted or weakened, so that the self is unable to successfully appropriate the world or to express itself on its own terms. As a result, the world appears as meaningless and dominating, and the self becomes impotent, leading to an isolated and impoverished existence where the self is unable to recognize itself in the world or in its own actions. See, Rahel Jaeggi, Alienation, ed. and tr. Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 25, 34–40. Although valuable for its critical analysis, Jaeggi unfortunately elaborates this thesis through a psychological pragmatism that does not address the status of the subject as the seat of willing. 23 ‘Le communisme sans héritage’, Lignes 33 (1998): 147; Political Writings, 92. Blanchot also discusses alienation in ‘La grande tromperie’ and ‘L’étrange et l’étranger’, in La Condition critique, 244–46, 282, 286–87. He is critical of the lack of reflexivity in Marxist thinking, whose one-­dimensional view of alienation fails to consider its relation to that which it is alienated from, and how this relation has arisen, since, most importantly, his interest is not in the being who is alienated but in the movement of alienation itself, and its duplicity. 24 For Blanchot, literature, in converging on its own formless materiality, becomes ‘the proper determination of indeterminate existence’ [PF: 320/331]. For Marx, the genuine critique of the present consists ‘in grasping the peculiar [eigentümliche] logic of the peculiar object’, see ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, tr. Martin Milligan and Barbara Ruhemann in Collected Works: Volume 3, 91. Marx’s thought is drawn from Ludwig

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Feuerbach, The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings, tr. Zawar Hanfi (London: Verso, 2012), 238–39. 25 Indeed, such is the extremity of Blanchot’s position after 1958 that Herbert Marcuse could consider him in his Bakuninist conclusion to One-Dimensional Man (London: Routledge, 1991), 255–57. 26 ‘Lire Marx’, Lignes 33 (1998): 174; Political Writings, 105. The reference to the ‘insane game of writing’, which also appears as an epigraph to L’Entretien infini, comes from Mallarmé, who used it in a eulogy for Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam in 1890, see Œuvres complètes II, 23: Insofar as, so we hear, nothing exists and oneself especially in the reflection of scattered divinity: it is this insane game of writing that arrogates to itself by virtue of a doubt – the drop of ink linked [apparentée] to the sublime night – some duty to recreate everything with reminiscences, to confirm [avérer] that it is exactly there that one must be (because, permit me to express this apprehension, this remains an uncertainty). One by one each of our vanities are aroused in their anteriority and their look. Or, if it was not that, it would be a summation of the world, which equals its dread of richly ciphered postulates as its law, on paper that blanches at such audacity – I believe, truly, that there would be trickery there, almost to the point of suicide.

Chapter 4 1 Holland first sketched out the dimensions of this change in Blanchot’s writings in his editorial commentaries for The Blanchot Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 103–6, 254–60. 2 Rodolphe Gasché, in ‘The Imperative of Transparency: Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas’, in Clandestine Encounters, 216–40, seeks to make sense of this gaze in terms of the ideality of phenomenological vision, but as will become apparent such an approach is inadequate to the materiality of Blanchot’s text, to the explicitly concrete deformations of space and language that disrupt the descriptive intentions of the narrative, implying that this gaze is not some inverted eidetic vision but is rather gripped by the forms of melancholy that take place in writing. Closer to my reading are the comments by Lydia Davis on the interactions between the concrete and the abstract in this récit, see Proust, Blanchot and a Woman in Red (Lewes, UK: Sylph Editions, 2007), 32–33. 3 Adorno, Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (1959), ed. Rolf Tiedemann, tr. Rodney Livingstone (Oxford: Polity, 2001), 230–32, and, Against Epistemology, a Metacritique: Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, tr. Willis Domingo (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 146–47. A more Kantian reading of this problem can be found in Lorne Falkenstein, Kant’s Intuitionism: A Commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), chapter 2, which nevertheless finds the same difficulties in resolving the meaning of a ‘pure form of intuition’.

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4 See also, Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, tr. Paul Patton (London: Athlone, 1994), 56–57, who goes as far as to claim that ‘once we determine the conditions of real experience, which are not larger than the conditioned and that differ in kind from the categories, the two senses of the aesthetic become one’, that is, the transcendental aesthetic and the aesthetic of the beautiful, ‘to the point where the being of the sensible reveals itself in the work of art, while at the same time the work of art appears as experimentation’ (68). Despite his wide-­ranging studies of cinema, literature, music, and painting, it is doubtful whether Deleuze achieves the level of material and transcendental specificity that Adorno is aiming at in his (negatively) dialectical aesthetics. 5 Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, tr. Mark Raftery-Skehan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 11. Lacoste is referring to Heidegger’s notion of Erschlossenheit (disclosedness), and the effects this has on the fundamental topology of Dasein. 6 The aporias of this line are examined by Derrida in Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 96, 103; Parages, ed. John P. Leavey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 82, 89, as exemplifying the logic of the pas (step/not). 7 Frey is particularly good at explicating the temporal disjunctions of this récit, see Maurice Blanchot. Das Ende der Sprache schreiben (Basle: Urs Engeler, 2007), 77–96. 8 Raymond Bellour discusses this notion of solitude further in ‘Blanchot, “solitude de l’œuvre”’, Magazine littéraire 290 (1991): 43–47. The formulation Blanchot uses here, that the work is – and nothing more, self-­consciously recalls the ambivalent formulation discussed by Heidegger in ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’, that science examines beings – and nothing more, see Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 84. The proximity of Celui qui and L’Espace littéraire raises the question of the relation between Blanchot’s critical and fictional writings, for in the latter he uses a language resonant with notions of being, which the former avoids. It is only later that Blanchot finds a critical language that can discuss what is at issue in his fiction without drawing upon ontology, but at this point, as Celui qui makes apparent, his fiction is pursuing its own topography, which his critical writings can only approximate with a pre-­existing terminology. 9 Bident, Maurice Blanchot, 322. 10 Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Sonette an Orpheus’, in The Poetry of Rilke, tr. and ed. Edward Snow (New York: North Point, 2009), 358–59. 11 Rilke, ‘Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes’, in The Poetry of Rilke, 202–3. 12 Blanchot, ‘Le compagnon de route’, Botteghe Oscure 10 (1952): 39–53. In the English translation of the récit this extract corresponds to pages 263–73, 279–81, and 296 of The Station Hill Blanchot Reader. 13 Franz Kafka, ‘Ein Glaube wie ein Fallbeil, so schwer, so leicht’, in Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II, ed. Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992), 133; The Blue Octavo Notebooks, ed. Max Brod, tr. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1991), 39. On Hegel, see note 22 below.

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14 I have discussed Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study in more detail in ‘Melancholy and Parapraxis: Rewriting History in Benjamin and Kafka’, MLN 123.5 (2008): 1068–87. In response to Kierkegaard’s discussion of Abraham in Fear and Trembling, Kafka also seems to think that the task is one of finding out how thought and aesthetics can be combined rather than eliminating one in favour of the other, a task that is excessively difficult: ‘An enchantment accompanies his reasoning. One can escape from reasoning into the world of magic, from enchantment into logic, but both simultaneously are crushing, all the more since they constitute a third entity, living magic or destruction of the world that is not destructive but constructive’, Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II, 105; The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 55. Blanchot pointedly remarks on the differences between Kierkegaard and Kafka here, insofar as Kafka’s very existence as a writer is as one who cannot resolve this dilemma and so remains suspended within it [EL: 57–58/61–62]. 15 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften V, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 575–76; The Arcades Project, tr. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 461. 16 This is the term used at the end of Adorno’s inaugural lecture to indicate the mode of thought that he sees as necessary for philosophy to develop, insofar as exact fantasy is a ‘fantasy that remains strictly within the material that the sciences present to it, and reaches beyond them only in the smallest aspects of their arrangement: aspects, granted, that fantasy itself must originally generate’, see ‘Die Aktualität der Philosophie’, in Philosophische Frühschriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 342; tr. Benjamin Snow as ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 37. As such, it is possible to see this notion as a materialist, disenchanted version of Kant’s aesthetic ideas, ‘on the one hand because they at least strive towards something lying beyond the bounds of experience, and thus seek to approximate a presentation of concepts of reason (of intellectual ideas), which gives them the appearance of an objective reality; on the other hand, and indeed principally, because no concept can be fully adequate to them’, see, Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, ed. Paul Guyer, tr. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §49, 192. 17 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Repetition, ed. and tr. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 158. 18 Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, 74: ‘Figuratively speaking, it is as if an error slipped into an author’s writing and the error became conscious of itself as an error – perhaps it actually was not a mistake but in a much higher sense an essential part of the whole production – and now this error wants to mutiny against the author, out of hatred towards him, forbidding him to correct it and in maniacal defiance saying to him: No, I refuse to be erased; I will stand as a witness against you, a witness that you are a second-­rate author.’ 19 Adorno, Metaphysik. Begriff und Probleme, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 218; tr. Edmund Jephcott as Metaphysics: Concept and Problems (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 140.

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20 Allen, Aesthetics of Negativity, 138. 21 This is a point that recurs consistently through Blanchot’s writings from La Part du feu to L’Entretien infini [PF: 28–29/21; EI: 558–59/380–81]. 22 Blanchot may also be recalling the way that the prosaic banality of water is used by Hegel to mark the point of convergence of freedom and death in revolutionary action (which, as Blanchot had earlier emphasized, ‘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]), for the ‘sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water’ [PG: 320/360]. One could also look further afield, to the long prose piece by Francis Ponge called ‘Le Verre d’eau’, written in 1948 and published in his later collection, Méthodes (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 115–73. 23 Moreover, ‘the look of a symbol as such raises at once the doubt whether a shape is to be taken as a symbol or not’, Hegel, Aesthetics, 306. It is precisely for this reason that the symbolic nature of ‘proto-­art’ (Vorkunst) raises for the first time the issue of the relation between form and material, and nature and art, which is then resolved in classical art. The most useful discussion of Hegel’s thoughts on the symbolic can be found in Kathleen Dow Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001). 24 Paul Davies elucidates this argument especially well in ‘Blanchot’, in A Companion to Continental Philosophy, eds Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 304–16. See also the development of this point in relation to Das Schloss in Marthe Robert, The Old and the New: From Don Quixote to Kafka, tr. Carol Cosman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 25 This glass of water had also appeared in Au moment voulu (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 12; tr. Lydia Davis as When the Time Comes, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, 205. As Holland has noted, Celui qui was explicitly marked by Blanchot in his prière d’insérer as the third panel of a triptych, following L’Arrêt de mort and Au moment voulu, and so despite their differences and increasing thematic impoverishment there are a number of elements that repeat from one récit to the next, since, in Blanchot’s words, ‘they all belong to the same experience’. See Holland, ‘Space and Beyond: L’Attente L’Oubli’, in Clandestine Encounters, 279–80. 26 The sociological reading of melancholy has been developed by Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, tr. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), but see the extensive revisions by Elizabeth Goodstein in Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), chapter 2.

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Chapter 5 1 Although the strange lightness of a smile is noted in several of Blanchot’s narratives, he is also exploring a thought made in passing by Levinas in De l’Existence à l’existant (Paris: Vrin, 1947), 31; tr. Alphonso Lingis as Existence and Existents (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 11, where he speaks of ‘the essential levity of a smile, where existence is effected innocently, where it floats in its fullness as though weightless and where, gratuitous and graceful, its expansion is like a vanishing’. But, as will be seen, this thought is taken up in a more radically disruptive fashion by Blanchot as he rethinks its relation to the image, since for Levinas the smile is indicative of the ethical potential of the face to surpass ontology, while for Blanchot its curvature remains primarily impersonal and is thereby indicative of the ambiguity of appearance as such. It is thus, as Georges Didi-Huberman has pointed out in ‘De ressemblance à ressemblance’, in Maurice Blanchot, récits critiques, 143–67, that Blanchot’s thought of the image becomes transformed into the thought of the neutre (which, as I have shown, begins to take place in Le Très-Haut), although Didi-Huberman does not draw out the formal implications of this transformation, as I will do in the following chapters.   Other significant images of smiling in Blanchot’s writings (although none are as developed as this one in Celui qui) can be found in Aminadab (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), 30; tr. Jeff Fort as Aminadab (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 20; Une voix venue d’ailleurs (Plombières: Ulysse, 1992), 13; tr. Charlotte Mandell as A Voice from Elsewhere (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 5; and Le Très-Haut [TH: 41/36]. Significantly, these images are all from enigmatic representations (a painting, a mask, and a photograph) rather than from life, for ‘resemblance only begins and exists with the portrait and in it alone’ [A: 43/32]. 2 André Malraux’s writings on art have been extensively criticized for their lax terminology and methodology, but one of the most useful overviews can be found in William Righter, The Rhetorical Hero: An Essay on the Aesthetics of André Malraux (London: Routledge, 1964). It is also worth recalling the words apparently spoken by Malraux, as remembered by Blanchot, when the two met after the Liberation and discovered that they had both lost major manuscripts during the war: ‘It was only reflections on art, easy to reconstitute’, The Instant of My Death, 10–11. 3 In this short discussion Blanchot anticipates something of what Malabou has discussed under the name of plasticity, in terms of its transition from a concept of material formation to one that is temporal, which thereby reconfigures dialectics towards the opening of futurity, of what is and remains to come, see The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic, tr. Lisabeth During (London: Routledge, 2005). 4 Jean-Luc Godard uses this line towards the end of the last episode of his Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98). 5 Baudelaire’s line comes from his sonnet ‘Correspondances’: ‘Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent / dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité, / vaste

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comme la nuit et comme la clarté, / les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.’ The ‘power of words’ refers to the dialogue by Poe, translated by Baudelaire as ‘La puissance de la parole’. Gaston Bachelard discusses Baudelaire’s use of ‘vast’ in The Poetics of Space, tr. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 190–98, which was the occasion for Blanchot’s comments. 6 Blanchot’s writing is generally not given to such asides, perhaps the only similar example is the remark on cancer in L’Écriture du désastre [ED: 137/86–87]. 7 For the earlier version see Thomas l’Obscur, première version, 1941 (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 293–305. 8 If we recall that the sublime for Kant signifies the failure of comprehension to grasp extremities of size or force, then the impasse that Thomas has come up against is far more radical as it indicates the failure of thought in the face of a negativity that refuses all positing or negating. In this way, Blanchot’s thought has moved on from the encounter with the subterranean night that occurs in chapter two of Thomas l’Obscur, in which Thomas experiences the sublime of the conditions of possibility of thinking, its spatiotemporal foundations, to the more extreme experience of the neutre. I have examined this earlier episode in Aesthetics of Negativity, 116–22. 9 Hart provides another reading of Thomas’s encounter with the cogito in The Dark Gaze, 107–27. 10 Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-­delà de l’essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 216; tr. Alphonso Lingis as Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981), 170. See also, Blanchot, ‘Notre compagne clandestine’, in La Condition critique, 364; ‘Our Clandestine Companion’, in Political Writings, 149 [ED: 123/77, 170/110]. 11 In Samuel Beckett’s notes on Geulincx’s De virtute he copies out a passage in which Geulincx speaks of the Devil as the one who provides the instigation ‘to persist with something once it has been started’, which is then elaborated as Geulincx states that the Devil ‘is the instigator who continually inculcates into us this creed: Continue, because you have begun . . . since something should not be continued because you have begun it but because Reason dictates it’, see Han van Ruler and Anthony Uhlmann, eds, Arnold Geulincx’s ‘Ethics’ with Samuel Beckett’s Notes, tr. Martin Wilson (Amsterdam: Brill, 2006), 335. This point reinforces Beckett’s reading of Schopenhauer on the will as a blind and irrational urging that does not end, see Bert Olivier, ‘Schopenhauer and Beckett: Towards a Literature of the Un(re)presentable’, Journal of Literary Studies 12.3 (1996): 338–53. 12 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Millican (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 109. And, for Heidegger, ‘If the sceptic, of the kind who denies the truth, factically is, he does not even need to be refuted. Insofar as he is and has understood himself in this being, he has extinguished Dasein and thus truth in the despair [Verzweiflung] of suicide’ [SZ: 302–3/219]. Much like suicide, scepticism can no more be achieved than it can be denied, as Blanchot remarks in response to Levinas: ‘Scepticism is in

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relation with the refutation of scepticism. One refutes it, if only in living, but death does not confirm it’ [ED: 123/76]. Death here is entirely other, a corrosive pathology of sense that is never complete but is lived as alienation.

Chapter 6 1 Holland, The Blanchot Reader, 106, 104. Writing in 1953 Blanchot already recognized the risks inherent in the course he had taken, as the fact of the writer’s obsession, ‘which obliges him to say again what he has already said – sometimes with the strength of an enriched talent, but sometimes with the prolixity of an extraordinarily impoverished repetition, with ever less force, with ever more monotony – illustrates the necessity in which he is apparently coming back to the same point’ [EL: 14–15/24]. 2 Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 255–58; tr. Alan Bass as Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978), 171–72. This criticism refers to Blanchot’s readings of Artaud and Hölderlin. 3 Henri Meschonnic, Poésie sans réponse (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 79ff. 4 As Hill has pointed out, the designation of Le Dernier Homme as a récit is ambivalent, for when it was reissued in 1971 in a corrected edition, this designation was removed. A fact further complicated when it reappeared in 1977 as a ‘nouvelle version’, which was however otherwise identical to the corrected edition, see Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot, 229–30. The three texts are largely identical in themselves, except for their titles, which places an extra burden on the act of nomination that opens the work as it seeks to name ‘the last man’. 5 See, in particular, Hill, Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot, 233–43; Caroline Sheaffer-Jones, ‘“As Though with a New Beginning”: Le Dernier Homme’, in Clandestine Encounters, 241–62. See also, Frey, ‘The Last Man and the Reader’, tr. Georgia Albert, Yale French Studies 93 (1998): 252–79; Holland, ‘Bataille, Blanchot, and the “Last Man”’, Paragraph 27.1 (2004): 50–63; Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons, ‘Blanchot and Bataille on The Last Man’, Angelaki 11.2 (2006): 3–17; Daniel Just, ‘Weakness as a Form of Engagement: Maurice Blanchot on the Figure of the Last Man’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 44.1 (2008): 40–52. 6 Bident, Maurice Blanchot, 362–64. 7 Allen, Aesthetics of Negativity, 107–8. This movement is closer to the image of the flying spear in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, I: 968–82. 8 This idea recurs across Blanchot’s career, see, L’Écriture du désastre: ‘The word, almost deprived of sense, is noisy’ [ED: 87/52]. And earlier, when Blanchot relates a passage from Paulhan’s 1917 récit ‘Le Pont traversé’, where a dreamer ‘senses some flaw [défaut] in his words that makes them transparent to noise’, see, Jean Paulhan, Progress in Love on the Slow Side, tr. Christine Moneera Laennec and Michael Syrotinski (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 64 [PF: 67–68/63].

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9 In an interesting revisiting of this notion, Blanchot speaks in his elegy for Merleau-Ponty of the way that philosophical discourse always undermines itself because in speaking it uncovers the ‘disgusting murmur’ of the non-­ philosophical as its own dis-­course. But what is significant is that Blanchot feels that Merleau-Ponty sought to uncover this other language in its inhuman silence and wildness by turning philosophical discourse back on itself, so that it ‘could and should give way to this other speech [parole], terrifying speech, in the sense that one cannot welcome it without in a way becoming “the last man”, a speech that in every case does not give us an easy life and with which one perhaps cannot live’, see ‘Le “discours philosophique”’, in La Condition critique, 336. 10 Bataille, Œuvres complètes XII (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 458–66. 11 This is not just a reference to Blanchot’s emerging engagement with ethical thought but also to his interrogation of the convergence of nihilism and humanism in the works of des Forêts and Foucault through the anomalous form of the murmur, of a voice without words or silence, without beginning or end, a cry that is both more and less than human [A: 146–47/126–27; EI: 392–93/262–63]. The politics of such a semi-­human speech will, following the experience of May 1968, form one of the major themes of Le Pas au-­delà. 12 Barthes, Œuvres complètes I, 179; Writing Degree Zero, tr. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill & Wang, 1968), 76–77. Barthes mentions Blanchot, Cayrol, and Queneau in relation to écriture blanche, but the role of Camus is critical as it is in relation to L’Étranger that the idea of a blank, neutral writing is formulated in one of his earliest articles in 1944, see, Œuvres complètes I, 60–63. 13 This is also the basis of the distinction between what Blanchot is seeking to discuss and what Barthes termed in 1975 the ‘rustling’ (bruissement) of language, which in this case is more accurately translated as ‘hum’. The phenomenon he is attempting to describe is the mode of language when it is ‘working well’, by analogy with the hum of a machine or an office when it is operating smoothly. In the context of language, this hum would refer to the free signification of meaning as a capacity of language in general, not the noise of specific meanings but what arises in their absence as the sound of meaning as such, see Le Bruissement de la langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 93–96; The Rustle of Language, tr. Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 76–79. In its utopian horizon, this hum accords with what Barthes discusses as the neutral (as well as écriture blanche), thereby marking his distance from Blanchot, in which he seems to be following André Breton’s injunction: ‘Put your trust in the inexhaustible character of the murmur’, see, Œuvres complètes I, ed. Marguerite Bonnet (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 332; Manifestoes of Surrealism, tr. Richard Seaver and Helen Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 30. 14 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften II, eds Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 155; Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913–1926, eds Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 72–73.

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15 Although it takes the discussion in a very different direction it is worth noting that Blanchot later discusses white writing in relation to the Talmudic idea that the oral Torah derives from a pre-­existing written Torah, where the former appears as letters of black fire written on a background of white fire. Thus, what is oral is also written but is a delimited version of a writing whose whiteness indicates its neutrality, invisibility, and indefiniteness [EI: 631/430]. See also Hart, The Dark Gaze, 176–77. 16 Paulhan, ‘The Marquis de Sade and his Accomplice’, tr. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse in Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 10.

Chapter 7 1 Especially useful studies of Blanchot’s text can be found in Gregg, Maurice Blanchot, 132–67; Anthony Abiragi, ‘The Measure of the Outside’, Colloquy 10 (2005): 102–33; and, Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch (London: Continuum, 2012), 124–50. 2 That is, the language of this space is not the house (demeure) of being in which humans poetically dwell (Heidegger), or in which thought realizes itself in the unity of interiority and exteriority (Hegel). Instead, after Mallarmé, the space that occurs in this language for Blanchot is what does not remain (demeure), what lacks foundation, and leads to the crisis of thought, and its moving void [LV: 289/237–38]. 3 Before Derrida’s reading of the Phaedrus, Blanchot made his own remarks on Plato in an essay on René Char from 1953, where he discusses the relation between the silent and anonymous voice that speaks in writing and that which operates in sacred speech, in which an absence also speaks that cannot be questioned, see Une voix venue d’ailleurs, 45–48; A Voice from Elsewhere, 35–38. 4 Alternatively, much could be made of the relation between L’Attente l’oubli and the story of Cupid and Psyche in its nocturnal obligations between thought and desire, although Blanchot has reversed the genders in keeping with his Orphic tendencies. 5 Holland pointed out this reference to Saint-John Perse in ‘Space and Beyond: L’Attente L’Oubli’, in Clandestine Encounters, 278. Blanchot remarks in a paper from 1961 that ‘language lends itself to the movement of stealing and turning away – it watches over it, preserves it, loses itself there and confirms itself there. In this we sense why the essential speech of detour, the “poetry” in the turn of writing, is also a speech wherein time turns, saying time as a turning’ [EI: 31/23; cf. 42/30]. Some of the background to my thinking here comes from an earlier reading in Ellipsis: Of Poetry and the Experience of Language after Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Blanchot (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 193–212. 6 Derrida, ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’, tr. Peggy Kamuf in Points . . .: Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 292–93.

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7 In an essay on Simone Weil from 1957, Blanchot makes the following comments: the further thought goes in its expression of itself, the more it must maintain a reserve somewhere within itself, like a place [lieu] that would be a kind of uninhabited, uninhabitable non-­thought, something like a thought that would not let itself be thought [. . .] Forgetting this might be the most appropriate [le plus juste], as forgetfulness has perhaps its origin in this initial lacuna and as it alone gives us a presentiment of ‘immediate’ reality. Let us forget it then, so as to remember it only through forgetting. But it happens – rightly or wrongly – that this sort of blind spot of thought, this impossibility of thinking that thought is for itself in this reserve, can appear to us in all things, in all speech and in all action, and not only appears in a certain minuscule [infime] way but is able, by this minuscule presence, to take up always more space [place], to extend itself to all experience and little by little alter it completely. A strange and perilous situation against which we are tempted to react. EI: 173/119 And later, in relation to the peculiar temporal mode of attention, he concludes that ‘through attention, language has with thought the same relation that thought would like to have with this lacuna in it – this affliction – that it is and that it cannot render present to itself. Language is the place of attention’ [EI: 179/122]. 8 See in particular Adorno, ‘Skoteinos oder Wie zu lesen sei’, in Drei Studien zu Hegel, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 327–28; tr. Shierry Weber Nicholsen as ‘Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel’, in Hegel: Three Studies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 91–92. 9 Blanchot cites the line made well known by Derrida in La Dissémination (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972), 220ff; tr. Barbara Johnson as Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 194ff, which derives from Mallarmé’s 1886 review, reprinted as ‘Mimesis’, see, Œuvres complètes II, 178–79; Divagations, 140. The extent of his anticipation of Derrida’s thought here, as with note 3 above, is remarkable. 10 Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 9–26. 11 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, tr. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), esp. 65–80. 12 On the ontological sublime see Gasché, The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 306–11. 13 Ann Smock, ‘Conversation’, in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (London: Routledge, 1995), 123–37, emphasizes the way that the endlessly suspended nature of the dialogue in L’Attente l’oubli, its entretien infini, occurs by way of its deictics. Geoffrey Bennington is particularly strong on explicating the effects of deixis on the possibility of positing thinking in language, particularly in relation to Lyotard’s understanding of sentences, see, Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction (London: Verso, 1994), 274–95. 14 Blanchot, Le Pas au-­delà, 22; The Step Not Beyond, 12. Blanchot’s response to Levinas in L’Entretien infini culminates with these terms: interruption, man

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without a horizon, speaking is not seeing, and a relation of a third kind, all of which indicate the extent to which he wants to move the discussion of ethics as dialogue into an entirely different and non-­reciprocal spatial configuration.

Afterword 1 Blanchot, ‘On demande des dissidents’, in Chroniques politiques des années trente 1931–1940, ed. David Uhrig (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), 477–78. 2 Letter from Blanchot to Sartre, 2 December 1960, Lignes 11 (1990): 220; Political Writings, 37–38. Sartre did not respond to this letter and his refusal may have stemmed from the fact that Blanchot was proposing that the review should operate as an anonymous collective, but perhaps it was also too much to ask that Sartre’s involvement would follow the dissolution of his own journal, Les Temps modernes. 3 Lyotard, The Differend, §§ 136, 124. 4 ‘La paranoia au pouvoir’, Lignes 33 (1998): 184–85; Political Writings, 113. 5 ‘Sur le mouvement’, Lignes 33 (1998): 178; Political Writings, 107. Blanchot cites (and amends) this piece in his later article ‘N’oubliez pas!’ in La Condition critique, 431; tr. Leslie Hill as ‘Do not forget!’, Paragraph 30.3 (2007): 35. This article is not the letter with almost the same title written to Salomon Malka in 1988.   As this later article makes clear, Blanchot’s political sensibilities had their limits, since he found it impossible to associate with those members of the movement in May 1968 who expressed sympathy for the Palestinians. At a conference on Judaism and Revolution in March 1969, Levinas read out a letter from Blanchot that spelled out the reasons for this antipathy, as he felt that the lack of anti-Semitism in the Palestinian movement was not evidence of a lack of anti-Semitism. In his eyes, support for the Palestinians was akin to anti-Semitism, since it arose, in this case, not because of a hatred of the Jews but because these people are ‘absolutely ignorant of what it is to be Jewish [ce que c’est qu’être Juif]’. This ignorance, which he calls ‘gravely responsible and deprived of innocence’, placed Palestinian supporters in the same position as anti-Semites. The problems to which Blanchot has been driven in construing this criticism are evident, since it relies on a division between a privileging of a certain Jewish being and a universalization of anti-Semitism that would render it meaningless, as is his striking lack of historical and political awareness. Levinas cites this letter, without naming Blanchot, in Du sacré au saint (Paris: Minuit, 1977), 48–49; Nine Talmudic Readings, tr. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 115–16. Jacqueline Laporte, in conversation with Éric Hoppenot, recalls Blanchot ‘blindly supporting’ Israel, see, Maurice Blanchot Cahiers de l’Herne (2014), 102: ‘He who was capable of such careful analyses in so many fields, there it was impossible.’   One need only recall the words of James Baldwin here, writing three months after Blanchot had written a piece called ‘Être Juif’, which offers a damning recontextualization of the dimensions of European prejudice: ‘White people

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were, and are, astounded by the holocaust in Germany. They did not know that they could act that way. But I very much doubt whether black people were astounded – at least in the same way’, The Fire Next Time (London: Penguin, 1964), 50. 6 Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, 19; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 10. 7 ‘Les actions exemplaires’, Lignes 33 (1998): 157; Political Writings, 99. 8 Blanchot, Political Writings, 96. Bataille, Œuvres complètes VIII (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 300, 456; The Accursed Share II and III, tr. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 256, 430. In saying as much Bataille is seeking to distance his thought from anything substantive, anything that might make of sovereignty an object or work, a thing of the world. Blanchot goes even further and sees this association with nothing as a way to draw sovereignty away from any negativity and towards the non-­dialectics of the neutre [ED: 200/131]. 9 Blanchot, Comment la littérature est-­elle possible? (Paris: José Corti, 1942), 10; tr. Michael Syrotinski as ‘How is Literature Possible?’ in The Blanchot Reader, 49. 10 Marguerite Duras, Les Yeux verts (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1987), 81; tr. Carol Barko as Green Eyes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 60–61. 11 Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, tr. Rose Strunsky (London: Allen & Unwin, 1925), 77. It is on this point that Badiou’s argument could be taken up that the vanishing impossibility of the event nevertheless makes a restructuring of history possible. 12 Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable (Paris: Minuit, 1983), 57–58; tr. Pierre Joris as The Unavowable Community (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1988), 33–34. By contrast, a few years later, Blanchot insists that the relation that transpired between the members of the action committee was not that of friends but of comrades, see ‘Pour l’amitié’, in La Condition critique, 476–77; ‘For Friendship’, in Political Writings, 141. 13 D. A. F. de Sade, La Philosophie dans le Boudoir, in Œuvres III, ed. Michel Delon (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 129, 147; tr. Joachim Neugroschel as Philosophy in the Boudoir (London: Penguin, 2006), 124, 142. Unusually, Blanchot mis-­cites the title of the manifesto as ‘Français, encore un effort si vous voulez devenir républicains’. 14 When the Fifth Republic was founded the president was to be elected by a vote from the electoral college, consequently, the president was not as powerful as the president of the council of ministers. De Gaulle wished to change this so he called for a referendum that would decide whether the president should be elected by a direct vote from the people. This referendum was held in 1962 and de Gaulle received the endorsement he had hoped for, leading to the first direct election in 1965, which he narrowly won. The problem with this transfer of power from parliament to the president was that it should, according to the constitution, have been debated by both houses of parliament before it could be approved. De Gaulle avoided this move by a political sleight of hand and had the bill for the referendum passed without debate, which has meant that for

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many people (including François Mitterand, de Gaulle’s opponent in the 1965 election) the referendum, and, of course, everything about the powers of the presidential office that followed from it, up to today, was unconstitutional. The prime minister (Georges Pompidou) was censured for abuse of authority for helping to pass the bill, which led to a motion of no confidence being passed and the government collapsed, but in the subsequent elections Pompidou was reappointed by de Gaulle. When he was challenged over his actions and accused of violating the constitution, de Gaulle responded by saying, ‘Does one rape one’s wife?’ (Est-­ce qu’on viole sa femme?). It is in this atmosphere, which followed the military coup that brought de Gaulle to power in 1958 and established the Fifth Republic, which still exists, that Blanchot is urging a discussion of the way that the State is grounded in acts of violence and criminality that can only be secured by their continuation, which thereby lays out the challenge to all who would oppose its plutocratic deceptions.

INDEX

Adorno, T. W., 3, 7, 11, 15, 19, 26–7, 34, 97, 111–16, 117, 119, 201, 203, 210 Aeschylus, 52, 53, 58, 75 Alienation, 5, 7, 11, 24, 25, 26, 28, 32, 33, 35, 36, 49, 72–3, 80, 88, 89–92, 112, 120, 150, 155–6, 192, 200, 207 Althusser, L., 92 Artaud, A., 10, 200, 207

Des Forêts, L.-R., 15, 208 Descartes, R., 8, 37, 139, 140, 141 Désœuvrement, 96, 104–5, 107, 108, 155, 162, 167 Didi-Huberman, G., 205 Dostoyevsky, F., 42, 75, 77, 78, 82, 198 Duras, M., 144, 179, 183, 184, 212 Esquirol, J.-E., 42, 73, 197

Bachelard, G., 133, 206 Badiou, A., 17, 182, 190–1, 212 Baechler, J., 80–1, 199 Baldwin, J., 211–12 Balibar, É., 199 Barthes, R., 18, 95, 144, 154–5, 157, 200, 208 Bataille, G., 10, 14–15, 28, 46, 65, 104, 110, 150, 180, 182, 190, 194, 196, 212 Baudelaire, C., 85, 133, 205–6 Beckett, S., 15, 18, 95, 144, 164, 206 Benjamin, W., 64, 111–12, 113, 114, 117, 156, 203 Bennington, G., 210 Bident, C., 106, 195, 196, 202, 207 Breton, A., 157, 208 Caillois, R., 80, 180, 198 Camus, A., 18–19, 43–5, 73, 77, 82, 154, 208 Canguilhem, G., 26, 28–9 Crowley, M., 199 De Gaulle, C., 16, 181, 184, 185, 212–13 Deleuze, G., 9, 180, 189–90, 196, 202 Derrida, J., 89, 124, 127, 128, 143, 169, 200, 202, 207, 209, 210

Feuerbach, A., 133 Feuerbach, L., 1, 189, 200–1 Foucault, M., 8–11, 189, 192, 193, 197, 198, 199, 208 Frey, H.-J., 198–9, 202, 207 Gasché, R., 201, 210 Geulincx, A., 206 Godard, J.-L., 205 Gregg, J., 195, 209 Hart, K., 193, 206, 209 Hegel, G. W. F., 23, 41, 43, 52, 53, 57–8, 71, 73, 76, 79, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 105, 111, 114, 117–18, 119, 120, 132, 136, 138, 159, 170, 191, 194–5, 197, 204, 209 Heidegger, M., 9, 17, 43, 53, 58, 73, 74, 75, 76–7, 78, 82, 83, 84, 85, 89, 105, 120, 121, 132, 136, 141, 145, 152, 202, 206, 209 Heraclitus, 173, 178–9 Hill, L., 171, 182, 190, 195, 197, 207, 209 Hofmannsthal, H., 6–7 Hölderlin, F., 10, 68, 120, 194, 196–7, 207

216

INDEX

Holland, M., 143, 190, 201, 204, 207, 209 Hume, D., 140 Igitur, 36, 37–42, 80, 193

Merleau-Ponty, M., 26, 27, 28, 32–3, 124, 128, 190, 192, 208 Meschonnic, H., 143, 207 Minkowski, E., 28, 192 Montaigne, M., 8 Moore, G., 193

Jaeggi, R., 200 Kafka, F., 6, 31, 42, 77, 82, 105, 111, 116–17, 120, 183, 198, 202–3, 204 Kant, I., 27–28, 35, 96–7, 114, 120, 201, 203, 206 Kierkegaard, S., 49, 112–15, 195, 203 Klossowski, P., 10, 175, 180 Kojève, A., 14, 23, 47, 58, 66, 69, 70, 71, 73, 76, 82, 89, 91, 144, 146, 195 Lacoste, J.-Y., 97, 202 Laporte, R., 17 Lautréamont, 134, 183 Levinas, E., 56, 82, 84, 85, 139, 174, 200, 205, 206, 210, 211 Lewis, S. E., 195–6 literality, 3, 24, 28, 50, 58, 59, 60, 61, 169 Lucretius, 207 Lyotard, J.-F., 172, 178, 210, 211 Malabou, C., 27, 191–2, 205 Mallarmé, S., 6, 10, 17, 36, 37–42, 66, 77, 80, 82, 120, 127, 159, 170–1, 182, 191, 193, 201, 209, 210 Malraux, A., 128–30, 132, 133, 205 Mann, T., 150 Marcuse, H., 201 Marion, J.-L., 195–6 Marsh, I., 193–4, 197–8 Marx, K., 1, 42, 73, 89–92, 189, 194, 200 Mascolo, D., 17, 179, 186 Mauthner, F., 7, 199 Melancholy, 5, 11, 23, 72, 76, 88, 96, 105–6, 111–12, 115–17, 119, 120–1, 201, 203, 204

Nessus, 173 Nietzsche, F. W., 1, 10, 13, 14, 18, 75, 144, 146, 161, 174, 175, 198 nihilism, 1, 5, 6, 11, 13, 14–15, 18, 19, 23, 44, 51, 75, 105, 157, 178, 181, 190, 208 Orestes, 52–53, 62, 75, 76 Orpheus, 106, 107, 144, 161, 209 Pascal, B., 116, 161 Pathology, 11, 12, 13, 19, 25–8, 30, 33, 42, 53, 61, 62, 73, 74, 75, 96, 111, 119, 184, 186, 207 Paulhan, J., 180, 183, 207, 209 Perse, S.-J., 166, 209 Peuchet, J., 42, 194 Pinel, P., 73, 197 Plato, 62, 65, 161, 196, 209 Poe, E. A., 39, 206 Ponge, F., 204 Praxiteles, 129, 130 Rigaut, J., 86, 99 Rilke, R. M., 42, 77, 82, 106, 107, 192 Robbe-Grillet, A., 95, 144, 200 Sade, D. A. F., 10, 27, 92, 158, 183, 185, 186, 192, 212 Sartre, J.-P., 2, 3, 35, 45–6, 52–3, 75, 91, 104, 194, 211 Scepticism, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12, 19, 23, 26, 28, 33, 36, 73–4, 85, 87–8, 102, 124, 138–41, 199, 206–7 Schelling, F. W., 37 Schiller, F., 131 Seneca, 140 Sextus Empiricus, 7, 141 Simenon, G., 13 Sisyphus, 18–19, 43–5, 68, 196

INDEX

Smock, A., 195, 210 Suicide, 4, 5, 6, 11, 23, 36, 41, 42–3, 46, 50, 70, 71–86, 89, 132, 193–4, 197–8, 199, 200, 201, 206

Trotsky, L., 184, 212

Tristan/Iseult, 162

Zeno, 147

Wahl, J., 104, 200 Weil, S., 210

217