Maurice Blanchot and Psychoanalysis [1 ed.] 9789004401334, 9789004401327

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Maurice Blanchot and Psychoanalysis

Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies Editor Jon Mills Associate Editors Gerald J. Gargiulo Keith Haartman Ronald C. Naso Editorial Advisory Board Howard Bacal, Alan Bass, John Beebe, Christopher Bollas, Mark Bracher, Marcia Cavell, Nancy J. Chodorow, Walter A. Davis, Peter Dews, Michael Eigen, Irene Fast, Bruce Fink, Peter Fonagy, Leo Goldberger, Oren Gozlan, R.D. Hinshelwood, Otto F. Kernberg, Joseph Lichtenberg, Todd McGowan, Nancy McWilliams, Jean Baker Miller, Thomas Ogden, Owen Renik, Joseph Reppen, William J. Richardson, Peter L. Rudnytsky, David Livingstone Smith, Donnel Stern, Frank Summers, M. Guy Thompson, Wilfried Ver Eecke, Brent Willock, Robert Maxwell Young

volume 27

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​cps

Maurice Blanchot and Psychoanalysis By

Joseph D. Kuzma

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: By Orane Thomas (@truvisions) on unsplash.com. The Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data is available online at http://​catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://​lccn.loc.gov/2019940285​

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. issn 1571-​4 977 isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 0132-​7 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 0133-​4 (e-​book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents

Introduction: against Interiority 1 1 The Possibility of a Conversation 1 2 Politics of Refusal 7 3 The Streets 11 4 Communism without Communism 14 5 A Silent and Perpetual Hoax 16 6 Overview 19

Part 1 1

Freud, Lacan, and the Neuter 25 1 Thirteen Years 25 2 Va-​et-​vient 28 3 Dialectics for Magic 29 4 The Movement of Another Speech 34 5 Freud and the Neutral Turn 37 6 The Road to Rome 41 7 The Threat of Medical Formalization 45 8 Speaking, Again 47 9 A Perilous Endeavor 50 10 Desire Recognized 53 11 A Dialectic That Challenges Dialectic? 54 12 A Psychoanalysis without Psychoanalysis 57

2

On Madness 62 1 Hiding Is Forbidden 62 2 The Clinical Context 65 3 Madness—Lack or Surplus? 68 4 Jaspers and the Unverständlich 71 5 Compulsory Ruination 73 6 Against Blanchot 76 7 Beyond the Critical and the Clinical? 79 8 A Murmuring Emptiness 81 9 Internalizing the Outside 87

vi Contents

10 11 12 13

“A Word Perpetually at Odds with Itself” 90 The Prolepsis of Return 93 Every Name in History 94 Writing the Rupture 97

Part 2 3

Anti-​Narcissus 103 1 The Provocation 103 2 Every Poet Is Narcissus 104 3 Anti-​Narcissus: or, What Ovid Forgot 108 4 Primary Narcissism and the Recuperation of Otherness 111 5 A Return to the Zero-​Point 118 6 Narcissism, Nationalism 123 7 Turning toward Disaster 127

4

Primal Scenes 129 1 The Window of Mértola 129 2 Frames inside Frames 131 3 A Source of the Nile 136 4 “The Most Delicate Question” 139 5 Indefinite Anteriority 145 6 “I Died … There Had Been Rehearsals” 146 7 A Child Is Being Killed 149 8 Death Drives? 154 9 Return to the Window 158

5

The Trauma of Responsibility 160 1 Rethinking Responsibility 160 2 The Alien inside My Body 162 3 Subissement 168 4 The Invasive Other 173 5 Le Moi sans Moi 176 6 The Crypt 179 7 Nachträglichkeit: a Short History of a Translation 182 8 Blanchot and the Après-​coup 187 9 Mothering and the Asymmetries of Responsibility 190

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Contents

6

Maternal Rhythms 196 1 Blanchot’s Mother 196 2 Negative Hallucination 199 3 The Real, the Outside 203 4 Chora and Rhythm 207 5 The Danger of Rhythm’s Enigma 210 6 Double Dissymmetry 213 7 Conclusion: the Impossibility of Narcissism? 216

Works Cited 221 Index 229

vii

Introduction: against Interiority 1

The Possibility of a Conversation

In a 2007 paper, the French physician Pascal Possoz writes of the urgent need to develop a clinical reading of Maurice Blanchot.1 While any attempt at ‘mobilizing’ Blanchot’s writings in the service of formal, clinical practice must be approached with the utmost suspicion  –​for it would surely risk placing his writings under the control of an institutional authority whose hold on power he was always adamant to contest –​the provocation posed by Possoz is nonetheless a valuable one. It leads us to ask why there has been so little effort made to consider the nature and extent of Blanchot’s engagement, for instance, with psychoanalysis. Why have Blanchot’s various writings on Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, Leclaire, and others, received so little attention from scholars? Why have his critique of narcissism, his theorizing about madness, his comments on the death drive, and his frequent allusions to a temporality of trauma, evaded for so long any detailed, scholarly elaboration? To the extent that requisite subtlety and discretion can be maintained, the time has come, I  believe, to take these questions seriously. A  long-​overdue rapprochement between Blanchot and psychoanalysis is warranted. Without seeking to reduce the former to the latter, the time has come to allow them to speak to each other, in multiple voices, beyond reciprocity or continuity. The primary aim of this book is to foster such an encounter in which a conversation between the writings of Blanchot and psychoanalytic theory might take place. That so little has been written about Blanchot’s relation to psychoanalysis is surprising given the looming presence of clinical issues and concerns in both his biographical itinerary and his writings. Blanchot was not unacquainted with the medical sciences. Though the precise details remain anecdotal, Blanchot’s biographer, Christophe Bident, maintains that shortly after completing his graduate thesis at the Sorbonne, in 1930, Blanchot briefly commenced the study of medicine at Sainte-​Anne Hospital.2 Around the same time, Jacques Lacan was working at Sainte-​Anne under the supervision of the illustrious Henri Claude, “one of the first clinicians in France to institutionalize the teachings

1 Pascal Possoz, “Le médecine en filigrance dans la vie et l’oeuvre de Maurice Blanchot,” in Blanchot dans son siècle, eds. Monique Antelme, et al. (Lyon: Parangon, 2009), 161. 2 Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot, Partenaire Invisible (Champ Vallon: Seyssel, 1998), 49.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004401334_​0 02

2 Introduction of psychoanalysis.”3 Another pupil of Claude’s during this period was Henri Ey, who would come to develop the theory known as organo-​dynamism, and later organize, in 1960, the Bonneval Conference on the unconscious –​which perhaps did more than any single event in post-​war France to foster an interdisciplinary interest in Freudian thought. While any suggestion of a meeting between Blanchot and these individuals can only be a matter for speculation, there is little doubt that the ideas of psychoanalysis permeated the scene of his formative, intellectual development. Blanchot’s own ordeals at the hands of the clinic are somewhat easier to corroborate. As has often been noted, Blanchot’s health was very poor throughout the entirety of his adult life. He spent much time in the presence of doctors. In 1922, we are told, Blanchot underwent an abdominal operation during which his blood became infected.4 In 1937, due to the onset of tubercular symptoms, he was compelled to sojourn at the sanatorium in Cambo-​les-​Bains, near the Spanish border. Frailty and sickness were among his most proximal companions in the years leading up to the Second World War. Things scarcely improved in the years that followed the outbreak of hostilities. Death itself seemed to be held in abeyance by only the smallest of margins.5 By the time he began his association, in the autumn of 1941, with the group of thinkers meeting at 3 rue de Lille, Blanchot had already assumed the silent, ghostly countenance for which he is known.6 Tall, slender, and pale, he appeared as though partially dissolved, liminally-​situated somehow between presence and absence. Over the ensuing years, Blanchot would repeatedly seek convalescence in the south of France, travelling intermittently to locales such as Beausoleil and Èze, in search of rest. The latter would become his primary residence between the years 1946–​1957. It was principally here, in a small room overlooking the Cap Ferrat, that Blanchot would produce an extraordinarily prolific outpouring of critical essays and literary texts which would secure his reputation as one of the most challenging and influential writers of the 20th century.

3 Stijn Vanheule, The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 9. 4 Bident, Maurice Blanchot, Partenaire Invisible, 25. 5 On July 20, 1944, Blanchot narrowly avoided being executed by firing squad. See Blanchot’s letter to Vadim Kozovoï from May 28, 1982, in Maurice Blanchot, Lettres à Vadim Kozovoï (Paris: Éditions Manucius, 2009), 73. 6 The apartment at 3 rue de Lille was occupied at the time by Denise Rollin, who was romantically involved with Georges Bataille. From the years 1941 to 1943, Bataille organized discussions at the apartment which were attended by Blanchot and others.

Introduction

3

It is significant that his literary output, which ranks among the most distinctive in all French literature, features an unmistakable recurrence of clinical themes and clinical figures. Philippe Lacoue-​Labarthe notes that Blanchot was seemingly “haunted by physicians in his narratives.”7 Possoz, in an interview with Lacoue-​Labarthe, pushes the point even further, stating, “One has the impression, in the end, that [Blanchot] is addressing physicians.”8 Not only did Blanchot have at his disposal, in writing his récits and novels, at least some measure of medical knowledge from his brief studies at Sainte-​Anne, but he also had the benefit of having experienced first-​hand, by virtue of his constant illness, something of the patient’s vulnerability in the face of overbearing clinical authority. Blanchot’s unexpected longevity (he lived until the age of 95) serves as a rather unimpeachable testimony to the acute attentiveness he accorded to his own clinical care, and the trust (undoubtedly reluctant) which he placed in his doctors. “I liked the doctors quite well, and I did not feel belittled by their doubts,” remarks the narrator of Blanchot’s 1973 text, The Madness of the Day. “The annoying thing was that their authority loomed larger by the hour.”9 My focus in this book, however, will not be on Blanchot’s literary texts, nor upon his biography proper. I  will focus instead on his nonfiction writings  –​ namely, those myriad critical essays, political documents, letters, and fragmentary texts which, from roughly 1950 onward, draw Blanchot’s thinking into relation with a wide-​range of major intellectual figures and theories, including those of the psychoanalytic tradition. At no point across his writings does Blanchot engage in ‘psychobiography’ or partake in psychoanalytic ‘readings’ of texts. In fact, Blanchot explicitly disavows the appropriation of clinical language for the purpose of interpreting literary or artistic works. I endeavor likewise to eschew any such reductionist approaches here. The following book is not an attempt at psychoanalyzing Blanchot, or offering anything like a proverbial ‘uncovering’ of latent, psychoanalytic meanings within his work. My aim is rather to examine and critique Blanchot’s numerous engagements with psychoanalytic theory spanning the course of some fifty years, in hopes of identifying the principle themes and tendencies featured within these critical engagements. I am interested, for instance, in how Blanchot views the major 7 Philippe Lacoue-​Labarthe, “Interview with Pascal Possoz,” in Ending and Unending Agony: On Maurice Blanchot, trans. Hannes Opelz (Fordham University Press, New York, 2015), 107. 8 Ibid. 9 Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1981), 14.

4 Introduction figures of psychoanalytic theory, and how he assesses the nature of their respective contributions, not only to discourse –​but also to what he calls, with more than a tinge of scorn, ‘human culture.’ My interest is in understanding the broader context for these various engagements, and how they might be situated in relation to the prevailing currents of French post-​war theory. I want to probe, in other words, the status of psychoanalysis in Blanchot’s writings, and explore the question of how the contours of Blanchot’s various engagements with psychoanalytic theory came to be shaped by his own theories and by those to which he was exposed by others. Such a task is rendered somewhat more complicated by the fact that Blanchot, only on limited occasions, indulges in full-​fledged expositions or critiques of psychoanalytic theories or themes. Far more common are the passing references, the footnotes, the brief comparisons, and the tantalizing allusions, each of which characteristically draws psychoanalysis outside itself, into relation with the various non-​clinical frames within which these disparate references are embedded. At no point in his writing does Blanchot attempt to think about psychoanalysis ‘in the abstract,’ or subject either its conceptual apparatus, or its clinical efficacy, to anything resembling a formal critique. To examine the status of psychoanalysis in Blanchot’s writings is thus inevitably to explore its connection to a variety of neighboring disciplines in relation to which its significance is generated and constantly modified. Given all this, a direct approach to the question of ‘Blanchot and psychoanalysis’ may likely be imprudent. What I propose instead is to disrupt immediately the uneasy balance between these two terms, ‘Blanchot’ and ‘psychoanalysis,’ by introducing a third term which gives context and color to this conversation. That term is politics. Indeed, it will be my contention, in the chapters that follow, that the complex, multifaceted status of psychoanalysis in Blanchot’s writings demands to be considered specifically in relation to an exigency, increasingly prominent within his writings from the mid-​1950s onward, that might be understood as socio-​political in nature. I want to propose that psychoanalysis, for Blanchot, possesses both a political efficacy, as well as a political liability. And if Blanchot demurs from formulating anything resembling a final, unequivocal verdict on psychoanalysis, it is because he will prefer instead to qualify and ceaselessly requalify its manifold contributions and its shortcomings, its benefits and its dangers, its subversive potency and its intimations of stultifying dogmatism, all against the ever-​shifting background of the political. If psychoanalysis appears at times a conciliatory force, while at other times a dangerous, even menacing one, this can be explained by the fact that psychoanalysis, for Blanchot, remains precariously situated on the very cusp of the radical and the reactionary.

Introduction

5

For many on the left-​wing of French politics, particularly in the immediate post-​war era, the matter was far less ambiguous. By the late 1940s, psychoanalysis had become a target of disdain for many on the French political Left, particularly among the old-​guard establishment of French Communist Party (pcf). Under the guidance of the Zhdanov doctrine, the pcf had taken steps to combat what it considered to be the insidious influence of bourgeois decadence and formalism, as well as doctrinal revisionism within its own ranks. It denounced psychoanalysis, in 1948, as a “reactionary ideology,” accusing it of providing arguments “for the ideological struggle against Marxism,” and serving as a “practical instrument for the intimidation and mystification of consciousness.”10 In opposition to Freud’s theory, the pcf sought to promote a perfected form of materialist psychology patterned upon the insights of Ivan Pavlov and his epigones. By the early 1950s, La Nouvelle Critique, the official journal of the pcf, had posited an explicit link between psychoanalysis and the family of ideologies, including of Nazism, founded upon the irrational. Hitler had cultivated myths of race and blood which were but a subtle transposition of Freud’s doctrine of the “irrationality of the instincts.”11 To Blanchot’s credit, he remains utterly unsympathetic to any such reductionist appraisal of psychoanalysis. Its efficacies and its liabilities demand to be considered in all their complexity, without oversimplification. Of course, Blanchot is by no means alone in holding a more nuanced view. The precarious balancing-​act is already evident in Freud’s own theory, and particularly in what Adam Phillips describes as the tension between the lighter and the darker Freud, the enlightenment Freud and the Freud of romanticism, the rationalizer and the irrationalist, the scientist and the magician.12 It is also evident, closer to Blanchot’s own day, in the manner in which Michel Foucault –​with whom Blanchot enjoyed, from a distance, a relation of profound and mutual admiration –​places Freud, in his monumental 1961 text, simultaneously within two lineages, two traditions, fundamentally opposed to one another. At times, Foucault sees Freud as a quintessentially contemporary thinker. At other times, Freud is explicitly linked to the lineage of 18th and 19th century thought, still steeped in classicism. As Jacques Derrida writes, “Sometimes [Foucault] wants to credit Freud, sometimes discredit him, unless he is actually doing 10 11 12

Louis Althusser, “Freud and Lacan,” in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, New York, 1972), 190. Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–​ 1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 187. Adam Phillips,  Becoming Freud:  The Making of a Psychoanalyst (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2014), 51.

6 Introduction both indiscernibly and at the same time.”13 Something not dissimilar might be said about Blanchot’s Freud, as we will see. Blanchot is often laudatory in his appraisals of psychoanalysis, particularly to the extent that psychoanalysis places our received notions of subjectivity and selfhood into question, asserting the primacy of otherness over sameness, and moving mankind perhaps closer to the point of finally escaping the fetters of a residual, indomitable theism. As Blanchot will write, in the late 1960s, “the discovery of the unconscious … [is] one of the principle steps toward liberation with regard to the theological …”14 To the extent that psychoanalysis is conceived as a liberating force, or a subversive catalyst, Blanchot celebrates its impact. He is immensely critical of psychoanalysis, however, to the extent that it sets itself up as an institution, a system of absolute knowledge, or an objective science which uses its power over language in order to serve or reinforce the prevailing social order. My suggestion is that it is specifically in relation to the political dimensions of his thought that Blanchot develops this nuanced and double-​voiced approach. But what exactly are the political dimensions of his thought? This question, crucial to our study, resists any simple answer. For not only do Blanchot’s political views undergo a massive change between the late 1930s to the mid-​1950s, with the orientation of his thought shifting (in approximate terms) from anti-​democratic nationalism to anti-​nationalist radicalism –​but at no point in his mature writings does Blanchot’s accord his thinking about politics anything resembling a systematic elaboration. Zakir Paul has recently written, “There are strong reasons to claim that Blanchot lacks a fully articulated political theory.”15 This is not to say that Blanchot’s writings on politics are anything less than lucid. Politics was the great passion of his life, and his writings on the subject are both voluminous and compelling. It is simply to say that Blanchot’s thought frequently gestures beyond a mere consideration of politics in its everyday sense, understood as the contestation of existing positions, policies, and laws  –​and toward a critique of the underlying logic and conditions of possibility upon which politics is based. Blanchot’s focus, in other words, is not

13 Jacques Derrida, “ ‘To Do Justice to Freud’:  The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis,” in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I.  Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 63. 14 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 457. 15 Zakir Paul, “Affirming the Rupture,” in Political Writings, 1953–​1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), lv.

Introduction

7

simply upon a consideration of politics [la politique], but upon the very notion of the political itself [le politique].16 It is in the contentious relation of mutual contestation between these two registers that something of the complexity of Blanchot’s political thought is generated. His implicit suggestion is that politics demands always to be considered in its relation to the political, even as the latter ceaselessly calls the former into question, interrupting its work and suspending it in the name of a call to justice which resides beyond all political calculations and all political power. As readers of Blanchot, we are thus faced with the challenge of remaining ever-​vigilant to this double-​voice which speaks in Blanchot’s texts. Indeed, this doubleness, irresolvable into any form of unity or synthesis, is no less prominent within his writings on politics, than it is throughout his engagement with psychoanalysis. For Blanchot, every voice from the inside must be interrupted by a voice from elsewhere. To think about politics and psychoanalysis alike, is to be mindful of the voice of the other which speaks, beyond the demands of the present, in the name of those who are nameless. As a way of establishing some context for what follows, let us turn to a brief overview of Blanchot’s political itinerary, beginning with his return to Paris in the late 1950s. 2

Politics of Refusal

If there is a single political gesture perhaps most characteristic of Blanchot, from the time of his return to national politics in 1958 onward, then this gesture, as Zakir Paul suggests, is that of refusal.17 How does this exigency of refusal take shape? Returning to Paris, in the winter of 1957, Blanchot arrived upon a political scene on the precipice of great upheaval. In short order, the Fourth Republic would collapse, leading to General de Gaulle’s ascension to power and consolidation of control over the newly-​founded Fifth Republic. The question of how to resist this usurpation acquired great urgency, both for Blanchot and many other intellectuals disturbed by the general’s nationalist rhetoric and imperialist ambitions. The natural enemy of de Gaulle’s reactionary nationalism was the French Communist Party. Yet the pcf was scarcely in any state to mount an effective resistance. Having seen its parliamentary power in decline since the early 16 17

For a differentiation between these terms see Leslie Hill, Blanchot: extreme contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997), 198–​199. Paul, “Affirming the Rupture,” lv.

8 Introduction 1950s, the pcf was in a state of internal conflict, with power-​struggles among its various factions compromising the party’s cohesion. To make matters worse, Moscow’s suppression of the uprising in Hungary in 1956, coupled with Khrushchev’s scathing critique of Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’ at the Twentieth Party Congress, had thrown the world of Leftist politics generally into disarray. The pcf’s reputation on the Left had only been further damaged, in 1956, when members of the party voted in favor granting the French government special powers to combat the Algerian insurgency. As de Gaulle seized power, the PCF could do little to oppose him. This task fell increasingly to dissidents, and those outside the institutions of established party politics. It was toward this milieu that Blanchot found himself drawn. During the late summer of 1958, Blanchot began meeting frequently with the rue Saint-​Benoît group comprised of Dionys Mascolo, Marguerite Duras, and Robert Antelme. It was Mascolo in particular who would serve as a major influence upon Blanchot’s political thinking throughout this period. Having left the pcf in 1949, Mascolo was an anti-​authoritarian leftist and a fierce opponent of imperialism and colonialism in all its forms. He had co-​founded (with Jean Schuster) the paper, Le 14 juillet, in the immediate of wake of de Gaulle’s ascent to power. The publication’s stated mission was that of bringing about a return to “the resistance confiscated by Gaullists and Stalinists,” while voicing an “unconditional refusal of providential power.”18 It was here, in the second issue of this short-​lived journal, that one finds Blanchot’s October 1958 manifesto, “Refusal” –​a piece whose language is concise and uncompromising. Confronted with the troubling events of the day, Blanchot advocates a refusal that is absolute, categorical.19 What must be refused, he claims, is not simply de Gaulle’s usurpation of power, but also the very justification which this act claims for itself in the presumptive aim of restoring national honor. In “The Essential Perversion,” another anti-​Gaullist piece published a few months later, Blanchot further excoriates de Gaulle’s claim to embody the French national destiny. For Blanchot, de Gaulle’s recourse to the quasi-​religious rhetoric of national salvation amounts to a perversion of the highest order. Such perversion, according to Blanchot, demands to be both vigorously opposed and categorically refused, regardless of the consequences. Over the months and years that followed, Blanchot’s politics of refusal would grow even more radical. In 1960, shortly before Francis Jeansen and 18 Bident, Maurice Blanchot, Partenaire Invisible, 353. 19 Maurice Blanchot, “Refusal,” in Political Writings, 1953–​1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 7.

Introduction

9

twenty-​three other dissidents were put on trial for opposing French colonial rule in Algeria, Blanchot and Mascolo, joined by a group of others, endeavored to produce a written declaration of solidarity with the defendants. The resulting document, penned by Blanchot, and commonly known as the “Manifesto of the 121,” asserted the right of soldiers and draftees to desert from the military in order to avoid inflicting torture.20 Immediately following the Manifesto’s publication, and the subsequent banning of all its signees from national French radio and television, Blanchot and Mascolo began planning a new publication unprecedented in scope and ambition. “We are aware that we are approaching an extreme moment in time,”21 Blanchot notes, in one of the publication’s preparatory documents composed during the early 1960s. This reference to ‘an extreme moment in time’ was not hyperbole on Blanchot’s part. Not only was the possibility of socio-​political upheaval in France a continuous threat, but the Cold War had made real the threat of nuclear annihilation. Local politics had become global politics, and vice versa. The time had come for a fundamental rethinking with regard to the political. While the pcf’s formal reversal of policy with regard to Algeria, in 1960, had helped to redeem its appeal in the eyes of many Marxists committed to liberation politics, the generational struggle in its midst could not be denied. Though much power remained with an old-​guard who still looked toward Moscow for inspiration, a new generation of leftists had begun to emerge who increasingly saw the ussr as an imperialist power whose authoritarian leanings were a betrayal of its revolutionary heritage. Rather than looking to Moscow, this new-​wave of leftists sought inspiration in the struggles of the third-​world against the great colonial powers. Others, rejecting party politics altogether, sought to rethink the notion of community and communism even more radically beyond any reference to nations or empires. For such thinkers on the anti-​establishment Left, a rigorous internationalism was called upon to contest all forms of national party politics, including that of the pcf itself. This roughly speaking, was to be the stance upheld by Blanchot’s new project, The International Review. The project was focused around the creation of an experimental journal which was to be written in fragmentary form, featuring contributions in multiple languages. Crucially, it was 20

21

Among the document’s signees, which included Sartre and numerous other intellectuals, there were two psychoanalysts, Jean-​Bertrand Pontalis and Maud Mannoni, both of whom were close to Lacan at the time. See Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–​1985, 277. Maurice Blanchot, “[The Gravity of the Project],” in Political Writings, 1953–​1993, 56.

10 Introduction envisioned as a publication which would elide national borders and eschew any allegiance to political parties. Carrying the theme of refusal to the extreme, it was to be “a review of total critique”22 whose focus would be restricted neither to politics nor philosophy proper, but which would subject all forms of discourse, theory, literature, and art to a type of criticism envisioned as relentless.23 Was there a concrete political aim to all this? And, if so, what politics would the project espouse? Blanchot’s responses to such questions, unsurprisingly, are offered in multiple voices. On one hand, Blanchot insists that the notion of total critique implies “putting everything into question … seeking to give the word question all its force and dignity, even questioning the value of the question itself.”24 On the other hand, it is inevitably on the basis of Marxism, Blanchot concedes, that any such critique must be undertaken. For “whatever our personal choices concerning Marxism may be, it is still the case that we are leaning on Marxism, pressed up against it, albeit in order to contest it.”25 In an excursus upon the journal’s aims, Blanchot continues: The necessity of thinking about all problems as if they were uniquely political problems at a certain moment, then at the same time thinking of all problems not as purely political but as putting into question a global demand that we cannot only call political, this necessity comes from Marxism, and it leads us to affirm Marxism as dialectical, yet without being condemned to repeat the Marxist dialectic.26 This emphasis upon a kind of political enunciation which speaks in multiple languages and holds multiple (competing views) at once –​anticipates rather profoundly the very rhetoric which Blanchot will adopt several years later in his revolutionary tracts of 1968. Indeed, it is in the various texts composed by Blanchot (often anonymously) in the months surrounding the events of May, that his engagement with radical politics arrives at arguably its most challenging and provocative point.

22

Letter from Blanchot to Sartre, December 2, 1960, cited in Blanchot, Political Writings, 1953–​1993, 37. 23 For various reasons, the review never made it to print as such. An initial issue of it did appear, however, under the banner of the Italian journal Il Menabò in 1964. See Hill, Blanchot: extreme contemporary, 16. 24 Blanchot, “[The Gravity of the Project],” in Political Writings, 1953–​1993, 58. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid.

Introduction

3

11

The Streets

The extent of Blanchot’s personal involvement in the events of May 1968 was by all accounts significant, though his penchant for anonymity and discretion precludes any precise recounting of his activities during the upheaval. We know that Blanchot was a member of the Student-​Writers Action Committee, one of several anti-​authoritarian groups that formed around Paris that spring, and that he took a leading role in producing a many of the texts featured within its in-​house review, Comité. “These furtive pages,” as Zakir Paul calls them, “written and distributed in haste, attest to a radicalization of Blanchot’s breach with political orthodoxies.”27 Left unsigned, and only attributed to Blanchot later on by Mascolo, the texts in question show Blanchot wholly beyond the constraints of any party affiliation, or political program, exhorting the protesters onward toward a break in the continuity of history –​a change of epoch. Blanchot’s approach here might be contrasted rather starkly with that of both the establishment wing of the pcf, and the Althusserians at the École normale supérieure, who had come to assume, by the mid-​1960s, a position of considerable influence on the French Far-​Left. The normaliens and their outspoken professor, Louis Althusser, were caught rather flat-​footed when the student protests at Nanterre University and the Sorbonne began in early May. Even when barricades went up in the Latin Quarter on the evening of May 10, as though signaling a return to the revolutionary incandescence of 1848, the Althusserians remained rather ambivalent about what was happening. For most of them, the priority had been working ‘within the system’ of the pcf to promote a structuralist Marxism which they hoped would lead to international communist revolution. Considering themselves to be the “guardian[s]‌of orthodoxy in the pcf,”28 the Althusserian cohort tended to see the student protesters, at least in the early days of May, as petit-​bourgeois agitators whose interests where not sufficiently in-​line with the concerns of the proletariat. Unlike the Althusserians, the majority of the soixante-​huitards were not interested in Communist Party politics. Though intensely critical of the capitalist West, and opposed to imperialism, nationalism, and authoritarianism, the protagonists of May seemed generally more interested in the creative potential found within acts of general dissidence, than they were in the implementation 27 28

Paul, “Affirming the Rupture,” in Political Writings, 1953–​1993, xlix. Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2011), 100.

12 Introduction of any particular political program. Less a political revolution than a cultural one, this was a time when, as Andrew Feenberg writes, “poetry ruled the streets.”29 For Blanchot, to reduce the upheaval of 1968 to the status of a merely political revolution, would be to lose sight of the event itself in which the nature of human relations came to be rethought, beyond class, borders, boundaries, and identities. In the midst of such an event, fixed adherence to any political program or party, no matter how ostensibly radical, could only work to subvert the revolutionary potencies at play. As a way of further setting the stage for an exploration of his engagement with psychoanalysis, I would like to note several excerpts from Blanchot’s writing of 1968 which I believe most clearly convey his contestatory outlook. In a key text from October 1968, Blanchot suggests that the polyvocal exigency, whose contestatory capacity I  have been noting, already belonged to Marx himself. “The example of Marx,” writes Blanchot, “helps us to understand that the voice of writing, a voice of ceaseless contestation, must constantly develop itself and break itself into multiple forms. The communist voice is always at once tacit and violent, political and scholarly, direct, indirect, total and fragmentary, lengthy and almost instantaneous.”30 This multiplicity of voices is needed not only for the purpose of interrupting various types of established discourse, inevitably of a reactionary nature, but it is also needed for the purpose of interrupting itself. If it is to remain genuinely subversive, the revolutionary movement of contestation or total critique, which calls all forms of power and authority into question, must not hesitate to interrogate itself as well. The movement of contestation must never cease to turn back upon itself, and contest the principles of its own contestation, lest it become overly-​ formalized and give way to a stultifying and regressive complacency. This radical view is similarly expressed in a letter from June 1968. Here, Blanchot explicitly advocates for a revolutionary movement which would restrain itself “from all premature statements or programs, because it senses that in any statement formulated in a necessarily alienated or distorted discourse there is a risk of being recuperated by the established system (that of industrialized capitalist societies), a system that integrates everything, including culture, however ‘avant-​garde’ it may be.”31 Marxist radicalism

29

Andrew Feenberg, When Poetry Ruled the Streets:  The French May Events of 1968 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). 30 Blanchot, “Marx’s Three Voices,” in Political Writings, 1953–​1993, 99. 31 Blanchot, Political Writings, 1953–​1993, 83.

Introduction

13

must not spare itself the critique it directs against bourgeois culture. It must retain its contestatory force by refusing all forms totalization, all forms of certainty, all forms of established value –​otherwise it becomes part of the problem. In one of his most widely-​cited pieces of revolutionary writing from 1968, a text entitled, “Communism without heirs,” Blanchot identifies in the clearest terms both the enemy of the current revolutionary movement, and the reason for this adversary’s perennial appeal. He lists the names: patriotism, chauvinism, nationalism. Nothing distinguishes these three, according to Blanchot, other than the fact that “nationalism is the consistent ideology of which patriotism is the sentimental affirmation.”32 As our contemporary political climate makes frighteningly clear, the allure of nationalism is great. What it promises is a sense of unity and belongingness, a collective ­restoration of narcissistic omnipotence. All of this comes to be centered around the figure of the leader, the Father, who embodies the will of the ­nation and manifests through his actions and speech the highest values of its people. Such a political order is perverse, not to mention exceedingly dangerous. As Blanchot will later write, “There is no good nationalism.”33 For at its ­basis there resides a nefarious tendency to assimilate and unify everything, ­reducing every­thing to the self, the same. Whether embodied in the figure of de Gaulle, as in Blanchot’s time, or in the figure of any other charismatic leader, ­nationalism subordinates both difference and otherness unto the fantasy of the fully-​integrated whole. Nationalism involves, as Blanchot writes, “the most prodigious power of integration … [which] in the intimacy of thought, in ­everyday practice, in political movement, is at work to reconcile everything … to prevent class struggle …”34 While it may promise integration and unity, it delivers alienation and oppression. The great warning contained within Blanchot’s “Communism without heirs,” which is no less pertinent today than it was in 1968, might be summarized in the following way: wherever a desire for totality and absolute integration is present, there one already encounters a harbinger of nationalism. And such a tendency of thought, according to B ­ lanchot, ­demands a most rigorous and unequivocal contestation. Not unity, but multiplicity, is to be affirmed. For to challenge the politics of power, one must always speak in multiple voices at once.

32 33 34

Blanchot, “[Communism without heirs],” in Political Writings, 1953–​1993, 92. Blanchot, “[I think it suits a writer better],” in Political Writings, 1953–​1993, 173. Blanchot, “[Communism without heirs],” in Political Writings, 1953–​1993, 92.

14 Introduction 4

Communism without Communism

For obvious reasons, then, the idea of a national communist party held no appeal for Blanchot. The day that international communism agreed to serve the national interest, Blanchot claims, it lost its soul.35 The highly-​idiosyncratic form of ‘communism’ which Blanchot, from 1968 onward, thus espouses bears no resemblance to any form of communism hitherto constituted, either in France, or elsewhere. Serving as an heir to nothing, it would partake in no lineage, heritage, or tradition. Such communism, Blanchot writes, would exclude “any already constituted community.”36 It is on the basis of these supremely stringent qualifications, that one arrives at that aporetic formulation of a communism without communism. Far more of importance has been written about this topic than could ever be recounted here, but let us consider the elucidatory remarks of Lars Iyer, who has commented widely on the topic. Iyer sees Blanchot’s communism to be a name for “the voyage out, the unceasing response to a demand … [which] tears us, each of us, from the security of any determined political system.”37 No longer merely a political position, communism for Blanchot is something more like an event, whose affirmation “would welcome the indeterminacy of what is always ‘to come’ in any social space.”38 The affirmation of communism, one might say, would be indistinguishable from the affirmation of community –​understood in the most rigorous manner as utterly devoid of integration, and comprised neither of a collection of selves, nor featuring any over-​arching totality within which all individuals are subsumed. Such a community, always yet to come, which Christopher Fynsk calls “a community of freedom,”39 would mark an end to human alienation and enslavement, supplanting the traditional political and philosophical

35

This point is clearly stated in Blanchot’s writings from 1968. In a letter from early June, he even accuses the pcf of having “shirked its tasks” at the beginning of the May events, “doing everything to stop the movement and to contribute to reinstalling a Gaullist power that was falling apart.” Later in the same letter, Blanchot posits that one of the revolutionary movement’s “first characteristics should be its antinationalism, [as an] effort to revive internationalist Marxism…unfortunately unrecognized for decades by traditional communist parties.” See Blanchot, Political Writings, 1953–​1993, 82–​83. 36 Blanchot, “[Communism without heirs],” in Political Writings, 1953–​1993. 93. 37 Lars Iyer, Blanchot’s Communism:  Art, Philosophy and the Political (New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), viii. 38 Ibid. 39 Christopher Fynsk, Last Steps:  Maurice Blanchot’s Exilic Writing (New  York:  Fordham University Press, 2013), 2.

Introduction

15

emphases placed upon dialectical conflict and relational fusion, with a socio-​political relation of a radically different kind. How to open such a space? And how to preserve its openness as a welcome to the other –​the one who might come to us, dispossessed of everything? It is precisely the question of “engaging and holding open the infinite relation from which a community of freedom might be announced”40 that comes to comprise arguably the central preoccupation of Blanchot’s discourse on the political, from the 1960s onward. The exigency of holding open this relational space within which a community always yet to come, a communism without communism, might be announced is “an unending task that requires an uncompromising stance: the contestation of any appropriating instance, be this some myth, or some other discursive authority (including the discourse of reason itself).”41 Given all this, the reasons for my insistence upon reading Blanchot’s engagement with psychoanalysis against the backdrop of the political should become clear. If the opening and holding open of a ‘community of freedom,’ a non-​appropriable space in which radical otherness might be welcomed, comprises the implicit aim of Blanchot’s mature, political thought, then such a community (and the relation with otherness with which it is inseparable) demands that not only the established political order, but also the philosophical, theological, and psychological presuppositions upon which this order is based, be placed into question, and suspended. It is in writing that Blanchot understands one rather privileged way of meeting this hyperbolic demand. Writing, as he suggests in 1969, “passes through the advent of communism” by putting into question every established value, ever discourse, every form of identity, every preexisting form of community –​ transgressing “every law, and also its own.”42 But so, too, does psychoanalysis possess this subversive potency. Indeed, I want to argue that Blanchot sees psychoanalysis as a rather efficacious means for opening man up to a relation with radical otherness –​beyond all recuperation, beyond all reason. Though its liabilities are numerous, as Blanchot will not hesitate to acknowledge, there exists, in the disruption of human certainty, established value, and docile complacency marked by Freud’s intervention in intellectual history, something which one might justifiably call: revolutionary.

40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, xii.

16 Introduction 5

A Silent and Perpetual Hoax

It is under the banner of subversive iconoclasm that Blanchot, on the very cusp of his reengagement with political life, brings together the names Marx and Freud in his June 1957 essay, “The Great Hoax.” What Marx and Freud have in common, in this essay, is a passion for demystification, for ceaseless contestation. Blanchot sees them here as “great denouncers”43 seeking to expose the world of fraud and pretense within which men, deceived by others, and above all by themselves, are conscripted into the service of powers beyond their control, whose accomplices or victims they become. Anticipating the arguments of both Foucault and Ricoeur, in this respect, Blanchot portrays Marx and Freud as agents of suspicion who call into question received truths, values, and ideals, challenging man’s complacent acceptance of reality. Each in their own ways, Marx and Freud seek to expose the “silent and perpetual hoax which is inside us and outside us, which is the air that we breathe and the breath of our words.”44 These lines, down to the very metaphor they employ, foreshadow the precise way in which Blanchot, roughly a decade later, will comment upon the sheer ubiquity of ideology. In an essay initially published in late 1967, only months before the start of the May events, Blanchot will define ideology as “the inherited set of representations by which we rule our conduct, nearly independent of the more real relations upon which they depend.”45 Ideology comprises nothing less than “our element: that which causes us to breathe and, at the limit, asphyxiates us.”46 If deception and ideology are thus presented by Blanchot, in almost identical terms, as the very elements which sustain man in his being, only to suffocate him, then it is with the interventions of Marx and Freud that a path toward liberation, perhaps, commences. Deception, of course, has long been a prominent theme within Western thought. From Plato’s cave, to Descartes’s evil deceiver, to Sade’s God, speculative thought has found itself ever-​enticed by the possibility that what we take for reality might in fact be false. But such theories, proposed in the abstract, and applied universally, often fail to produce meaningful takeaways. As contemporary discussions surrounding Nick Bostrom’s simulation theory make clear, as long as the deception is understood to concern everyone, at all times, 43 Maurice Blanchot,  The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford:  Blackwell, 1995), 157. 44 Ibid., 161. 45 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 248. 46 Ibid., 262.

Introduction

17

it ultimately concerns no one. So what if we are all living in the proverbial ‘matrix’? Life goes on much the same way as before. Moreover, if everything around us, as well as everything we say and do, is subject to deception –​then might not this discovery itself be part of the deception? The disclosure of a universal deception, Blanchot suggests, would merely be “part and parcel of the hoax.”47 For Blanchot, the importance of Marx and Freud resides, first and foremost, in the manner in which they each concretize the circumstances of the so-​called ‘great hoax’ by relating it to the specificities of collective and personal history. The hoax becomes less an abstract, global deception, than something historically or individually specific. We are each complicit in the hoax, all the while remaining largely oblivious to it. Marx and Freud show us that while we speak and act under the assumption that our words and actions are innocent and transparent –​both our interpersonal and intrapersonal lives are in fact conditioned by powerful forces beyond our immediate perception or control. We can no longer, in good faith, take ourselves to be masters of our own domains. And to the extent that we are alienated in this manner from ourselves, we cannot help but also remain alienated from others. Marxism and psychoanalysis, each in different ways, draw us outside ourselves, shatter our self-​satisfied complacency, and put both our understanding of ourselves and our position within the world-​at-​large radically into question. In the words of Louis Althusser, who sought in his own writings to formulate a rapprochement between Marx and psychoanalysis, Freud shows us that the human subject is decentered, constituted by a process, or a structure, which likewise is decentered.48 Consciousness rests upon the unconscious, and what we take to be the self –​as it has been conventionally construed by both philosophy and psychology –​is largely unknowable to itself. This radical assault upon human narcissism and certainty comprises a primary aspect of Freud’s so-​called Copernican Revolution. Indeed, the notion of a Copernican Revolution, as it pertains to Freud, is perhaps best understood in relation to Freud’s own words, from 1917, where he writes of the three great narcissistic wounds that have been inflicted upon Western culture. Along with the wound inflicted upon human pride with Darwin’s suggestion that mankind shares a common ancestry with the primates, Freud notes the great assaults on human narcissism likewise perpetrated by Copernicus and by himself. In shifting our scientific thinking away from the geocentric paradigm Copernicus relegates the earth to the periphery –​making

47 Blanchot, The Blanchot Reader, 157. 48 Althusser, “Freud and Lacan,” 218–​219.

18 Introduction our relative motion and position in the cosmos dependent upon an other body beyond ourselves. To speak of a Copernican Revolution, in general terms, is to speak of a fundamental contestation of whatever has traditionally constituted, for mankind, a center point –​a point of absolute stability –​in relation to which identity and selfhood might be derived. Far from simply decentering the Ptolemaic cosmos, however, the Copernican Revolution also hints at something even more radical, namely, the possibility of a cosmos without any center at all.49 It is perhaps in this sense that Freud’s own Coperncian Revolution is best understood. As Jean Laplanche will later argue, to liken Freud’s intervention to a Copernican Revolution, is by no means simply to assert that Freud replaces one form of centering with another. Rather, Freud challenges the very notion of the center itself. The effect of Freud’s Copernican Revolution is necessarily ex-​centric; it puts into question the very possibility of anchoring, or orienting, human experience in relation to any point of absolute certainty, centrality, or value. Not only does Freud’s discovery of the unconscious comprise, according to Blanchot, one of “the principal steps toward liberation with regard to the theological,”50 but it suggests a dimension of man residing beyond the grasp of all mastery, power, and knowledge. Far from comprising an inner-​depth, a hidden level of inaccessible interiority that would maintain intact the onto-​theological privilege of centricity, Blanchot proposes to read the Freudian unconscious as a radical exteriority, something that is not only indeterminate and unknowable, but that pulls man outside himself, outside everything he believes himself to be, outside e­ verything that would comprise for him a center point. Indeed, I believe that Blanchot wants to ‘think’ the unconscious here in a manner that profoundly foreshadows what Laplanche will later call its alien-​ness [étrangèreté]. He wants to think it, in other words, as an irreducible otherness that precedes any installation of identity –​an obscurity more ancient than even the most primitive form of consciousness. One must not conceive of it as the “un-​Conscious,” Blanchot insists, but always as the “Un-​conscious.”51 Nor should the epithets of presence or absence, affirmation or negation be applied to it. For the unconscious, at its most radical, marks that point beyond the reach of dialectics, ontology, and theology:  a point at which all rootedness is undercut and any hope of total integration is dispersed. Not just a principal step toward humanity’s liberation 49

Jean Laplanche, “Unfinished Copernican Revolution” in Essays on Otherness, ed. John Fletcher (New York: Routledge, 1999), 56. 50 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 457. 51 Ibid.

Introduction

19

with regard to the theological, then, the discovery of the unconscious perhaps makes way for a new kind of relating to the other person. All of this cannot help but entail socio-​political consequences. Consider, for example, the following lines from 1968, in which Blanchot paraphrases Marx to great effect. “The end of alienation only begins if man is willing to come out of himself (out of everything that institutes him as interiority): out of religion, out of the family, out of the State.”52 According to Blanchot, this call to the outside [le dehors], an outside that is neither another world nor a hidden world, “is the only movement that can oppose all forms of patriotism, whatever they may be.”53 Psychoanalysis possesses a political efficacy, for Blanchot, on account of its capacity for engendering precisely such a ‘movement to the outside.’ Psychoanalysis is revolutionary to the extent that it places our received notions of interiority under suspicion, turning us outside ourselves, and turning us toward the other. Such is the movement which interests me here. 6

Overview

This book is composed of two parts, roughly divided along chronological lines. In Chapter One, I begin by examining Blanchot’s discussion of Freud and Lacan, and his appraisal of their importance and impact. I  focus primarily on Blanchot’s 1956 essay, “Freud,” and its significantly revised and retitled, 1969 version, “The Speech of Analysis,” in order to explore how Blanchot’s view of Freud and Lacan comes to be modified across these two versions, as well as noting areas in which Blanchot’s appraisal remains unchanged. Building from this account, I turn toward a consideration of madness in Chapter Two. Focusing initially upon Blanchot’s 1951 essay, “Madness par excellence,” I turn toward an examination of how Blanchot’s approach to the question of madness undergoes rather significant alteration over the course of the 1960s, due in large part to the interventions of Michel Foucault and Pierre Klossowski. My thesis, here, is that the manner in which Blanchot comes to rethink the notion of madness in terms of fragmentation, singularity, and the exigency of return, exerts a significant influence upon the manner in which he will later engage with psychoanalysis in The Writing of the Disaster. The second part of this book features a detailed examination of the status psychoanalysis in The Writing of the Disaster, arguably Blanchot’s most difficult

52 Blanchot, Political Writings, 1953–​1993, 92. 53 Ibid.

20 Introduction and multifaceted text. I begin, in Chapter Three, by looking at the problem of narcissism. Blanchot plainly tells us that narcissism is inescapable. It encompasses all the positions of being and non-​being. Nevertheless, Blanchot appears to undertake, in the pages of his text, a sophisticated and nuanced critique of the conventional conceptions of narcissism. How can something inescapable be made subject to critique? I proceed to ask whether narcissism might, in fact, presuppose an outside which remains somehow beyond the grasp of mastery, power, and possibility. I examine Blanchot’s reading of Ovid’s Narcissus myth, as well as taking-​stock of the major psychoanalytic accounts of narcissism, in order to discuss the nature of Blanchot’s critique and its political implications. In Chapter Four, I turn my focus squarely to what is widely-​considered Blanchot’s most famous engagement with psychoanalysis. This is his fragment entitled, ‘(A primal scene?).’ I draw the fragment into conversation with Freud’s Wolf Man case, as well as the other psychoanalytic accounts with which Blanchot engages. These include D.W. Winnicott’s “Fear of Breakdown” essay, and Serge Leclaire’s A Child is Being Killed. My aim, here, is to retrace Blanchot’s critique of the psychoanalytic notion of the primal. My account builds toward Chapter Five, which is in some ways the key chapter of this text. Here, I suggest that the dominant trope in Blanchot’s engagement with psychoanalysis, in the pages of The Writing of the Disaster, is something I term the trauma of responsibility. I make use of both Laplanche and Levinas in order to develop a reading of Blanchot’s ‘(A primal scene?)’ which highlights the manner in which Blanchot, throughout his text, seems to portray responsibility in terms of trauma. This approach, carried out along the margins of Blanchot’s text, allows psychoanalysis and philosophy each to contest one another, and push one another to their respective limits. Finally, in Chapter Six, I bring Blanchot’s text into dialogue with the writings of André Green and Julia Kristeva, among others, in order to address the status of the maternal in Blanchot’s text. What I suggest is that, despite her apparent absence, the figure of the mother in fact plays a crucial role in Blanchot’s account by gesturing us toward an understanding of responsibility that is entirely irreducible to all reciprocity or symmetry. Rather than seeking, at any point within the pages that follow, to subject Blanchot’s writings to ‘psychoanalytic’ interpretations, my more modest aim is simply to open a channel of conversation, a space for further discussion, between those fascinated with the writings of Blanchot, and those who see in psychoanalysis a perennially-​vibrant field of study. It is my hope that this book will contribute in some small part to a broader consideration of the relations linking psychoanalysis, politics, and responsibility, in Blanchot’s writings –​and beyond.

Introduction

21

This book would not have been possible without the assistance of many people. I  would especially like to acknowledge the following individuals for their generosity and support: Dorothea Olkowski, Leslie Hill, Robert Sackett, Sudhanshu Semwal, Raphael Sassower, Mary Ann Cutter, Rex Welshon, Jon Mills, Bram Oudenampsen, and the staff at Brill.

pa rt 1  

∵

­c hapter 1

Freud, Lacan, and the Neuter 1

Thirteen Years

It is rare to be granted access to the inner-​workings of a writer’s compositional process and to watch as a single text develops over the course of a decade or more. It is rarer still when that writer is guided in his endeavors by the watch-​words of discretion and anonymity. Such is the privilege, however, accorded to readers of Blanchot by virtue of his decision to republish, often with substantial revisions, many of his critical essays from the 1950s and 1960s in his 1969 text, The Infinite Conversation. In a manner not dissimilar to Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, first published in 1905, and then repeatedly revised and republished by Freud over the next twenty years, The Infinite Conversation offers us more than just a writer’s theory. It shows us this theory in motion, developing and surpassing itself. When read alongside the original versions of the essays featured within its pages, The Infinite Conversation shows us Blanchot at work, altering his terminology, refining his points of emphasis, and pushing his thought in new and unexpected directions. As such, it comprises an invaluable point of reference for anyone interested in tracing the evolving status psychoanalysis in his texts. For Blanchot, the thirteen-​year period spanning from the publication of his essay, “Freud,” in 1956, to the republication of the same essay, heavily revised and newly retitled, as “The Speech of Analysis,” in 1969, was a period of enormous personal and intellectual change whose effects are reflected in his writing. During the period in question, de Gaulle seizes power, the Cold War reaches its height, and the streets of Paris (along with countless other cities around the world) reverberate with the sound of revolutionary discontent and violence. At the level of theory, the years are no less transformative. Blanchot’s close friend, Emmanuel Levinas, publishes his Totality and Infinity in 1961, raising the question of the ethical relation to the Other in excess of all dialectic and all ontology. Derrida’s intervention in theory, during this period, is likewise heavily influential upon Blanchot, compelling the latter to abandon any uncritical reference to the notions of being and presence in his texts, and to rethink fundamentally the relationship between writing and speech.1 There are 1 Throughout The Infinite Conversation, in fact, Blanchot frequently suspends the terms ‘being’ and ‘presence’  –​along with many others deemed either too metaphysical, or too

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004401334_​0 03

26 CHAPTER 1 other, emerging influences as well. These include Foucault, who leads Blanchot to refocus his critical approach (as we will see in Chapter Two) upon the question of the conditions of possibility for discourse, and Pierre Klossowksi, whose reading of Nietzsche asserts the privilege of the eternal return as the anti-​theological thought par excellence. In the world of political philosophy, the structuralist Marxism of Althusser gains increasing prominence throughout these years, posing a direct challenge to the Marxist humanism espoused by the pcf. These were the years that marked the ascent of structuralism in France. Tom Eyers describes the prevailing thought of this period as one which privileged “the metaphorics of structure as a means of capturing the underlying matricies –​linguistic, unconscious, political –​that produce the effect of subjectivity.”2 This notion of subjectivity, moreover, was understood as fundamentally decentered, and any talk of man as absolute freedom now belonged decisively to the past. When Sartre, in a 1966 issue of the journal L’Arc, took Foucault, Althusser, and Lacan jointly to task for ignoring history in favor of structure, and opting to reject man in favor of the decentered subject, such objections could only be taken for little more than the rumblings of a theoretical anachronism.3 As Edward Baring writes, any philosophical account which posited the freedom of the subject and its ability to constitute the world as it saw fit was increasingly understood as a form of bourgeois ideology. By contrast, those post-​Freudians, such as Lacan, who emphasized “a prior constitution that the subject passively received were easier to accept into the Marxist fold, for they posed thought and philosophy as superstructures to more originary, often material, processes.”4 It was also during the thirteen years separating the two version of Blanchot’s essay that psychoanalysis attained a hitherto unprecedented stature in France. With the 1960 Bonneval Conference on the unconscious, psychoanalysis began for the first time to modify the intellectual landscape of the country, becoming part of French national culture.5 Freud’s ideas become increasingly tolerated, if not accepted, in France, and inquiries into the notions of sex and the unconscious were no longer deemed scandalous. At the heart of all this, of course,

ontological –​by placing them in quotes or eliminating them altogether. Blanchot’s rethinking of the relationship between writing and speech will be discussed below. 2 Tom Eyers, Post-​Rationalism: Psychoanalysis, Epistemology, and Marxism in Post-​War France (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 153. 3 Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–​1985, 416. 4 Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 122. 5 Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–​1985, 373.

Freud, Lacan, and the Neuter

27

was Jacques Lacan. By roughly 1964, as Elisabeth Roudinesco writes, “the history of psychoanalysis in France became subordinate to that of Lacanianism.”6 It was impossible to speak of Freud without speaking of Lacan. This point is borne out in Blanchot 1956 essay, whose title explicitly references the former, but whose focus is already directed upon the contributions of the later. Across the 1956 and 1969 versions of Blanchot’s essay, then, we are granted far more than a mere recounting of what he perceives to be the efficacies and liabilities of psychoanalysis. We are accorded, rather, a unique glimpse into how Blanchot’s perception of Freud, Lacan, and psychoanalysis as an institution undergoes modification over the course of a thirteen-​year period during which nearly everything about French politics, society, philosophy, and theory-​at-​large is made subject to disruption or contestation. The two versions of Blanchot’s essay might be seen as framing not only one of the most intellectually fertile periods in Blanchot’s mature thought, but one of the most intellectually fertile (not to mention volatile) periods in the entirety of French, post-​war history. The timing of Blanchot’s 1956 essay is particularly significant. At the time of its publication, exactly a hundred years had passed since Freud’s birth, and roughly fifty years had elapsed since the beginnings of psychoanalysis. The French translation of Freud’s correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess had just been published only months earlier. And perhaps most importantly, the first issue of the journal La Psychanalyse had just appeared in print. Founded by the Société Française de Psychanalyse (sfp) after its break from the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (spp) in 1953, the journal featured, in its inaugural issue, an abbreviated version of “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” paper, commonly known as the Rome Discourse, which had been delivered by Lacan in September 1953. In this paper, Lacan articulates what would later come to be known as his ‘return to Freud.’ Across the two versions of his essay, Blanchot seeks to make clear what he perceives to be the vital importance of Freud’s thought, and why its resuscitation by Lacan marks such a welcome moment in psychoanalytic theory and practice. As the essay’s revised, 1969 title suggests, it is specifically with a focus upon speech, and the need for a radical rethinking of the relational capacities proper to it, that Blanchot’s discussion of Freud and Lacan proceeds. In the following chapter I want to offer a close-​reading of Blanchot’s 1956 and 1969 versions, focusing on the manner in which Blanchot portrays Freud and Lacan within each of these texts. It will be my claim that Blanchot discerns, 6 Ibid., 375.

28 CHAPTER 1 in both Freud and Lacan, a penchant for radical contestation that not only puts the traditional notion of the subject into question, but opens a space for the possibility of an encounter with otherness beyond the reach of either dialectical recuperation or ontological enclosure. At the same time that he praises both Freud and Lacan, however, we will see that Blanchot nevertheless tempers this praise with more than a measure of ambivalence. For he wants to argue that psychoanalysis in its institutional forms often works toward the opposing goal of reasserting certainty, stability, and conformity –​thus muting the force of contestation to which both Freud and Lacan seek to give voice in both their writings and clinical practice. In light of this, the question becomes how, if at all, it might be possible to affirm a ‘psychoanalysis without psychoanalysis’ –​a psychoanalysis that puts all forms of speech, all forms of dogma, all forms of institutional order, including its own, ceaselessly into question. 2

Va-​et-​vient

As Blanchot readily notes in the opening pages of his 1956 essay, a spirit of ceaseless contestation is clearly evident throughout Freud’s intellectual itinerary. Citing Freud’s freshly-​published correspondence with Fliess, Blanchot highlights the manner in which the early Freud moves nimbly from one hypothesis to the next, refusing all complacency and all dogma. Never happy with easy solutions, Freud’s fastidiousness is evident in the countless theoretical explanations he proposes, develops, modifies, and then jettisons over the decades that follow. Indeed, for Blanchot, the precise course of Freud’s intellectual development is almost less important than this restless, contestatory spirit which continually impels it forward. Rejecting, in September 1897, his theory of seduction, Freud turns almost immediately toward a new paradigm, that of the Oedipus complex, which he believes to possess a greater explanatory potential. This is only the start, Blanchot suggests, of a process of contestation and self-​interrogation which characterizes the movement Freud’s thought from start to finish. From the seduction theory to Oedipus, from infantile asexuality to endogenous psychosexual development, from the early theory of the drives to the later theory, from the first topography to the second –​it is less the stases of Freud’s thought which impress Blanchot than the “tentative efforts, detours, and vain attempts … the renunciations, the silences, and the need to know that precipitously gives form to thoughts and definitions.”7 Such 7 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 454.

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is the relentless probity that Blanchot lauds in relation to Freud. Almost nothing, save his most fundamental insights into the liberating power of speech, is spared from intense interrogation or healthy mistrust. Another thing immediately impresses Blanchot about Freud. Throughout his investigations and theoretical innovations, Freud is reluctant to rely upon a ready-​made language, philosophical or psychological, to elaborate his theories. He is driven, as Blanchot notes, by a clinical restlessness to invent a new language that permits him “to retrace the movement of human experience”8 in all of its various knots and conflicts. Where a concept is lacking, it must be invented. Where a concept has been scrutinized and found deficient, it must be revised, or discarded. Everything must be challenged. With Freud, one thus observes “a fascinating back and forth movement of thought [un passionnant va-​ et-​vient de pensées], which in part explains the fact that, no matter how firmly he holds to the principles of his method, he can freely and easily renounce the various explanatory schema that his disciples so willingly turn into dogma.”9 In a much later text, published in March 1984, Blanchot further stresses this self-​questioning, self-​critical va-​et-​vient proper to Freud’s thought. “To seek out how, from a starting-​point in the irrational and its realm, the unconscious, by way of erotic violence and the death drive, it was possible to allow an affirmation of hope in a reasonable society where the ambiguous possibilities of sublimation would continue to bear fruit –​such was Freud’s task, yet one always under threat from Freud himself.”10 For Blanchot, Freud’s contestatory attitude with respect to his own doctrines is not a sign of impetuousness or intellectual immaturity. Rather, it is precisely in the recurrent threat which Freud poses to himself, and especially to ‘Freudianism,’ that the radical potency of his thought announces itself. Nothing, according to Blanchot, is more essential to Freud’s thinking than this va-​et-​vient which renders every judgement about his theory premature, and every conclusion one might draw from its practice incomplete. Freud, at his subversive finest, subverts everything –​including himself. 3

Dialectics for Magic

Yet, in giving Freud his due, as Blanchot endeavors to do in the opening pages of his 1956 essay, it is essential to acknowledge, from the very outset, how dubious the foundations of psychoanalysis must have appeared to those initially 8 Ibid., 231. 9 Ibid., 454. 10 Blanchot, The Blanchot Reader, 207.

30 CHAPTER 1 made aware of its existence. For who would not be rightfully suspicious of a healer endeavoring to cure a patient solely by means of speech? Such a notion, as Blanchot admits, cannot help but strike us as redolent of shamanism, or worse yet, a nefarious charlatanism designed to prey upon the desperation of the ailing. The story is an ancient one, though perhaps no less common to our present day. An ailing person, weary from having tried all other remedies, turns to a trusted wise-​man who promises to dispel, with the intonation of the right syllables, a sickness which otherwise cannot be treated. By uttering the right words in the presence of the shaman, and receiving the shaman’s righteous reply, a healing is promised to the patient –​a healing not only of the body, but also of the mind. The images associated with such ceremonies are familiar to us. Whether they center around totems and relics, whether they feature the scent of incense or the imbibing of intoxicants, whether they take place in ancient temples or in the presence of infomercial-​style audiences whose reactions of astonishment are beamed digitally around the world –​the formulas for such ceremonies are remarkably predictable. It is by the power of the word alone that a cure is supposedly achieved. In placing our faith solely in the power of speech, have we not entered the realm of magic? Indeed magic, as Blanchot writes, “does not always require ceremony, a laying on of hands or the use of relics. There is already magic when one individual acts in an imposing manner with regard to another.”11 This is because magic has less to do with the use of spells or incantations, than it does with the force of compulsion arising from gross disparities in authority. Whenever a desperate individual is forced to heed the imposing demands made upon him by another person, undoubtedly an expert of sorts, a kind of magic is already in play. If such disparities in authority are inevitable in even the most standard interactions between a sick person and a doctor, Blanchot writes, “the situation lends itself all the more to such abuse when the patient considers himself or herself (or is considered to be) unreasonable.”12 If the treatment of physical ailments, in other words, demands a willing surrender on the part of the patient to the authority vested in the physician, then the compelling force exerted by this authority grows only larger the more the sickness is thought to infect the patient’s thoughts, emotions, and judgments. There comes a point when the physician must assume total control of the situation for the good of the patient’s well-​being. Drawing upon his own early

11 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 230. 12 Ibid.

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experiences at Sainte-​Anne, Blanchot notes, for example, the “impression of violence” with which an onlooker in the psychiatric clinic is immediately struck.13 It is in the domain of mental illness, where the patient’s agency and reason are ostensibly imperiled, that the potential for manipulation and exploitation at the hands of a trusted wise-​man becomes most evident. Never is the need for magic greater than in matters of the psyche, the soul. And never is the danger associated with its use more ominous. In his ‘discovery’ of the transference, then, Freud was already walking a dangerous line. He was entrusting to the power of speech a therapeutic efficacy that could not help but bear certain resemblances, at least prima facie, to occult practices likewise involving the intonation of magic words and the redirection of energies. The potential for exploitation, for violence, loomed large. Making this danger ever more acute, according to Blanchot, was the very mixed nature of Freud’s own background. The formative period of Freud’s medical studies, as we know, included an immersion within the world of hypnotism. Between 1885–​6, Freud spent four months at the Salpêtrière, where he observed Charcot conducting his famous studies on hypnotic states. Some four years later, Freud travelled to meet Charcot’s rival, Hippolyte Bernheim, who was likewise employing hypnotic techniques to treat patients. Then, of course, there were the years of his close collaboration with Josef Breuer, who was known for successfully using hypnosis to investigate and treat hysteria, as in the now-​famous case of Anna O. According to James Strachey, it is likely that Freud maintained some degree of clinical reliance upon the technique of hypnotism from roughly 1886 to 1896.14 And while Freud eventually rejected, for reasons that have been widely-​discussed, the use of hypnotism as a legitimate clinical tool, this rejection did not preclude Freud from maintaining more than a peripheral interest in the hypnotic method throughout the years that followed.15 It is certainly not lost upon Blanchot that Freud retained, over the entire course of his career, a measure of residual fascination in both the powers and curative potential of hypnosis. 13 Ibid., 231. 14 Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 1, Pre-​Psycho-​Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-​Analysis, 1953), 63–​70. 15 For Freud’s own retrospective remarks on hypnosis, as well as commentary on its uses and limitations, see The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 20, An Autobiographical Study, 1–​70. For a general overview of the importance of hypnotic techniques within Freud’s clinical practice, see Rachel Bachner-​Melman & Pesach Lichtenberg, “Freud’s Relevance to Hypnosis: A Reevaluation,” American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis 44, no. 1 (July 2001): 33–​50.

32 CHAPTER 1 If anything, though, this initial proximity to the world of occultism and pseudo-​science makes Freud all the more worthy of laud, according to Blanchot. For given the nature of his early influences and interests, it would have been entirely understandable for Freud to formulate the notion of transference as something obscure, something mysterious –​in short, as something magical. Yet this is precisely a temptation which Freud boldly resists. In developing his curative method, Freud elects “to substitute dialectics for magic.”16 Blanchot glosses the nature of this substitution in the following terms. Rather than assigning unto the analyst an enchanted role, or construing his relation to the patient as one governed by obscure forces, Freud envisions the analytic situation quite differently, and radically, as a relation grounded in the simplest of human interactions: one man speaks and another listens. Unlike shamanistic figures, ancient and modern, who captivate the ailing person through the force of personality, the Freudian analyst is entirely devoid of all personality, denuded of attributes, a veritable man without qualities. In allowing the analysand to speak, “giving expression to what is unceasing,” the analyst remains detached almost to the point of negligence, like someone “without a face,” serving as a pure counter-​weight to the patient’s naked outpouring of words.17 It is not the analyst’s personality or power that is emphasized here –​but his status as the other, and his capacity for eliciting from the patient an unguarded speech which allows the dynamical process to unfold. Never present as himself, but only ever present in place of another person, the analyst provides, simply by means of being there, a necessary condition for the patient’s eventual act of discovery and self-​recognition. The analyst thus assumes the role of a kind of “presence-​absence over and against which some ancient drama, some profoundly forgotten event, real or imaginary, comes again to take form and expression …”18 As Freud explains in his posthumously published Outline, “the patient sees in the analyst the return, the reincarnation, of some important figure out of his childhood or past, and consequently transfers on to him feelings and reactions which undoubtedly applied to this prototype.”19 Naturally, the patient’s attitude toward this other person will assume many shades of ambivalence, each of which will be transferred, in turn, onto the analyst. And yet, whether these attitudes 16 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 231. 17 Ibid., 233. 18 Ibid., 231. 19 See Freud, An Outline of Psycho-​Analysis in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 23, Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psycho-​Analysis and Other Works, 141–​144.

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comprise positive (affectionate) or negative (hostile) feelings, they are universally indispensable to treatment, Freud insists.20 This is because the success of therapy hinges upon the patient’s discovery that, in his transference-​ attitude, he is actually re-​experiencing emotional relations which had their origin in his earliest object-​attachments during the repressed period of his childhood. As Blanchot explains, the analyst helps to facilitate this discovery by “incessantly disrupting the equilibrium, making the tension of the exchanges vary, responding without responding and insensibly transforming the monologue without issue into a dialogue where each of them has spoken.”21 He thus plays a part akin to Socrates, who coaxes forth from his interlocutors the very things, distantly forgotten, that they have nevertheless known all along. Such is the dialectic with which Freud replaces the enchanted formulae of olden times. It is not magic, or the force of personality, which leads to a liberation, a cure. Rather, it is the patient’s own speech, returning to him through the mediation of the other person, which allows for a successful transference, a moment of discovery. This is the contribution made by Freudian psychoanalysis which Blanchot, in both his 1956 and 1969 versions, deems so worthy of praise. Freud’s “principle merit,” according to Blanchot, is that of having “enriched ‘human culture’ with a surprising form of dialogue … in which, perhaps –​perhaps –​ something would come to light that would enlighten us about ourselves when we speak by way of the other.”22 In the 1969 version of this text, however, Blanchot pushes his praise for Freud even further. Appending an additional clause to a sentence previously cited, Blanchot’s text now reads: “Freud … perhaps before he knows he is doing so, attempts to substitute dialectics for magic, but also for dialectics the movement of another speech [une autre parole].”23 These are crucial words. For what they suggest is that the subversive potency of the Freudian approach might not only lead us beyond the province of magical thinking or naïve folk-​psychology. It might perhaps lead us, even more radically, into a space of conversation exceeding all dialectical recuperation or enclosure. Freud, in short, might already 20

In important lines, Freud writes:  “An analysis without transference is an impossibility. It must not be supposed, however, that transference is created by analysis and does not occur apart from it. Transference is merely uncovered and isolated by analysis. It is a universal phenomenon of the human mind, it decides the success of all medical influence, and in fact dominates the whole of each person’s relations to his human environment.” See Freud, An Autobiographical Study. 21 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 233. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 231.

34 CHAPTER 1 be leading us toward a thought of what Blanchot calls the outside [le dehors]. But let us explore these important points in greater detail. 4

The Movement of Another Speech

This important reference to the movement of another speech immediately draws the 1969 version of Blanchot’s essay into close relation with those various texts compiled in the opening part of The Infinite Conversation under the title, ‘Plural Speech (the speech of writing).’ Throughout these texts, one of Blanchot’s primary aims is to differentiate between two kinds of speech: one which is dialectical and one which is non-​dialectical. The former, as Blanchot tells us, is speech “tending toward unity and helping to accomplish the whole.”24 Such speech can begin with any particular question, or with any particular word –​much like the analytic session itself. It is characterized by Blanchot in terms of a tension between two voices, juxtaposed with one another, which produce by means of their opposition a meaningful accomplishment of some kind. Once dialectical speech begins, it develops always in the direction of greater coherence, greater understanding. It methodically expands its reach, typically moving “from the center to the periphery, from the abstract to the concrete,” little by little seeking to take possession of everything until it finally constitutes itself “as a totality that is infinite and unlimited.”25 It goes without saying that even the pressing silence of the analyst can comprise, in this sense, a form of dialectical response. What counts is not so much who is doing the talking, or what they are saying, but the simple fact that the two interlocutors gradually come to build, by means of their alternating utterances and silences, a unitary conversation –​a speech which is one, and which moves progressively toward the truth. It is Hegel, in particular, who offers us a paradigmatic exemplification of such a movement, both expansive and continuous, which seeks to lay claim over the whole. For Hegel, even discontinuity itself is integrated into this process of continuous development.26 Indeed, this account of dialectical speech bears a striking similarity to the manner in which one might traditionally think of the notion of dialogue. Recounting the mythological account of the notion’s origin, Blanchot highlights the manner in which dialogue and dialectical speech seemingly collapse into one another, becoming virtually synonymous. As the god Apollo makes clear 24 Ibid., 78. 25 Ibid., 7. 26 Ibid.

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to Admetus, a mere mortal, it is the fate of man to harbor in his mind always two thoughts at once –​or, as Blanchot writes, “a multiplicity of speech in the simultaneity of one language.”27 To speak under the weight of this doubleness, with each word uttered already resembling its own echo, is far more than any speaker can handle. It is a burden, Blanchot writes, that no man can face alone. As a result, Admetus ingeniously invents the notion of dialogue, which allows him to bear the burden of this duality by sharing it with another person. For dialogue to account fully for this doubleness, however, certain requirements must be met. First and foremost, the sharing of doubleness must be based upon the reciprocity of words and the equality of the two speakers. The two poles of dialogue must be isomorphic with respect to one another. Dialogue, as Blanchot explains, is thus conceived here in accordance with “a plane geometry wherein relations are direct and remain ideally symmetrical.”28 This means that each speaker of dialogue must acknowledge in his counterpart the same exact power to speak that he himself possesses. Each speaker must consider himself equal to the other person, as though this other person were nothing but a copy of himself. Together, the two speakers thus consummate the idealistic fantasy of speaking doubly in one act of speaking, hence escaping the unenviable fate assigned to mankind by the god. Undoubtedly, the consequences of such doubling are impressive. By “thinking and speaking by twos in the intimacy of dialogue,” Admetus makes himself not only Apollo’s equal, but perhaps even his superior, “since this ever-​present duality, be it that of two persons, maintains the movement of thought that is necessarily excluded from a being that is one.”29 A god can only be one. The partners in dialogue, by contrast, have the capacity to be two in one. They can generate, so to speak, the one out of the many, identity out of difference. But here Blanchot intervenes, noting the inadequacy of Admetus’s approach. Despite the admitted brilliance of what Admetus attempts, his view of speech is far too limited, too restrictive. For it adopts, rather uncritically, the god’s ideal  –​the ideal of unity  –​as the ultimate goal of every thought, every utterance, every human relation. “Admetus, the founder of dialogue … has only unity in view, as though in aiming for the same, the One had to be the truth of all comprehension, the goal of every relation human and divine.”30 To the extent that dialogue is based on the absolute equality of the speakers, and upon the complementarity and continuity of their respective utterances, 27 Ibid., 80. 28 Ibid., 81. 29 Ibid., 80. 30 Ibid., 81.

36 CHAPTER 1 a semblance of unity is perhaps attained. But something profound is lost in the process. This ‘something’ is difference itself: “a difference that nothing should simplify, nothing can equalize and that alone, mysteriously, gives voice to two instances of speech by keeping them separate even as they are held together only by this separation.”31 Might there be another kind of speech, Blanchot wonders, which would not resolve in oneness or synthesis? Might there exist, outside all dialectic, a truly plural speech, one which would maintain the movement of difference without reducing it to some form of identity? This, precisely, is the other speech that Blanchot thinks Freud may have inadvertently stumbled upon. Such a speech, according to Blanchot, “[is] no longer founded upon equality and inequality, no longer upon predominance and subordination, nor upon a reciprocal mutuality, but upon dissymmetry and irreversibility …”32 It remains, in other words, outside the dialectical pairings which seek to generate unity through plurality, and identity through difference. Plural speech bears instead “a relation of infinity and strangeness,”33 giving voice to pure difference and otherness beyond the reach of either dialectical totalization or ontological enclosure. Through the movement of plural speech, Blanchot posits, “it may be that an entirely different relation announces itself … a relation that would except itself from the problematic of being and would pose a question that is not one of being. Thus, in this questioning, we would leave dialectics, but also ontology.”34 What Blanchot seems to be implying here is that plural speech comprises not so much a new means of communicating that would remain situated within a pre-​existing system of human relations. It is not simply, for instance, a new way of using language to achieve the same old ends. Rather, it announces an entirely different kind of relation irreducible to any form of unity or centering –​a relation which can neither be conceived on the basis of dialectical pairings, nor predicated upon any notion of being or becoming. Commenting on this plural speech, Kevin Hart claims that “it does not represent a point of view, or even several points of view, so much as establish a space of the ‘between’ and open up ‘a relation of infinity.’ ”35 It is a speech already opening onto a time that is wholly other, a time of revolution “that will fundamentally change how human beings relate to one another.”36 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 8. 33 Ibid., 78. 34 Ibid., 10. 35 Kevin Hart, “The Friendship of the No,” in Political Writings, 1953–​1993, xxv. 36 Ibid.

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When Blanchot adds the claim, in the 1969 version of his essay, that Freud substitutes dialectics with the movement of another speech, this other speech must therefore be understood to have nothing in common with dialogue as it is usually conceived. In fact, it does not even really have anything to do with speech itself, at least not in the classic, phonological sense whose privilege, as Derrida argues, Western metaphysics strives so obstinately to maintain. Plural speech is linked instead to a movement of differentiation and contestation whose domain, within Blanchot’s texts of the 1960s and beyond, is principally that of writing [écriture], and whose trait is that of neutrality. Blanchot makes this connection explicit in multiple places within his text, describing plural speech as a “speech that is in advance always already written,”37 and elsewhere, simply as the speech of writing [parole d’écriture]. To say that Freud substitutes for dialectics the movement of another speech, is to suggest that Freud, perhaps without realizing it, allows dialectic to be undercut and disrupted by nothing less than the exigency of writing considered in its most hyperbolic form –​the writing of the neuter. 5

Freud and the Neutral Turn

Though a full discussion of the neuter, and its status within Blanchot’s writings, cannot be attempted here, its basic contours might nonetheless be sketched. First formulated by Blanchot in the early 1960s, and employed to great effect throughout his writings of the subsequent decades, the neuter involves “a relation that is foreign to every exigency of identity, of unity, even of presence.”38 Set apart from everything visible and invisible, the neuter is not something that can be conceptualized or represented. It is not, for instance, a third gender opposed to the other two. In fact, it is not a gender at all. Neither subjective nor objective in nature, the neuter “supposes another relation depending neither on objective conditions nor on subjective dispositions.”39 Because of the neuter, sameness and unity are always already undercut by difference and dispersion, just as interiority has always already been turned toward its outside, toward the other. What, then, is the neuter? And how might it relate to the speech of a­ nalysis? The neuter, in short, is a way of indicating (without directly communicating) the relation, the thought, or the singular word, which marks –​outside 37 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 10. 38 Ibid., 300. 39 Ibid., 299.

38 CHAPTER 1 all presence and all identity –​the trace of pure difference. To say what the neuter is, in other words, is precisely not to say it. For the neuter is necessarily different from whatever one might say about it. The neuter effaces itself before ever being traced, differing from everything (including itself) and every moment of its inscription.40 As Blanchot writes, in a series of important lines from the late sixties, “The neuter would thus be related to that which in the language of writing gives ‘value’ to certain words, not by bringing them forward but by placing them in quotation marks or parentheses, through the singularity of an effacement that is all the more efficacious for the fact that it does not signal itself.”41 The writing of the neuter breaks not only with all language, but with all discourse, whether spoken or written. It breaks not only with all representation, but with all ideology. It likewise comprises “a break with all empirical ­experience of the world … a rupture with all present consciousness.”42 Always already in play, and always yet to come –​though never given in the ‘now’ –​ such writing offers no proof of its existence, Blanchot maintains, other than in rare, fleeting moments outside all discursive enclosure. In lines clearly meant to evoke the events of May, and the graffiti-​covered walls of the Sorbonne, Blanchot suggests that it is “only perhaps here and there upon walls or on the night”43 that the future of writing (which is also its pre-​ original past) might indicate itself in its pure difference, beyond books, beyond language. Such is the writing which “passes through the advent of communism,”44 and whose movement also passes through plural speech –​the very speech with which Freud inadvertently supplants the privilege of dialectical dialogue. In his inconspicuously titled “Note,” which precedes (and performatively destabilizes) the opening lines of The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot accords unto this kind of hyperbolic writing, moving both within and beyond plural speech, a proclivity for ceaseless contestation that challenges every ideal, every program, and every theory. Such writing devotes itself solely to itself as “something that remains without identity.”45 In lines which prefigure many

40

Bearing a resemblance, then, to Derrida’s différance, Leslie Hill calls the neuter a name “for the infinite suspension, division, or referral that is an irreducible trait of all language.” See Leslie Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing (London: Continuum, 2012), 61. 41 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 304. 42 Ibid., 261. 43 Ibid., 262. 44 Ibid., xii. 45 Ibid.

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of The Infinite Conversation’s major arguments, Blanchot suggests that such writing: … little by little brings forth possibilities that are entirely other: an anonymous, distracted, deferred, and dispersed way of being in relation, by which everything is brought into question –​first of all the idea of God, of the Self, of the Subject, then of Truth and the One, then finally the idea of the Book and the Work –​so that this writing (understood in its enigmatic rigor), far from having the Book as its goal rather signals its end: a writing that could be said to be outside discourse, outside language.46 These lines from the late 1960s are especially significant in the context of our present discussion, for they resonate strongly with two further additions that Blanchot makes in “The Speech of Analysis.” The first of these is the addition of a pair of lines to the essay’s fifth footnote. Here, Blanchot insists that language, being always more and always less than language, comprises “first of all also writing and then, in the end, in a future that has not come about, a writing outside language [écriture hors langage].”47 This emphasis upon the contestatory movement of writing, which both precedes and exceeds language, is then supplemented yet further, in the main body of the 1969 version, by the addition of a key reference to the neuter. To appreciate the latter addition, let us begin by taking-​stock of how Blanchot, in his 1956 “Freud” essay, describes the ‘naked conversation’ characteristic of the Freudian analytic situation: “In a space that is separate, cut off from the world, two persons, each invisible to the other, are little by little called upon to merge with the power of speaking and the power of hearing, and to have no relation other than the impersonal intimacy [l’intimité impersonnelle] of the two faces of discourse.”48 In the 1969 version, we find the foregoing lines unchanged with the exception of a single substitution. Blanchot replaces the phrase “impersonal intimacy” with the phrase, “neutral intimacy [l’intimité neutre].”49 I want to propose that the substitution of this single word comprises one of the more important changes made to the 1956 “Freud” essay upon its re-​publication in 1969. With this substitution, Blanchot is suggesting that the generic placeholder of ‘impersonality’ cannot suffice to evoke the sheer force of contestation which turns the participants of the analytic situation outside 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 455. 48 Maurice Blanchot, “Freud,” La Nouvelle Revue française 45 (September 1956): 489. 49 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 233.

40 CHAPTER 1 of themselves, exposing them to a difference and otherness beyond the reach of dialectics or ontology.50 Blanchot calls this movement of contestation the “neutral turn [tour ­neutre].”51 He tells us that one of its characteristic traits is that it cannot be assumed by a self. It belongs ultimately to no one. For in relation to the destabilization engendered by this neutral turn, the personal capacity to question, or even to undergo questioning, no longer suffices. “Mastery ceases to be an authentic manner of facing [such questioning].”52 Given all this, it cannot help but become increasingly evident why Blanchot’s addition of a reference to ‘the movement of another speech,’ in the 1969 version of his essay comprises such a significant change. For this movement of another speech, a movement of plural speech, poses nothing less than “the most profound question … the question of the neuter [le neuter].”53 It is on the basis of the question of the neuter alone we might begin rethinking the notion of communism, of community itself –​beyond any form of centering, unity, or totality –​as a relation with otherness, a relation of pure difference. The additions and changes made across the two versions of Blanchot’s essay, then, are both significant and quite extensive. Even beyond the changes already mentioned, there are numerous places where quotation marks are added around various words and phrases in the later version of the text. For instance, Blanchot puts the word ‘dialogue’ in quotes in multiple places throughout the 1969 essay, as though specifically seeking to neutralize the term or extract it from its association with unity, symmetry, or dialectic.54 By putting ‘dialogue’ in quotes, Blanchot is also able to signal (without directly signaling) the idea that psychoanalytic dialogue may involve something very different than mere dialogue in its dialectical sense. It might involve a play of differences that cannot be fully recouped within any notion of the unified whole. As Leslie Hill suggests, the quotation marks used by Blanchot serve “both to interrupt the text and to displace the whole concept of dialogue by silently invoking the infinity of language and the otherness of the neuter.”55 As though seeking to push this neutralization further still, Blanchot completely removes the word ‘dialogue’ at one point in the 1969 version, and replaces it with the still more 50

One might recognize “in the entire history of philosophy an effort either to acclimatize or to domesticate the neuter by substituting for it the law of the impersonal…” Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 299. 51 Ibid., 24. 52 Ibid., 14. 53 Ibid., 17. 54 Ibid., 235. 55 Hill, Blanchot: extreme contemporary, 259.

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neutral term “relation [rapport]” –​which he then likewise proceeds to place in quotes.56 Blanchot’s point is clear. What takes place in the analytic situation, at its limit, can no more be reduced to magic than to dialogue or dialectics. It involves, instead, the movement of a plural speech which puts everything into question, including the dialectic which would seek to take hold of it, or exhaust its meaning. When we recall those key lines, cited in the Introduction, “the end of alienation only begins if man is willing to come out of himself (out of everything that institutes him as interiority),” the radical potency of the speech of analysis becomes more apparent still. For what does the speech of analysis entail if not precisely such an ex-​centric movement, turning its participants wholly outside of everything that might institute a sense of interiority? Speaking, here, becomes synonymous with ceaseless contestation. By replacing magic for dialectics, and substituting for dialectics the movement of another speech, Freud is implicitly thinking (without thinking) the question of the neuter, the question of difference outside all identity. Traversed by the exigency of writing, and suffused with the interrogatory force of the neuter, the speech of analysis is rightfully deemed by Blanchot to be nothing short of revolutionary. 6

The Road to Rome

No sooner is this radical potency gained, however, than it is squandered. Blanchot understands the history of psychoanalysis, in the years leading up to Lacan’s Rome Discourse of 1953, to be a history of betrayals. From its beginnings as a radically Copernican endeavor, psychoanalysis gradually moves, as though counter to the movement of all subversive thought, back toward the comforts of Ptolemaic certainty and stability. If Freud is his own Copernicus, as Laplanche will later suggest, he is also his own Ptolemy. It was Ptolemy, as we recall, who codified and ‘perfected’ the Aristotelian cosmology, rendering the geocentric worldview mathematically coherent through his recourse to epicycles. In Ptolemy’s cosmology autocentrism found its paradigmatic exemplification. The self, the same, were placed at the center of everything –​requiring the intervention of Copernican science to restore, at long last, the primacy of otherness. Remarkably, the itinerary of the psychoanalytic movement seems to ­follow the exact opposite course. Breaking free from the positivist psychology of 56 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 234.

42 CHAPTER 1 the late 19th century and engendering a veritable Copernican Revolution in thought –​psychoanalysis then slides backward, regressively, into a staid autocentrism. Within psychoanalysis, gradually, Ptolemy wins-​out over Copernicus. In a passing remark from 1967, Blanchot notes that Freud, in the end, could do little to spare himself from becoming a victim to “the ideology of the continuous.”57 Such an ideology, whose origins Blanchot identifies with Aristotle, is granted perhaps its most consummate expression in the philosophy of Hegel, where one finds, as we have already seen, “a totality that is finite and unlimited, that moves according to … the principle of understanding, which is satisfied only by identity through repetition.”58 This tendency, already evident at times in Freud’s thinking, grows ever more pronounced in the various forms of psychoanalytic theory and practice that rise to prominence in the years following his death. When, exactly, do things begin to go wrong? When does the subversive, contestatory potency of Freud’s thought come to be lost? This has been a question long debated by critics and scholars, admitting no simple answer. According to Laplanche, the prescience of a reversion to a Ptolemaic stance can be discerned extremely early in Freud’s own writings, namely, with the abandonment of the seduction theory in the autumn of 1897. Others might point to Freud’s discovery of the Oedipus complex, around the same time, as a decisive point of bifurcation, presaging the start of a regressive slide into bourgeois familialism. “Instead of participating in an undertaking that will bring about genuine liberation,” the authors of Anti-​Oedipus will write in 1972, “psychoanalysis is taking part in the work of bourgeois repression at its most far-​reaching level, that is to say, keeping European humanity harnessed to the yoke of daddy-​mommy …”59 Could it be that the ascendency of Oedipus in Freud’s theory marks the end of psychoanalysis as force of genuine iconoclasm? Or might the beginnings of the regressive drift perhaps be located slightly later, in what Didier Anzieu calls the ‘mythological period’ in the history of psychoanalysis –​those years, roughly between 1906–​1920, when the influence of Jung and then Ferenczi led Freud into wild metapsychological speculations and phylogenetic phantasies?60 A definitive answer, of course, is

57 Ibid., 411. 58 Ibid., 7. 59 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.  Anti-​Oedipus:  capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 50. 60 Didier Anzieu argues that 1906–​1920 is the period of mythological works in the history of psychoanalysis. See Didier Anzieu, “Freud et la mythologie,” Incidences de la psychanalyse 1 (1970): 126–​129.

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not forthcoming. We are left to content ourselves with facile analogies. “Psychoanalysis is like the Russian Revolution,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “we don’t know when it started going bad.”61 In Lacan’s view, it is not Freud himself who is ultimately responsible for having betrayed the promise of psychoanalytic thought, but those thinkers who, in his wake, selectively appropriated and distorted aspects of Freud’s thought to serve their own ends. A most nefarious perpetrator of the distortion, according to Lacan, is the school of ego psychology, whose influence and status, particularly in North America, had risen by the early 1950s to unparalleled heights.62 While a distinct foreshadowing of ego psychology can already be found in Anna Freud’s 1936 book, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, the theory receives arguably its paradigmatic elaboration in Heinz Hartmann’s 1939 text, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation. In Hartmann’s work, both the unconscious and sexuality are marginalized as topics of psychoanalytic importance. In their place one finds an abiding emphasis upon the ego’s adaptation to society and its pursuit of autonomy. In Hartmann’s theory, the life of the drives, potentially so dangerous to social integration and conformity, demands to be subdued by an increasingly masterful and well-​adapted ego whose reinforcement and support become the true aims of analytic practice. Ego psychology claims to derive its justification from the writings of Freud’s later period where, in the context of his so-​called second topography, Freud seems to assign an especially privileged status to the ego. It makes little difference to the theorists of ego psychology that Freud had expressly insisted, in the pages of The Ego and the Id, that the ego is in large part unconscious, and hence unknowable to itself. Nor did Hartmann and his followers seem to take seriously Freud’s insistence that the ego (specifically in the second topography) is conceived as possessing no libidinal resources of its own, emerging as an independent agency only through differentiation from the id, whose libido it must appropriate in order to come into existence. Following the precedent of both Adler and Jung, who had earlier sought to minimize the importance of libido and the id in Freud’s work, Hartmann seeks to consider the ego (or at least part of the ego) as a kind of abstract entity, separate from everything which constitutes it. Hartmann thinks of this portion of the ego, considered in isolation from the id, as a conflict-​free zone in which the rational functions of the psyche can be performed without interference. It comprises the quintessential, centered subject. 61 62

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, 55. Along with ego psychology, Lacan is also highly-​critical of object-​relations theory and the Kleinian school of psychoanalysis.

44 CHAPTER 1 Not simply an area of theoretical emphasis for Hartmann, this prioritization of the ego as an agency at the center of psychic life carries over into analytic practice, as well. According to Hartmann, the goal of psychoanalysis is to assist the ego in achieving “a better functioning synthesis and relation to the environment.”63 This involves helping the ego to attain an optimal balance between internal and external pressures. Hartmann posits what he calls the ‘autonomous ego,’ namely, an ego which has broadened the scope of its powers to such an extent that it gains control over the drives and adapts fully to its environment. The promotion and maintenance of the autonomous ego is conceived by Hartmann as the primary goal of psychoanalytic practice. The role of the analyst is simply to model for the patient an example of this well-​adapted, autonomous ego, with which the patient, over the course of the transference, will gradually come to identify. According to Lacan, such an approach, rooted in a fundamental misreading of Freud’s texts, entirely eschews the most radical facets of psychoanalytic theory. Lacan will thus insist that there can be no position of compromise taken with regard to Hartmann and ego psychology. If the positions taken by ego psychology are true, he will later write, “everything I say is false.”64 Consummately Ptolemaic in its orientation, ego psychology is considered by Lacan such a dangerous foe, not only because of its appropriation and corruption of Freud’s doctrine, but also because it had become, by the time of the Rome Discourse in 1953, the dominant theory within the International Psycho-​Analytical Association (ipa). Particularly in the United States, where it had been brought by Austrian analysts during the 1930s, the school had come to supersede all other forms of psychoanalysis in both power and influence. With its emphasis upon adaptation, autonomy, and happiness, ego psychology seemed a perfect complement to the consumerist way of life. Thoroughly pragmatic, it promised remedies for common personal and interpersonal ills. Far from putting prevailing cultural values into question, ego psychology proved itself a willing ally to the ideology of bourgeois neo-​liberalism, explicitly advocating for what Anastasios Gaitanidis calls the ego’s “subservience to social imperatives.”65 To be a healthy, well-​adjusted individual was to participate in the relations of

63 64 65

Heinz Hartmann, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation, trans. David Rapaport (New York: International Universities Press, 1958), 58. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book II.  The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–​ 1955, ed. Jacques-​ Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988), 148. Anastasios Gaitanidis, “Narcissism and the autonomy of the ego,” in Narcissism: A Critical Reader, eds. Anastasios Gaitanidis and Polona Curk (London: Karnac, 2007), 20.

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consumption and exchange that are ubiquitous within capitalist society. Happiness, success, satisfaction –​perhaps even complete self-​understanding –​are suddenly possible for the individual who invests the requisite time, energy, and money to optimize the ego in relation to its surroundings. If psychoanalysis had indeed become, by the early 1950s, an article of mass consumption, thanks in large part to the influence of American ego psychology, then the price of this broader cultural acceptance had been anything but cheap. Culture, as Blanchot maintains, always works ‘for the whole.’66 It works to integrate all human accomplishments, be they artistic or scientific, into a unified body of established works, a body of common knowledge. But this requires that everything dissonant, radical, or conflictual about a given theory or a practice be pacified –​or perhaps even forcibly suppressed. In contrast to all forms of radical thought, which seek to put established culture into question, ego psychology works in tandem with culture to acclimate human beings to their status as consumers in a world where financial and social success is dependent upon conformity to established behaviors and norms. All of this comes under scrutiny in Lacan’s Rome Discourse, as the emphasis on the ego is thoroughly dismantled. 7

The Threat of Medical Formalization

Yet even beyond the pernicious influence of ego psychology, and the commodifying tendencies proper to consumerist culture, there is yet another target for disdain singled-​out within the pages of the Rome Discourse. This is the prevailing tendency toward medical formalization within the ipa. The proponents of medical formalization come under attack within the Rome Discourse for seeking to promote and enforce a dogmatic, institutionalized form of psychoanalysis that blunts the radical potency of Freud’s thought. In order to gain all-​important acceptance from the medical sciences, the ipa had increasingly opted in favor of doctrinal rigidity, enforcing compulsory compliance with institutional norms. One of the most outspoken advocates for bringing psychoanalysis into full-​compliance with the techniques and training practices utilized by the medical sciences was the Romanian-​born spp member Sacha Nacht. It is his quote, left unattributed by Lacan, which opens the Rome Discourse. The quote reads: “In particular, it should not be forgotten that the division into embryology, anatomy, physiology, psychology, sociology, and clinical 66 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 400.

46 CHAPTER 1 work does not exist in nature and that there is only one discipline: a neurobiology to which observation obliges us to add the epithet human when it concerns us.”67 One of Lacan’s principle aims of the Rome Discourse is to contest the kind of neurobiological-​medical reading of Freud championed by Nacht and others then holding power within the ipa. Such a reductionist approach, Lacan believes, is responsible for artificially constricting the field of psychoanalytic theory and practice, stifling connections with neighboring disciplines (such as linguistics and philosophy), and inhibiting clinical breakthroughs. The ipa’s efforts at promoting uniformity and standardization, Lacan writes, have led to “a disappointing formalism that discourages initiative by penalizing risk … in which the authenticity of research is blunted even before it finally dries up …”68 Given all this, the need for an intervention becomes clear. From its origins as a method of radical contestation, psychoanalysis had been transformed into something almost unrecognizable, something aspiring to the dubious ideal of what Blanchot (with quotes added in 1969)  calls an “objective science.”69 With its embrace of conformity, doctrinal rigidity, and established protocol, psychoanalysis had become eminently appropriable as a respected auxiliary discipline. Its knowledge, theories, and practices are increasingly deemed useful by neighboring sciences, and put to work toward diverse ends. Such developments, Blanchot concedes, are perhaps unavoidable given the imperialist-​reach and ambitions of the sciences. “But how can one fail to see that the relation proposed by Freud is then destroyed in its very essence? How can one hope to reconcile a psychoanalysis that always puts one into question (questioning the very place one occupies as an observer or thinker, knowing or speaking) and a psychoanalysis that suddenly takes itself to be the naively absolute affirmation of a scientifically certain knowledge that would explain an objectively determined reality?”70 The radical promise of Freud’s thought is betrayed. By fettering itself to dogmas and protocols that allow for not the slightest deviation, Lacan suggests that psychoanalysis has begun to exude an arid, ceremonial character redolent of the obsessive neuroses found “in the practice, if 67

Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits: the first complete edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), 197. 68 Ibid., 199. 69 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 234. 70 Ibid., 234–​35.

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not the genesis, of religious rites.”71 The time has come, Lacan writes in 1953, to return to the radical, contestatory spirit of Freud’s thought beyond the stultifying confines of its present, overly-​institutionalized form. The time has come, Lacan writes, to psychoanalyze psychoanalysis itself.72 Such is the impetus for Lacan’s Rome Discourse, famously delivered in September 1953. Having refused the ipa’s demand that he follow established protocol regarding the standard length of the analytic session and abide by formalized training practices, Lacan was asked, in June 1953, to resign from his position as President of the spp. Shortly thereafter, the sfp was formed with Lacan as one its founding members. The paper delivered in Rome thus serves, among other things, as a statement of resistance and a declaration of rebirth, a rejoinder directed at the very institution which had just expelled him from its midst. It the pages of his paper, Lacan attempts to outline the directions which must be taken if psychoanalysis is to return to the radical promise of its founding. The movement toward revitalization, he suggests, must begin first and foremost with a renewed emphasis on the primacy of speech. It is this turn, or rather return, to a focus on speech which specifically captures Blanchot’s attention and garners Blanchot’s praise. 8

Speaking, Again

Blanchot’s response to Lacan’s intervention is indeed rather laudatory. He praises Lacan for attempting to recover and revivify the radical promise of Freudian thought. “Jacques Lacan’s effort is precisely to try to bring us back to the essence of psychoanalytic ‘dialogue,’ ”73 Blanchot writes, adding the quotation marks around ‘dialogue’ in the 1969 version. “He shows us that what is essential in analysis is the relation with the other [autrui], within the forms that language’s development make possible.”74 Continuing in this laudatory tone, Blanchot claims that “[Lacan] frees psychoanalysis from all that makes it an objective knowledge or a kind of magical act. He denounces the prejudice that leads the analyst to seek beyond words a reality with which he would strive to come into contact … This effort to purify, which is only beginning, is assuredly an important undertaking, and not only for psychoanalysis.”75 With the exception of 71 Lacan, “Function and Field,” 203. 72 Ibid. 73 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 235. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid.

48 CHAPTER 1 several key changes that will be discussed below, Blanchot leaves his comments on Lacan virtually unmodified across the two versions of the text. To arrive at a more complete sense of precisely how Blanchot views Lacan’s importance, however, it will be useful to recapitulate a number of the key arguments from the Rome Discourse itself. For it is here that the attempted ‘purification’ of psychoanalysis, to use Blanchot’s phrase, might be most readily discerned. One of Lacan’s primary contentions is that, for far too long, psychoanalysis has neglected the centrality of speech in favor of an over-​riding emphasis upon imaginary identifications, egos, and objects. In the Rome Discourse the battle lines are clearly drawn. If ego psychology, for instance, seeks by means of the analytic situation to reinforce of the ego, to help it master the pressures of the drives, and to adapt more successfully to society, then this is precisely an approach that Lacan forcefully rejects. The focus of analysis should not be upon promoting egoic mastery or certainty, Lacan maintains, but rather on arriving at the gradual suspension of all certainties, ultimately leading to the destabilization, even dissolution, of the ego itself. It is the speech of analysis that is called upon to undo the ego’s imaginary identifications and to dispel the ego’s pretense of coherence, mastery, and autonomy. In place of the ego, which is understood by Lacan as an imaginary object whose claims to power and mastery are illusory, Lacanian psychoanalysis seeks to facilitate something quite different: the realization of the subject. This subject, whose realization psychoanalysis endeavors to facilitate, is not an autonomous entity, nor does it have anything in common with the ego. “[Going] far beyond what is experienced ‘subjectively’ by the individual,”76 the subject is rather an effect of language, constituted by the very signifiers proffered in the course of speech. Of course, just as the structure of exchanging gifts, as Lacan had learned from his readings of both Claude Lévi-​Strauss and Marcel Mauss, is regulated by a determinate set of rules –​so, too, must the exchange of speech conform to a pre-​existing structure. This structure, which is bound up with the inner-​workings of language itself, is inseparably linked to the various cultural or social norms and expectations embedded within the broader field of intersubjective life. It is Lacan’s claim that speech derives its structure and order at the intersection of these various cultural, social, and legal planes which collectively comprise what he calls the Symbolic order.77 The portion of the Symbolic order that remains utterly inaccessible 76 77

Lacan, “Function and Field,” 219. The Symbolic is one of the three registers in Lacanian theory (the Imaginary and the Real are the other two) in relation to which all psychic phenomena can be described. Though

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to the subject –​all the while ceaselessly imposing its structures upon him –​is what Lacan calls the unconscious. “The unconscious,” according to the Rome Discourse, “is that part of concrete discourse qua transindividual, which is not at the subject’s disposal in reestablishing the continuity of his conscious discourse.”78 Less a hidden recess of the mind, or an unreachable point in the inner depths of the psyche, than a vast network of interlinking signifiers governed by the same rules that govern language itself  –​the unconscious is indeed a type of discourse, but not one which can ever be claimed by the subject as his own. It is a discourse, rather, whose terms and whose structures are entirely dictated, in advance, by something other than the subject himself. This ‘something other’ is the vast field of social, cultural, linguistic, and institutional forces which impose themselves upon the subject, from one moment to the next, structuring and implicitly regulating his speech and behavior in a manner that escapes his purview. In Seminar xi, Lacan will famously refer to the Symbolic order, in precisely this capacity, as the ‘big Other.’ The claim that language is intersubjective, of course, is far from novel. Lacan’s aim in the Rome Discourse is to push the argument further than this. Drawing upon Freud’s account, in The Interpretation of Dreams, which assigns unto condensation and displacement the status of primary processes governing the workings of the unconscious, Lacan suggests that these primary processes might be correlated, at the level of the language, with metonymy and metaphor through which substitutions are made in the chain of signifiers. While each signifier, in keeping with Saussurean linguistics, is denied any positive value, receiving its value only by means of differential relations with other signifiers, the selection and combination of signifiers proffered within the speech of analysis is anything but arbitrary.79 Free association, that hallmark of the analytic method, is actually not ‘free’ at all, but always overdetermined, not only by the deep structure of language in its symbolic dimension –​but also by the subject’s unconscious desire which ceaselessly forges metonymical links

78 79

language has imaginary as well as real dimensions, it is the symbolic dimension of language which Lacan, both in the Rome Discourse and throughout his major work of the 1950s, repeatedly seeks to emphasize. Lacan, “Function and Field,” 214. However, unlike the theory of Saussure upon which Lacan’s ideas here are initially based, there is an absence of any fixed relation between the signifier and the signified. For Lacan, the signifier is entirely separate from the signified, producing the latter only as an effect of the signifying process. For instance, the meaning that a word ultimately comes to assume in a sentence is not given at the start of the sentence, but is produced only once the entire sentence has been spoken. Until then, it remains pending.

50 CHAPTER 1 between signifiers, perpetuating a signifying chain that begins with a lack, and lacks any point of absolute completion. Lacan wants to argue that if the subject is indeed realized by means of his speech, then the manner in which this speech is given, down to its minutest detail, bears the markings of his unconscious desire. Moreover, the truth of the subject’s unconscious desire is not buried beneath the patient’s speech, like some underlying morsel of a hidden reality, but rather produced within the act of speech itself. The speech of analysis, one might say, does not so much express the pre-​existing truth of the subject’s desire, as it does work to constitute this truth. And while speech can never articulate the whole truth about desire, for there is “always a leftover, a surplus, which exceeds speech,” this truth is nevertheless always present to some degree in everything the subject says.80 A primary aim of therapy thus becomes to dissolve the mirage of the patient’s ego to such a degree that he might come to recognize the truth of his unconscious desire in the very speech he offers to the analyst. 9

A Perilous Endeavor

To work toward such a point, however, is an arduous undertaking. First and foremost, it requires an acute attentiveness to the patient’s speech, and an appreciation for the numerous ways in which its usage within the analytic situation can either alienate or reconcile the patient in relation to his desire. It is not uncommon, throughout the course of analysis, for the patient to talk about himself as though from the perspective of another person, with all the certainty and complacency that one typically speaks of an object. This privileged object with which the patient so readily identifies, and whose history he attempts to chronicle, is of course none other than himself qua ego. In the opening section of the Rome Discourse, Lacan describes this sort of self-​ exposition as empty speech. In empty speech, the patient shows himself to be fully identified with his ego and thus mired in the residual effects of primary narcissism. Empty speech is Narcissus speaking of his counterpart, his alter-​ego. As Lacan explains, it is the patient speaking “in vain about someone who –​even if he were such a dead ringer for him that you might confuse them –​will never join [the patient] in the assumption of his desire.”81 To the 80 81

Dylan Evans. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1997), 36. Lacan, “Function and Field,” 211.

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extent that he remains ensconced in the relative safety and security afforded him by a total identification with his own self-​image, the patient is inevitably alienated from the truth of his desire. Moreover, he remains sealed-​off from any possibility of change. Yet, from the very outset, the patient’s distorted self-​presentation and fixation upon the imaginary desires of his ego are challenged and undermined by the play of signifiers. Even as the patient remains ensconced in illusory identification with his ego, the speech of analysis itself works subversively to ‘unwork’ this ego, often without the patient even realizing it. This happens in a number of interrelated ways, each of which can be traced back to the structuring role played by the unconscious which governs and regulates everything that is spoken. One encounters, for example, in slips of the tongue a classic example of unconscious processes making themselves evident, undercutting the ego’s pretense of total control. But there is also another way in which the patient’s fixation upon the ego is undercut and put into question through speech. This is a way which brings to light the crucial role played by the analyst. For it is not enough that the patient simply speaks. Rather it is only by speaking in relation to the other person that the patient’s sense of egoic coherence, mastery, and agency is sufficiently called into question. As Lacan tells us, in the work the patient does to reconstruct his past “for another, he encounters anew the fundamental alienation that made him construct it like another, and that has always destined it to be taken away from him by another.”82 These words, which Lacan adds to the 1966 version of his paper upon its republication in the Écrits, suggest in the clearest of terms that the patient’s speech, which he naively assumes to control, is actually overdetermined by otherness on multiple fronts. Not only is the patient speaking in relation to another person, but he is doing so necessarily in adherence to the structures, forms, and protocols imposed upon him by the unconscious, the discourse of the other. Moreover, the patient comes to understand that these words, which he offers to the other person in the very language of the other, are also fated to be reclaimed and interpreted by the other person the moment they are uttered. How, in the midst of this, how can the patient’s ego not become decentered, disrupted, or placed radically into question? How can the patient’s confidence in his own reifications and narcissistic identification not be undercut? Confronted with otherness both all around him and within him, the solidity of the patient’s ego thus inevitably begins to dissolve, and the truth of the patient’s 82

Ibid., 207–​208.

52 CHAPTER 1 unconscious desire, which is found nowhere else but in his speech, begins to announce itself. This is an especially precarious moment in the analytic situation, which Blanchot spends a fair amount of time examining in his essay. At the moment of greatest vulnerability for the patient, with his ego being undercut by the unconscious movement of speech, both the patient and analyst are each tempted fall back upon ready-​made certainties. “Such is the fright that seizes man when he discovers the true face of his power that he turns away from it in the act –​ which is his act –​of laying it bare.”83 Principally, the temptation here involves falling back upon a shared illusion, tacitly endorsed by both patient and analyst, that there abides beyond speech an absolute reality that might be grasped. Lacan’s unequivocal rejection of such a notion, we recall, is one of the primary things which draws specific praise from Blanchot in his essay. For rather than concerning himself with any attempted excavation of a reality hidden beneath the patient’s words, Lacan urges the analyst to focus his attention entirely on the words themselves. It is in the patient’s speech alone that the unconscious truth of the subject is found. Great clinical discretion is therefore demanded of the analyst to avoid doing or saying anything that will apply the stamp of certainty or finality to what he hears. If speech itself constitutes the truth, as Lacan maintains, then the patient’s speech must be allowed to develop in an unfettered way. As Blanchot writes, speech must be permitted “to find its paths and its measure on its own.”84 In the midst of this, it is not only the analyst’s impatient or anxious replies which have the potential to shut down prematurely the unfolding of the patient’s speech, thereby introducing a false sense of certainty or closure. One finds a similarly dangerous potential in the manner in which the analyst elects to make use of time. Here is a key reason for Lacan’s insistence upon using sessions of variable length. As Freud’s Wolf Man case made evident to him, when the analyst proposes from the very outset a fixed-​term to the course of treatment, it only reinforces the patient’s misguided belief that the truth of his case is somehow ­already present to the analyst. Similarly, to stipulate in advance the precise term of the analytic session is to begin and end the session with an abiding sense of certainty. On the other hand, by remaining silent and by refusing the patient the sense of certainty accorded by fixed time-​limits, the analyst allows the various associations forged among the patient’s own words to take center-​stage,

83 Ibid., 201. 84 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 236.

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“suspending the subject’s certainties until their final mirages have been consumed.”85 The art of analysis resides in discerning when this point has been reached, and intervening accordingly to punctuate the precise moment when empty speech falls away, allowing what Lacan calls true speech, or full speech, to emerge. Here, it is no longer the ego that is in control. Rather, it is the subject whose truth is being spoken by language. It is at precisely the moment when the subject’s discourse “assumes the form of true speech,” Lacan writes, “[that] we sanction it with our response.”86 10

Desire Recognized

What does the analyst’s response entail? It entails nothing more than giving back to the patient, perhaps in slightly modified from, what he himself has just proffered. Because true speech, as Lacan believes, already contains its own response, the analyst need do little more than double the patient’s speech, giving it back to the patient as something for which he now understands himself (qua subject) to be responsible. In other words, the analyst’s carefully timed response does little more than “give the subject’s speech its dialectical punctuation.”87 It is by having his words given back to him in ‘punctuated’ form that the subject understands these words for the first time as his truth. Blanchot neatly describes this dialectical process in an addition to his 1969 essay. He writes that the subject who “is then separated from his self as from the center,” realizes himself to be constituted in the truth of his speech, insofar as this speech is doubled and given back to him by the other.88 There is a further consequence to all this. For in doubling the patient’s speech, the analyst does more than just provide punctuation or emphasis, he implicitly recognizes the patient’s unconscious desire operating in the very movement of this speech. And to the extent that the analyst’s intervention succeeds in bringing about a diminution or even disappearance of the patient’s symptoms, one might justifiably conclude that the subject’s unconscious desire has been, in some small part, satisfied by means of this recognition. The subject’s unconscious desire, one might therefore conclude, has all along been

85 Lacan, “Function and Field,” 209. 86 Ibid., 255. 87 Ibid. 88 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 236.

54 CHAPTER 1 a desire to be recognized by the other. And the subject’s speech, in turn, has been nothing but a symptom of this desire. Such a view, as Blanchot realized, owes much to Hegel, especially to the highly-​influential interpretation of the Phenomenology of Spirit developed by Alexandre Kojève in his 1933–​1939 seminar at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, which Lacan attended.89 All human desire, Kojève insists here, “is, finally, a function of the desire for ‘recognition.’ ”90 This notion is crucial for how Lacan, particularly around the time of the Rome Discourse, understands the aim of the analysis. The importance of the dialectical relation between the patient and the analyst resides in the manner in which it allows the subject’s unconscious desire, perpetuated within the signifying chain, to emerge within the subject’s speech and find recognition in the other’s response. And even though the subject’s desire can never receive recognition in full, having arisen from the start in relation to an unassuageable lack, something of value might nonetheless be gained in the process of analysis. The subject might better come to understand himself as constituted on the very basis of this lack. He might come to understand himself as a subject of unconscious desire which can never be fully sated, and thus as inexorably barred from ever discovering himself as a fully realized entity. Like the signifying chain itself, which keeps running and running, without any terminal signifier, the subject remains forever incomplete, always missing the very thing which would make him whole. It is nevertheless Lacan’s conviction that through the difficult labor of analysis, and the dialectical relation facilitated by the analyst, the ceaseless pulsing of desire and the various symptoms to which this unquenchable desire gives rise might gradually bring less suffering to the subject. Perhaps, in time, these symptoms will even become enjoyable. 11

A Dialectic That Challenges Dialectic?

To summarize, one might draw upon Blanchot’s own words from the 1956 version of his essay. He tells us here that Lacan’s major achievement is to bring us back to the essence of psychoanalytic dialogue, which demands to be 89 90

Between the years 1934–​1937, Lacan was listed as ‘regularly present’ at the seminar. See Marie-​Andrée Charbonneau, “An Encounter Between Sartre and Lacan” Sartre Studies International 5, no. 2 (1999): 33. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H.  Nichols Jr. (New York and London: Basic Books, 1969), 6.

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understood as “a form of dialectical relation.”91 Through this relation, the subject’s speech is returned to him, for the first time, as his “own discovery, permitting him to recognize himself and know himself recognized by this strange, vague, and profound other [autrui] who is the psychoanalyst.”92 Such an effort is worthy of laud, in Blanchot’s opinion, despite its uneasy closeness to Hegelianism. Psychoanalytic dialectics are preferable to the techniques of medical formalism, and certainly to the violence involved with any form of mystical or magical ritualism. But is this going far enough? We have already seen how Blanchot intervenes in the 1969 version of his essay to push Freud beyond dialectic, into the space of the neuter, where the possibility of a relation, or even a kind of community, outside all identity, presence, and unity might be affirmed. Might Blanchot attempt something similar with regard to Lacan? Indeed, by the time of the 1969 version of his essay Blanchot intervenes similarly to extricate Lacan from the fetters of dialectical enclosure. Much as he does with Freud, only pages earlier in his essay, Blanchot makes a crucial addition to a sentence which, in the 1956 version, still appears to situate Lacan within the general economy of Hegelian thought. In addition to adding quotes around the word ‘dialogue,’ Blanchot modifies the sentence just cited to read: “Lacan’s effort is precisely to try to bring us back to the essence of psychoanalytic ‘dialogue,’ which he understands as a form of dialectical relation that nonetheless challenges (disjoins) the dialectic itself [qui cependant récuse (disjoint) la dialectique elle-​même].”93 Much as Freud is portrayed in Blanchot’s 1969 version as having substituted dialectics for magic, and for dialectics, the exigency of plural speech –​here, Lacan is quite similarly portrayed as using dialectics to put dialectics into question. Lacan uses the dialectical relation to move beyond the dialectical relation. There is, of course, a sense in which such a challenge to dialectical enclosure is already inherent within the Kojèveian interpretation of Hegel which Lacan tacitly endorses and reinscribes. Whereas for Hegel, the dialectic ultimately culminates in synthesis, for Kojève it does not. Rather, in Kojève’s interpretation, as Martin Murray tells us, dialectic is understood as “a-​thetic,” meaning it resists any kind of final resolution.94 We see this lack of resolution clearly exemplified in Lacan’s text, particularly with regard to the subject of unconscious desire perpetually lacking completion or absolute fulfilment. 91 Blanchot, “Freud,” 492. 92 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 235. 93 Ibid. 94 See Martin Murray, Jacques Lacan: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2016).

56 CHAPTER 1 But going even further, one senses in Blanchot’s addition yet another intimation of the neuter. It is the neuter, we recall, which emerges within the dialectical relation as the question that dialectic cannot pose and cannot answer. It is a question that exposes the dialectic to that which infinitely precedes and exceeds it, challenging even ontology as well. Emerging against the ground of the interminable, this plural speech, or neutral speech, puts into question not only the ego and its objects, but also the coherence and direction of time. Blanchot discerns the movement of the neuter in the incessant murmuring, the aimless and directionless babbling of the patient’s speech freed from all constraints. In such speech, a movement of contestation that is “not dialectical, [and] that threatens every dialectic”95 is given voice. What speaks here is language in its sheer otherness, language in its radical exteriority with respect to every form of dialectical or ontological enclosure. Lacan is deserving of great credit for seeking a return to an emphasis on speech in its neutrality. This is Blanchot’s insinuation in the closing pages of his essay. Yet even as he praises Lacan, Blanchot remains keen (particularly in the 1969 version of his essay) to hold Lacan’s feet to the proverbial fire. For at the same time that speech, in Lacan’s account, subversively works to challenge the dialectic which gives it its meaning, there is more than a hint of suspicion on Blanchot’s part that this challenge may not go far enough. Lacan’s belief in the “liberation of speech by speech,” Blanchot writes, “represents a moving wager made in favor of reason understood as language, and in favor of language understood as a power to collect and gather in the midst of dispersion.”96 The sense here is that Lacan’s theory, despite its subversive aims, evinces a logocentric bias which is perhaps not sufficiently called into question by Lacan himself. After all, the effusive outpouring of words is consummately governed and regulated by an unconscious law which rigorously circumscribes all that is spoken. Blanchot wonders whether Lacan might be placing too much faith in the order inherent within language. If the privilege accorded to speech, both by Lacan and by Freud, is admirable, then one must nevertheless not lose sight of the fact that both speech and the laws inherent to its functioning are always already preceded and exceeded by the movement of another speech. This is the speech of pure difference, the speech of writing, which constantly calls the speech of analysis into question, separating it from itself, and drawing its participants into a relation with something radically outside themselves.

95 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 237. 96 Ibid., 235.

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57

A Psychoanalysis without Psychoanalysis

How are we to evaluate the status of Freud in Blanchot’s essay? What about the status of Lacan? What about the status of psychoanalysis, more generally? And to what extent, if at all, do these assessments undergo alteration across the calamitous thirteen-​year span that separates the two versions of Blanchot’s text? These are the questions that I would like to consider in conclusion. Perhaps surprisingly, given everything that transpires between 1956 and 1969, both in his own intellectual itinerary, and in theory-​at-​large, Blanchot does not dramatically alter his view either of Freud’s importance, or of Lacan’s admirable effort at revitalizing Freud’s legacy. If anything, Blanchot seems to push his praise of both Freud and Lacan further, in the 1969 version, by suggesting, in two of the key additions we have noted, that both Freud and Lacan use dialectic as a spring-​board for gesturing us toward something that would put not only the dialectic, but also ontology itself, into question. If The Infinite Conversation, across its myriad essays and fragments, is a text broadly concerned with showing that the idea of totality (as expressed, for example, in the aspiration for the complete Work, the notion of Absolute Knowledge, or the all-​encompassing embrace of the economy of Being) is always already both exceeded and undermined by a relation with radical otherness and difference which this totality can neither fully recuperate nor subdue, then Freud and Lacan are both clearly enlisted by Blanchot as thinkers ‘on the side’ of otherness and difference. Here they join a host of philosophers and writers whose names are familiar to us: ­Nietzsche, Bataille, Levinas, Artaud, Kafka, Char, and Duras, among so many others for whom the coherence of the self, the meaning of desire, and the ordering of language and time, are called into question or drawn toward the proverbial outside. But what about psychoanalysis, in general? What is its status in Blanchot’s essay? This is a more difficult, more nuanced question. For despite the fact that both Freud and Lacan are accorded, with certain qualifications, a rather favorable treatment by Blanchot, the same cannot be said for psychoanalysis. Indeed, it is almost as if one of the implicit aims of Blanchot’s essay were in some way to ‘peel’ Freud and Lacan (or at least their most radical insights) away from psychoanalysis –​away from the institution, the culture, the politics, and the power with which it had come to be associated. While already present in the essay’s 1956 version, these points emerge with particular clarity in “The Speech of Analysis.” In an extended footnote appearing at the end of his 1956 essay, Blanchot notes one of the ways in which psychoanalysis is indeed “very close

58 CHAPTER 1 to Marxism.”97 Like Marxism, Blanchot writes, psychoanalysis is “at once a technique and a knowledge: a power, an action, and a comprehension.”98 Thirteen years later, however, he appends to the end of this sentence the additional words, “always within the horizon of science.”99 The addition of these words is significant. For it makes clear that what psychoanalysis and Marxism have in common, at least in their prevailing forms, is a similar aspiration to attain the threshold of objective certainty and total comprehension through the use of a codified set of practices and techniques. It is by emulating and then subtly transposing the aims, techniques, and forms of comprehension modelled by science that psychoanalysis and Marxism alike seek to legitimize themselves. While the former may fancy itself a ‘science of the unconscious,’ and the latter a ‘Marxist science,’ they share a common emphasis upon construing themselves in conformity with a scientific ideal. Blanchot could well have seen this trend emerging, in the mid-​1960s, in the hyperlogical strain of Lacanianism then being promoted by Lacan’s son-​in-​law, Jacques-​Alain Miller. Perhaps more prominently, it was discernable in the stark opposition drawn by Althusser between (proletarian) objective science and bourgeois ideology.100 Any attempt like Althusser’s, of placing one’s faith in the liberating force of objective science, can only be misguided, Blanchot insists. For it naively assumes that the path out of ideology leads by way of objectivity and certainty. Blanchot’s contention is that the ideals of scientificity and objectivity can offer no escape from ideology, because scientificity and objectivity are themselves ideological. As Blanchot writes, in late 1967, “To believe oneself sheltered from ideology … is to give oneself over, without the possiiblity of choosing, to the worst ideological excesses.”101 A little over a decade later, in The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot will go so far as to compare the man of science directly to the man of faith. “Both appeal to a constant which they 97 Blanchot, “Freud,” 496. 98 Ibid., 496. 99 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 455. 100 Miller was among the founders, in 1966, of the Cahiers d’analyse, a journal whose contributors were all students at the École normale supérieure. The journal’s founding marked a crucial moment of intersection between radical politics and psychoanalytic theory in France. Roughly speaking, the journal’s thrust was to read Lacanian and Althusserian theory in relation to one another. In 1962, Althusser placed Lacan’s work on the reading list for his courses at the École. Shortly after Lacan’s exclusion from the sfp, in 1963, it would be none other than Althusser himself who would secure for Lacan an invitation to begin holding his Seminar at the École beginning in January 1964. 101 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 262.

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pray or theorize about,”102 remaining incessantly on guard against destructive chance and uncertainty. Forever in pursuit of something stable, the man of science and the man of faith are “men of unity … for whom the other and the same are complementary.”103 In “The Speech of Analysis,” Blanchot finds this tendency particularly disconcerting. In its aspiration to attain the status of an objective science replete with a codified technique of its own and a determinate object of inquiry, Blanchot believes that psychoanalysis cannot help but risk turning its back once more upon the radical potential of Freud’s thought, whose spirit resides (according to Blanchot) not so much in an allegiance to any particular theory, but in a movement of ceaseless contestation which puts all received truths into question. To the extent that it is conceived as a science, psychoanalysis abridges the movement of contestation. It lays claim to a certain power and a certain understanding of the world which it places outside the reach of critique. It uses, moreover, its power to further its understanding, and its understanding, in turn, to justify its ever-​growing reach for more power. Such a tendency is redolent of an imperialist, even totalitarian, ambition. But toward what ends? As Blanchot writes, in “The Speech of Analysis,” psychoanalysis has become an institution (whether or not willingly). And as such, it risks “serving the institutional forms that alone, historically, have a hold on speech.”104 This is one of the sternest warnings against the dangers of psychoanalysis that Blanchot issues throughout his writings. The danger is that psychoanalysis, as a ‘recognized institution,’ now works in tandem with other ‘recognized institutions’ to reinforce the prevailing socio-​political order. It does so, moreover, by claiming control over the very medium through which Freud had sought to liberate man: the medium of speech. This is the cruel irony. For despite the admirable efforts of Freud and Lacan, the analytic situation is still most often “conceived of in terms of power, and the speech that it secures is the power to speak within the normal conditions of a given society.”105 It has become a technique that is reactionary and repressive. The psychoanalyst becomes the culturally-​sanctioned arbiter of speech, granting the patient the privilege of speaking freely, so long as this speech ultimately arrives in a place that serves the analyst’s desired ends, and meets prevailing societal or clinical standards. Far from comprising a means of contestation, psychoanalysis has 102 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 90. 103 Ibid. 104 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 455. 105 Ibid.

60 CHAPTER 1 increasingly become a way for the ‘powers that be’ to enforce social compliance and conformity under the pretense of offering patients a clinically robust, curative method. If language is a tool, then it is also a weapon. Such is the implication carried by those lines, from The Writing of the Disaster, in which Blanchot insists that only those “for whom analysis is a risk, an extreme danger, a daily test” have the right to use psychoanalytic vocabulary.106 For otherwise, the vocabulary in question becomes nothing more than “the convenient language of an established culture.”107 It risks being recuperated by the established system, and deployed in the service of oppressive forces. The status of psychoanalysis, across the two versions of Blanchot’s essay, is thus a complex one. It defies any simple encapsulation. If Blanchot declines to offer anything resembling a final, unequivocal verdict on psychoanalysis, here, it is because he prefers instead to qualify and re-​qualify both its efficacies and its liabilities, its revolutionary potency and its tendency for stultifying imperialism. This point might be illustrated, in closing, by way of one final reference to the political. In a letter from June 1968, Blanchot describes the emerging, antinationalist movement as one which would restrain itself “from all premature statements or programs, because it senses that in any statement formulated in a necessarily alienated or distorted discourse there is a risk of being recuperated by the established system (that of industrialized capitalist societies), a system that integrates everything, including culture, however ‘avant-​garde’ it may be.”108 Even Marxist radicalism, Blanchot insists, must refuse all forms of integration, all forms of totalization. Otherwise, he argues, it becomes part of the problem. Communism is to be affirmed, but only in the form of a “communism without communism,” or a communism without heritage.109 To do otherwise is to find oneself entranced, yet again, by the false allure of integration, the false allure of certainty. The lesson garnered from Blanchot’s 1956 and 1969 essays, is that psychoanalysis, in an analogous manner, must be called upon to refuse not only the institutionalizing and formalizing tendencies of late capitalism and bourgeois culture, but also those of psychoanalysis itself. It must be called upon to contest and interrogate itself in a manner that is unsparing, relentless. Is psychoanalysis, then, to be affirmed? Perhaps. But only in the form of what we might call a ‘psychoanalysis without psychoanalysis.’ 1 06 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 67. 107 Ibid. 108 Blanchot, Political Writings, 1953–​1993, 83. 109 Blanchot, “Communism without heirs,” in Political Writings, 1953–​1993, 92–​93.

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In the next chapter, I want to turn toward another question of great concern for Blanchot during this period  –​the question of madness. Beginning with a reading of his essay, “Madness par excellence,” I  will show how Blanchot’s thinking on the question of madness develops and undergoes considerable revision, between the 1950s and the early 1970s. Crucial to this story will be the work of Michel Foucault, whose influence upon the manner in which Blanchot ultimately comes to think about psychoanalysis, and clinical discourse more broadly, will prove considerable.

­c hapter 2

On Madness 1

Hiding Is Forbidden

The perils of institutional psychiatry are perhaps nowhere evoked more vividly in Blanchot’s writings, than in a series of lines from his 1973 fictional text, The Madness of the Day. Describing his experiences at an institution where he had been temporarily ‘locked up,’ the protagonist of Blanchot’s story recounts in the following manner an encounter with the institutional authorities: “Right before their eyes … I reduced myself to them. The whole of me passed in full view before them, and when at last nothing was present but my perfect nothingness and there was nothing more to see, they ceased to see me too.”1 These lines capture the violence of reductionism which Blanchot understands to be pervasive within the clinical psychiatry of his day. Visibly frustrated, the clinicians turn to the newly ‘reduced’ protagonist and demand that he now reveal himself to them. “Where are you?” they ask. “Where are you hiding? Hiding is forbidden, it is an offence.”2 Having been reduced to little more than a vial of blood, a drop of water, a spot of ink on a doctor’s chart, the patient and his madness are effaced through the very procedures designed to account for them. Blanchot’s point is clear: the singularity of madness cannot help but be lost in our attempts at comprehensively understanding it. Like light, which “slips away in a radiating absence,”3 madness hides itself from anyone who would seek to capture it. Perhaps loosely autobiographical in nature, this scene calls to mind a number of interrelated questions which, for the preceding two decades, Blanchot had been exploring throughout his critical essays and fragmentary texts. What is the connection between madness and creativity? What is the relationship between madness and language? What impact, if any, might a writer’s madness have upon the development of his work? Beginning around 1951, Blanchot endeavors to examine these questions specifically in connection to the writings of Friedrich Hölderlin. Indeed, there is no writer who comes to embody, for Blanchot, the idea of the ‘mad poet’ more consummately than Hölderlin, just as there is no poet in whom the 1 Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, 14. 2 Ibid. 3 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 163.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004401334_​0 04

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relationship between madness and the creative work appears more mysterious. If Nietzsche is the figure, for Blanchot, who carries philosophical thought toward its outermost limits, toward that point where thought demands from itself nothing short of its own dissolution –​then Hölderlin embodies a similar exigency in the realm of the poetic. For Blanchot, to think about the connection between madness and poetry is to think first and foremost about the case of Hölderlin. Remarkably, as late as 1930, Hölderlin’s work had been little known in France, and his madness had been scarcely considered as topic of interest by French literary critics. It was only in 1930, with the publication of a translated volume, Poèmes de la folie de Hölderlin, that the question of madness first came to be placed at the center of the German poet’s oeuvre.4 This volume, prepared in collaboration by Pierre Jean Jouve and Pierre Klossowski, featured translations of poems and fragments from various eras of Hölderlin’s life, focusing heavily upon his ‘mad’ writings, and the poems of his final years. It also featured a preface by the philosopher Bernard Groethuysen, which portrayed Hölderlin’s “life and poetic project as a single continuous development … [making] no exception for the period of his madness.”5 Such an interpretation would profoundly foreshadow Blanchot’s own approach to Hölderlin, some two decades later. As Ann Jefferson writes, the effect of the Jouve-​Klossowski volume was nothing short of momentous. It introduced, for the first time, the question Hölderlin’s madness to French scholarship as a fertile area for critical inquiry. By electing to highlight the poems of Hölderlin’s madness, and view them neither as an aberration, nor as a mere curiosity, Jouve and Klossowksi established a precedent which would lead, over the decades that followed, to a veritable outpouring of scholarly activity in France focused upon the topic. Blanchot explicitly acknowledges Jouve and Klossowksi in his 1951 essay on Hölderlin’s madness. And when Jouve himself delivers a series of three radio broadcasts on Hölderlin later that same year, he quotes at length from ­Blanchot’s recently published essay on the topic, seeing in its arguments a similarity with his own views.6 The essay in question, “Madness par excellence,” first appeared in the journal Critique, in February 1951. It was then reprinted, in 1953, as the preface to the French translation of Karl Jaspers’ 1922 book, Strindberg and Van Gogh: An Attempt at a Pathographic Analysis with Reference to Parallel Case of Swedenborg and Hölderlin. Composed during one of Blanchot’s most prolific periods 4 Ann Jefferson, Genius in France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 205. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 206.

64 CHAPTER 2 as a writer, “Madness par excellence” is a significant text in no small measure because of the robust critical response it later came to elicit from prominent theorists such as Jean Laplanche and Jacques Derrida, both of whom took issue with aspects of Blanchot’s approach. According to Laplanche, Blanchot’s essay offers a resolutely anti-​scientific and anti-​psychological interpretation of Hölderlin’s madness, an interpretation smacking of idealism.7 Derrida, for his part, chides Blanchot for having performed “an essentialist reduction,”8 and overlooking what is singular, or irreducibly unique, in the cases of literary madness he examines. In his haste to avoid the standard essentialization of madness pervasive within clinical psychiatry, Derrida suggests that Blanchot inadvertently makes the same mistake through different means. He reduces the question of madness to a question of literary production, performing not so much a clinical, as an aesthetic, ­reduction. Though I believe these pronouncements somewhat overstate their case –​it is not my intention here to defend Blanchot’s essay against these charges. My aim, in this chapter, is rather to examine how Blanchot undertakes, in response to the serious criticisms levelled against his essay, a radical repositioning of his approach to the question of madness over the course of the 1960s and early 1970s. This repositioning is perhaps most clearly discerned in the “Note for a New Edition” which Blanchot appends to the “Madness par excellence” essay upon its republication in 1970. A significant shift in Blanchot’s thinking about madness occurs throughout the period in question –​a period which runs, incidentally, roughly parallel to the one examined in the previous chapter. The shift owes much to the intervention of Foucault, but also to the influence of Klossowski’s reading of Nietzsche. Whereas Blanchot had seemingly been content, in his writings of the 1950s, to employ critical discourse as a rather unproblematic and transparent means of explicating Hölderlin’s work and detailing its possible connection to madness, by the late 1960s, Blanchot increasingly comes to view all such discourse as threatened from within by the very madness it both presupposes and violently excludes. Though much of the discussion in this chapter will focus on issues pertaining more closely to clinical psychiatry than to psychoanalysis per se, I want to argue that Blanchot’s reformulation of his stance with regard to madness has a decisive impact on the manner in which he will later engage 7 Jean Laplanche, Hölderlin and the Question of the Father, trans. Luke Carson (Victoria, B.C.: els Editions, 2007), 12. 8 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1978), 172.

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with psychoanalytic theory in his writings of the 1970s and beyond. Working toward this end, it may be useful to begin with a brief consideration of the clinical context for Blanchot’s “Madness par excellence.” In this way, we might better situate the essay in relation to its times. 2

The Clinical Context

In the late 19th century, a certain view had risen to prominence that sought to consider mental pathology in terms analogous with those of organic pathology. Central to this view were two fundamental presuppositions, closely related to one another. The first presupposition was that mental illness comprised an underlying essence irreducible to the symptoms expressing it. The second presupposition involved the belief that mental and organic illnesses alike could best be classified in accordance with a model adopted from botanical science. In establishing the widespread acceptance of both these tenants, the impact of Emil Kraepelin was decisive. Dismayed by the overly-​broad and imprecise psychiatric diagnoses and concepts of the 19th century, Kraepelin had sought to establish a new paradigm of nosological clarity. Owing much to the style of Carl Linnaeus, whose groundbreaking taxonomical innovations in the 18th century established an important precedent in science, Kraepelin’s approach was structured in terms of a decidedly ‘top-​down’ style of classification. Kraepelin sought to categorize the psychoses on the basis of clusters of genera and species, and to then look for the underlying causes responsible for differentiation among these various clusters. Such an approach, which might roughly be termed deductive in style, begins by positing discrete, universal categories which are then subsequently populated (on the basis of empirical observation) by particular cases. The clinician begins, in other words, by positing the existence of an irreducibly unique pathology –​and then proceeds to look for particular cases that e­ xemplify its essence. Based upon these guiding principles, Kraepelin came to formulate, in the ­famous 6th edition of his Lehrbuch, published in 1899, the key distinction (commonly named the Kraepelinian dichotomy) between manic-​depressive insanity and dementia praecox. The core disturbance, or Grundstörung, of dementia praecox was understood by Kraepelin to involve a deficit in attention, coupled with a progressively deteriorating mental function affecting memory and the ability to undertake goal-​directed activities. In contrast to manic-​ depressive insanity, which was a form of psychosis that allowed for alternating periods of remission and recurrence, Kraepelin believed that dementia

66 CHAPTER 2 praecox was an irreversible, degenerative condition whose course progressed without abatement. 9 The distinction between these two forms of madness was as groundbreaking as it was controversial. Despite the acknowledged importance of his nosological intervention, and the clarity it introduced, many clinicians were troubled by the narrowness of the diagnostic categories Kraepelin had generated, as well as by his overriding emphasis upon ‘top-​down’ classification. Seeking an alternate path, the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler embraced a more inductive clinical approach. Bleuler’s method involved interacting more closely with patients themselves, carefully observing their speech and actions, and subjecting them to psychological tests. He would then use the clinical findings gleaned from these interactions to create new diagnostic concepts, whose contours he then gradually refined. It was this approach that led Bleuler to a famous re-​working of the Kraepelinian nosology in which he broadened significantly the concept of dementia praecox, extending its reach to include certain forms of paranoia. Unlike Kraepelin, Bleuler insisted that only the illness’s most extreme cases should be considered irreversibly degenerative. Bleuler’s name for this new, more expansive, nosological entity was schizophrenia. First proposed by Bleuler in a public lecture in 1908, and referenced shortly thereafter by Carl Jung, his main assistant at the Burghölzi hospital, the notion of schizophrenia was formally elaborated by Bleuler in his 1911 text, Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias.10 As its name suggests, schizophrenia was understood as a breaking-​up or splitting [Spaltung] of the continuity of thought. This Spaltung would produce disturbances in both association and affect, precluding the patient from engaging meaningfully with either the environment 9 10

Kraepelin, in subsequent editions of his psychiatric Lehrbuch, would ultimately modify his original account to allow for partial remission of symptoms in a small number of dementia praecox patients. Watching from Vienna, Freud coveted the academic prestige that Bleuler, who was Professor Psychiatry at the University of Zürich, might bestow upon his nascent enterprise. Correspondence between Freud and Bleuler ensued, and the notion of schizophrenia was brought into line with psychoanalytic theory. When psychoanalysis began to conquer American psychiatry in the 1920s, it was thus unsurprisingly the nosology of Bleuler which comprised, for American clinicians, an appealing alternative to Kraepelin’s system of classification. By the time that the first edition of the dsm was published in 1952, Kraepelin’s notion of dementia praecox had been decisively supplanted in American nosology by the notion of ‘schizophrenic reaction.’ And though Kraepelin’s influence remained strong within British psychiatry throughout the 20th century, it was not until the neo-​Kraepelinian revolution of the 1970s gave rise to the publication of the dsm-​i ii that his nosological insights were vindicated within the North American tradition.

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or other people. In severe cases, hallucinations might also be present, though Bleuler –​in keeping with his emphasis upon crafting a broad, continuous spectrum –​assigned no privilege to the presence of any specific psychotic symptoms. In contrast with Kraepelin’s nosological approach, which considered mental disturbances to be fundamentally discontinuous with normal behavior, Bleuler believed there to be a significant overlap between normal and pathological states.11 The problem with which Blanchot is concerned, in the opening pages of his 1951 essay, however, is not a problem of nosology or classification.12 “This is not the place,” he writes, “to recall the debates about these names and what they represent.”13 Nor is the issue at hand one concerning diagnostic accuracy. As Blanchot insists, “Hölderlin’s madness does not disconcert medical science.”14 His schizophrenic illness can be named. Blanchot’s focus, rather, is on attempting to elucidate the mysterious relation between Hölderlin’s madness and his creative work. Blanchot wants to ask what effect, if any, madness might have upon the production of the work of art or literature. Is this effect 11

Yet, despite the differences between their respective approaches, Kraepelin and Bleuler both shared a common presupposition, namely, that underlying the various primary symptoms of dementia praecox/​schizophrenia there resided an unknown organic disease, likely afflicting the whole body, which gave rise to lesions or tumors in the brain. Both men agreed that madness was neither an effect of exogenous trauma nor socio-​ psychological factors. Severe psychoses were rather solely a question for medical science. 12 Separate from the German-​speaking tradition, it is worth noting that the history of clinical nosology in France during the 19th and early 20th centuries followed a course of its own. Dating back to the work of Boissier de Sauvages, in the 1760s, the French nosological tradition had long been a well-​respected one. Encompassing, for example, the work of Philippe Pinel and his followers, the French tradition maintained a position at the leading-​edge of the development of psychiatric concepts for much of the 19th century. As Marc-​Antoine Crocq tells us, it was only around 1880 that the French schools of psychiatry, hamstrung by excessive administrative and cultural centralization, came to be eclipsed in both prestige and influence by their German-​speaking counterparts. As Kraepelin and then Bleuler conquered the world of European psychiatry, the French remained insolently aloof, tied to their own traditions, loyal to their own diagnostic categories –​even as these very categories set them apart from international classifications. One can see prime evidence of this insular attitude in both the idiosyncratic notion of the bouffées délirantes, first identified by Valentin Magnan in the 1880s, but largely unrecognized outside the Francophone world –​and in the quintessentially “French” diagnostic grouping referred known as the chronic delusional psychoses (cdp, psychoses délirantes chroniques), which had no precise counterpart in international classifications, but remained a fixture of French nosology for the better part of the 20th century. See Marc-​ Antoine Crocq, “French Perspectives on Psychiatric Classification,” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 17, no. 1 (2015): 51–​57. 13 Blanchot, The Blanchot Reader, 127. 14 Ibid., 110.

68 CHAPTER 2 predominantly a positive or negative one? Is a poet’s madness to be praised or disparaged with respect to the creative task? 3

Madness—Lack or Surplus?

Such questions, of course, had long been of interest both to philosophers and clinicians. In the waning years of romanticism, for instance, the Italian forensic psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso famously argued, in 1864, that there exists a fundamental link between genius and madness. Genius, according to Lombroso, derives from the same root as other forms of madness, distinguishing itself only on account of its obvious evolutionary benefit. Genius is nothing but a more selective form of madness. By the late 19th century, however, such thinking had fallen out of fashion, having been thoroughly repudiated by emerging trends in clinical psychiatry. In its place, there arises a diametrically opposed view that considers madness to be a deficiency in normal functioning whose impact upon the creative process is nothing but deleterious. Blanchot notes the predominance of this view, particularly in France, citing a number of thinkers and clinicians with whom it has been most closely associated. A prime illustration of this view might be found in the philosopher Henri Bergson’s 1908 article, “Memory of the Present and False Recognition,” which examines two groups of abnormal psychic states. The first group includes amnesia, aphasias, paralyses, and various states characterized by the loss of movement or sensation. These states, Bergson argues, can quite straightforwardly be seen to involve an impoverishment of normal life, a psychic deficiency of some sort. But there is also another group of abnormal states, Bergson notes, such as hallucinations, deliria, obsessions, and experiences of false recognition  –​ which seem to add something to an individual’s experience, or even enrich it. Bergson wonders whether these states might likewise be traced-​back to an underlying psychic deficiency, or whether, on the contrary, they might genuinely involve a surplus, or an enrichment of some kind. Bergson opts for the former answer. In an extended passage which Blanchot cites in his essay, Bergson insists that “disorder and degeneration” in the mental domain ultimately create nothing –​and that the “apparently positive characters which give the abnormal phenomenon an aspect of novelty are [actually], when we come to study their nature, reducible to an internal void, a shortcoming of normality.”15 What appears as an abnormal phenomenon 15

Henri Bergson. Mind-​Energy: Lectures and Essays, trans. H. Wildon Carr (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1929), 152.

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presenting novel, or even positive, characteristics is actually neither novel nor positive, but always the mark of deficiency in the mind. If these symptoms do not manifest in healthy persons, Bergson claims, it is simply because they are prevented from emerging “by one of those continually active inhibitory mechanisms which secure attention to life.”16 Bergson is by no means alone in this view. In the pages of “Memory of the Present and False Recognition,” Bergson draws his own account into close ­relation with the theory of Pierre Janet, another figure with whom Blanchot explicitly associates this ‘deficiency’ view of mental illness. An immensely influential psychologist and neurologist, Janet focused much attention on a disorder called psychasthenia, publishing an important book on it 1903. Psychasthenia was understood by Janet as a broad diagnostic category, separate from hysteria, which encompassed many forms of obsessive disorder as well as some forms of psychosis.17 Its core disturbance was understood to be a state of mental weakness which allowed for the emergence of secondary symptoms such as emotional disturbances, outbursts, or the inability to complete projects. This mental weakness was described in various ways by Janet, most famously, in terms of a reduction in psychological tension, or a lowering of the mental level [abaissement du niveau mentale]. Janet believed that there existed a direct correlation between an individual’s degree of psychological tension and the range of tasks that the individual would be capable of accomplishing. When an individual’s state of psychological tension came to be lowered, the synthetic abilities of the mind would be compromised, leading in turn to a discharge of psychological energy only in more basic, or ‘primitive,’ forms. Janet’s influence was far-​reaching. Even as the French clinical tradition remained largely indifferent to outside influences, German-​speaking psychiatrists made little secret of selectively appropriating and transposing aspects of Janet’s work into their own theories. Andrew Moskowitz has persuasively argued, for instance, that the influence of Janet upon Bleuler’s formulation of schizophrenia ultimately rivaled, if not exceeded, that of Freud himself. Moskowitz points to striking similarities between Bleuler’s account of the diminution of associative links found in schizophrenic patients, and Janet’s discussion of the reduction of psychological tension found in psychasthenia.18 Jung, for 16 Ibid., 153. 17 Incidentally, the term schizophrenia was not used by Janet, though H.F. Ellenberger has subsequently argued for placing schizophrenia at the extreme end of the psychasthenia spectrum. 18 See Andrew Moskowitz and Gerhard Heim, “Eugen Bleuler’s Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias: A Centenary Appreciation and Reconsideration,” Schizophrenia Bulletin 37, no. 3 (2011): 471–​479.

70 CHAPTER 2 his part, absorbed Janet’s notion wholesale into his own clinical apparatus, identifying the abaissement du niveau mentale as the core dysfunction involved in schizophrenia. Among French psychiatrists, Janet’s influence would be no less profound. Clinicians such as Henri Ey and Jean Delay (both of whom Blanchot mentions by name in his essay) held-​fast to the general premise, endorsed by both Janet and Bergson, that madness should be understood as a deficiency in relation to a state of normal functioning. Ey’s approach proved to be particularly influential. Building upon the work of John Hughlings Jackson, an important late 19th century English neurologist, Ey develops what he calls the organo-​dynamic theory of mental functions. In this theory –​which is based on a hierarchical model of the central nervous system where each level of the mind overlaps with, and integrates, the various levels beneath it –​all psychopathological disorders are the expression of a defect, a deficiency, in the integrative functions of the mind at one of its hierarchical levels. What appears to be a new or interesting phenomenon emerging in the midst of madness is in fact little more than a primitive function of the mind suddenly appearing in full-​view due to the failure of psychic integration at some higher level. It is Ey’s theory that Blanchot specifically glosses with words “illness does not create anything … it never liberates any but inferior functions which were already involved in the normal carrying out of conscious life, but were surpassed or ‘integrated’ in that process.”19 The extent to which the personality as whole is affected by mental illness, according to Ey, will depend upon the specific level at which this dissolution sets in. At no point can illness either awaken genius, or produce anything truly novel. It merely expresses “the passage from the superior to inferior, from a complete life to a depleted one.”20 A rather similar outlook is offered in the writings of Jean Delay. Born in the same year as Blanchot, Delay studied under Janet, and presented his doctoral thesis in 1942, less than a decade before the initial publication of “Madness par excellence.” In his work, Delay proposes an architectonic of the mind composed of two primary layers: an infrastructure layer that facilitates primitive mental functions, and a suprastructure layer which is adapted to the social environment. Delay’s claim is that madness involves a compromising of this suprastructure which allows for a ‘bursting-​through’ of primitive functions. Much as in the theories of Janet, Bergson, and Ey, there is absolutely nothing positive to be found in such an occurrence.

19 Blanchot, The Blanchot Reader. 111. 20 Ibid.

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In each of these various accounts, mental pathology is portrayed as a deficiency in higher functioning. Any positive link between mental illness and creativity is rejected. For the adherents of such ‘deficiency’ theories, madness is but “an appearance of riches –​in the most favorable cases –​which indicates a real impoverishment.”21 It is nothing but a loss masquerading as a surplus. If we take the time to mention each of these theories cited in Blanchot’s essay, it is not only to offer a sense of the prevailing spirit of conformity which dominated the French clinical tradition of Blanchot’s day, but also to show why, by the time of his 1951 essay, Blanchot must have seen in Karl Jaspers’ approach to the question of Hölderlin’s madness such a remarkable freshness, despite Jaspers’ book on the topic having been published nearly three decades earlier. In contrast to the ‘deficiency’ theorists noted above, Jaspers refuses to consider madness as unequivocally deleterious with respect to the creative process, preferring instead to examine each case of madness in its own specificity and detail. 4

Jaspers and the Unverständlich

For Blanchot, the importance of Jaspers’ approach to psychiatry and pathography is two-​fold. First, there is Jaspers’ thoughtful, nuanced resistance to the empirical-​biological reductionism traditionally favored by Kraepelin and his followers. Second, there is Jaspers’ reluctance to assign either an unequivocally positive or negative valuation to mental illness in terms of its relation to creative activity. One cannot say, categorically, whether madness aids or inhibits creativity. Each case must be examined on its own terms. For at the very heart of madness, Jaspers insists, there resides an enigmatic, ‘un-​understandable [unverständlich]’ core which demands to be neither ignored nor wrapped in secrecy. To deal frankly with mental illness is to acknowledge, from the outset, both its elusiveness with respect to comprehensive understanding, and the great variability with which it produces its effects. Jaspers’ approach to clinical psychiatry is characterized by a spirit of modesty and inclusiveness lacking in the work of many of his contemporaries. At the heart of Jaspers’ 1913 classic, General Psychopathology, for instance, is the claim that no single method of psychiatric practice or theory is adequate to encompass the various abnormalities associated with severe mental illness. The model of natural science, preferred by Kraepelin, must be supplemented 21 Ibid.

72 CHAPTER 2 by methods borrowed from social science, for madness is not simply a pathology, but also a state of lived-​experience. While there remains a significant role for medical science to play, recourse to medical science must be predicated upon a requisite acknowledgement of the incompleteness of all clinical ­understanding. Like his peers in the Heidelberg school, Jaspers was deeply interested in the question of what the fundamental, core disturbance [Grundstörung] underlying the symptoms of dementia praecox/​schizophrenia might be. Was this disturbance, ultimately, a deficiency in attention (as Kraepelin proposed), or a loosening of associations, coupled with a fissure of the personality (as Bleuler suggested)? Or was it perhaps something else entirely? Jaspers urged psychiatrists to tackle these, and other problems, always by starting from the ground of the patient’s phenomenological, lived-​experience. In doing so, the psychiatrist would find himself precluded from achieving a full empathic understanding of the patient’s experience. The patient’s primary symptoms would inevitably remain at least in part unverständlich. Far from signaling a therapeutic shortcoming, however, this failure to achieve complete empathic understanding indicates something important about schizophrenia, according to Jaspers. It suggests that underlying its primary symptoms, there exists some yet undetermined, neurobiological process, beyond the grasp of medical science. Clinical psychiatry is therefore best served by attempting to explore the relationship between this underlying process and each of the patient’s symptoms, rather than trying to reduce each of these symptoms to some over-​arching, unified diagnosis. Though diagnoses like ‘dementia praecox’ and ‘schizophrenia’ are clinically valuable to the extent that they name ideal types, Jaspers maintains that no patient ever embodies an ideal type. In the words of S.  Nassir Ghaemi, Jaspers can thus be seen calling into question “the essentialist tendencies of his predecessors … [replacing] their bold verbal associations of presumable theoretical access to a putative core disturbance with a more modest approach,”22 in which the un-​understandability of primary symptoms is protected against ‘top-​down’ categorization, and the irreducibility of the underlying biological process is maintained. Jaspers’s approach, in summary, is to explore what the diversity of symptoms can tell us about the underlying disease process, rather than to focus exclusively upon what nosological categories can tell us about the meaning of symptoms.

22

S. Nassir Ghaemi, “Nosologomania: DSM & Karl Jaspers’ Critique of Kraepelin,” Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 4, no. 10 (2010), 11.

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This is likewise his chosen approach in the pathographic analysis he undertakes with regard to Hölderlin. “The categories of today’s psychiatry are entirely too crude to use them for analysis of Hölderlin’s poetry of his first years as a victim of schizophrenia,”23 writes Jaspers, in 1922. We can learn little about Hölderlin’s creativity, or the process involved in his poetic work, by consulting a ‘top-​down’ clinical model. Rather, it is psychiatry itself which has much to learn from the case of Höldelrin and his poetry. This is the radical reversal in orientation which Jaspers’ book so provocatively defends, and which catches Blanchot’s eye. Blanchot explain Jaspers’ approach in the following way: “Causal explanation is a requirement which admits no exceptions; but what science explains by designating a cause is not necessarily thereby understood. Understanding seeks what escapes it, and advances vigorously and purposefully towards the moment when it is no longer possible … But that extreme limit is not only the end of comprehension, its moment of closure, but also its opening moment.”24 Unverständlichkeit, as Blanchot recognizes, is not a moment of requisite closure, but rather, a starting-​point for all genuine inquiry. It is by acknowledging the un-​understandable process at play in madness, and seeking to protect this process from excessive reductionism, that Jaspers aims to preserve its most authentic and extreme aspects. 5

Compulsory Ruination

According to Jaspers, something decisive happens to Hölderlin around 1801 –​ the commencement of the evolution of an illness, coupled with a change in poetic style. Beginning in 1801 and continuing from 1802 to 1805, Jaspers sees the poet presenting symptoms indicative of early-​stage schizophrenia.25 He notes certain remarks from this period in which Hölderlin describes a quasi-​ mythical exposure to excessive luminosity, a visitation by the divine, a contact with Apollo himself. As the extremity of these ecstatic experiences increasingly threatens his personality with dissolution, Hölderlin struggles to maintain

23

Karl Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh:  An Attempt at a Pathographic Analysis with Reference to Parallel Cases of Swedenborg and Holderlin, trans. Oskar Grunow and David Woloshin (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977), 135. 24 Blanchot, The Blanchot Reader, 112. 25 Here, Japers is following a thesis earlier proposed within Wilhelm Lange’s 1909 Hölderlin: Eine Pathographie, which proposes a rupture in Hölderlin’s poetic development commensurate with the onset of psychosis.

74 CHAPTER 2 a semblance of continuity. Hölderlin becomes akin to Tantalus, we are told, overwhelmed by a surfeit of blessings, overflowing with an inspiration that both burdens and threatens him. Yet, even faced with the threat of total inundation, we are told that his aim is never “to preserve himself and save his mere reason, but to raise to poetic form … what he has grasped.”26 Hölderlin struggles to hold on, not for his own sake, but rather, in order to bear witness to the very tumult that increasingly ravages his life. As this psychic conflict intensifies, Jaspers claims that a profound change in Hölderlin’s work becomes apparent. Hölderlin’s writing becomes more direct, more assertive, indifferent to the world, and wholly affirmative of the reality of the mythical. Hölderlin, apparently like many schizophrenics, finds himself in contact with a strange, ferocious energy that impels him onward, into uncharted territories. A pulsating life-​force that is natural, yet irrational, is liberated inside him. Jaspers refers to it as the demonic. Blanchot describes this “demonic existence” as a “tendency of existence to surpass itself eternally –​to assert itself relentlessly with regard to the absolute …”27 Operating beyond the binary opposition of health-​sickness, the demonic is a life-​force which exists inside all individuals (though usually in muted form), driving them toward the limit of their powers. The demonic is not schizophrenia. Rather, it is precisely through schizophrenia’s uprooting of the personality that the demonic emerges openly and in full force. Schizophrenia, one might say, is an un-​understandable pathological process that liberates the demonic existence that is usually kept under wraps in daily life. This allows Jaspers to make the claim, which Blanchot readily reinscribes, that there is nothing intrinsically creative about schizophrenia. Madness is neither a negative nor positive phenomenon. It is neither a deficiency nor a blessing. By taking this nuanced path, Jaspers appears to avoid the pitfalls of classic pathography. He neither seeks to reduce Hölderlin’s texts to the status of mere symptoms, nor does he employ some over-​arching diagnosis in order to ‘rationalize’ Hölderlin’s mental illness and make it comprehensible to us. Schizophrenia is presented by Jaspers as a clinical entity that is neither fully comprehensible nor deserving of either unequivocal praise or reproach. It is an illness that demands, from the clinician as much as from the literary critic, an inevitable acknowledgement of un-​understandability. In the case of a sufficiently creative personality, however, this illness can also be a powerful catalyst capable of breaking through the sedimented

26 Blanchot, The Blanchot Reader, 115. 27 Ibid., 117.

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topsoil of the psyche, liberating the ferocious and unrelenting demonic energy required to bring a poet’s most uncompromising creative visions to fruition. Up to this point, Blanchot is rather faithful in his exposition of Jaspers’ text, making clear the undeniable attractiveness of the latter’s nuanced approach. Yet no sooner does Blanchot recount Jaspers’ reading than he already begins to step away from it. Despite its impressive insight, Blanchot maintains that Jaspers’ approach still neglects what is most essential in Hölderlin’s itinerary, namely, his destiny as a poet –​and the inevitable dissolution which this destiny requires. For starters, Blanchot wants to resist Jaspers’s claim that a decisive turning-​ point in Hölderlin’s work occurs in 1801, arguing that while new stylistic elements emerge in Hölderlin’s writings around this date, the change in style is better explained by the notion of a “continuous development”28 rather than by that of a rupture. Echoing Bernard Groethuysen’s preface to the 1930 volume of Hölderlin’s poems, Blanchot writes that even with the onset of the poet’s madness, “what persistently impresses us is not change but rather fidelity, the continuity of Hölderlin’s destiny.”29 Related to this point is a further assertion, namely, that what is stake in Hölderlin’s work is not so much the destiny of a particular individual (and his Promethean struggle in the face of madness), as it is the destiny of poetry itself. This, as it turns out, is the decisive moment in Blanchot’s essay. It is the moment when, breaking discretely from Jaspers, Blanchot begins to elevate the question of poetry over the question of madness. It is no longer Hölderlin the man, much less Hölderlin the ‘mad man,’ that seems of primary interest to Blanchot. It is rather the question of poetry itself that ascends to a position of principle importance in his essay. “[Hölderlin’s] fate is his alone, but he himself belongs to what he expressed and discovered, not as his, but as the truth and affirmation of the poetic essence,”30 writes Blanchot. In his struggle, his madness, and his eventual collapse, “it is not his destiny that he decides, but that of poetry.”31 Surely, Hölderlin is an exemplary figure in the history of literature; he is a writer of unquestionable genius. Yet the ordeal which he undergoes “is not his own, it is the realization of the true which, at a certain point and in spite of him, demands of his personal reason that it become pure impersonal transparency whence there 28 Ibid., 118. 29 Ibid., 119. 30 Ibid., 120. 31 Ibid.

76 CHAPTER 2 is no return.”32 Hölderlin’s importance is not to be found in the contingencies of his biographical itinerary or even his work itself, but in the ‘essential’ poetic exigency which is exemplified within his dissolution, his slide into the abyss. In a series of lines, the poet’s ultimate task is made clear. The case of Hölderlin shows us, according to Blanchot, that “the poet must be ruined in order that in and through him the measureless excess of the divine might become measure … this effacement at the heart of language is what makes language speak.”33 Blanchot’s claim is that the supreme task with which poetic writing is charged is to make the pure word manifest, even at the cost of any individual who would seek to claim this word as his or her own. As Blanchot will go on to write only a couple years later in The Space of Literature, “The work requires of the writer that he lose everything he might construe as his own ‘nature,’ that he lose all character and that, ceasing to be linked to others and to himself by the decision which makes him an ‘I,’ he becomes the empty place where the impersonal affirmation emerges.”34 Hölderlin’s poetry exemplifies, in other words, a movement by no means unique to him, or specific to his particular form of madness. What it shows us is that writing, at its limit, entails nothing short of the writer’s compulsory ruination. This, far more than any thesis about madness as such, is the primary point of emphasis in Blanchot’s 1951 essay. The critical response generated by Blanchot’s “Madness par excellence” would be significant. Of particular importance would be the critical responses delivered by Jean Laplanche and Jacques Derrida. I would now like to turn to a consideration of these critiques, which not only highlight some of the weaknesses of Blanchot’s reading, but which also serve as a catalyst for Blanchot’s repositioning of his approach to madness over the course of the 1960s and ­beyond. 6

Against Blanchot

In his 1961 text, Hölderlin and the Question of the Father, Laplanche takes Blanchot to task for proposing what the former calls a “resolutely anti-​‘scientific’ and anti-​‘psychological’ unitary thesis.”35 Laplanche wants to focus on exactly 32 Ibid., 121. 33 Ibid., 124. 34 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 55. 35 Laplanche, Hölderlin and the Question of the Father, 12.

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what Blanchot says, and does not say, about that key moment around 1801 when signs of Hölderlin’s madness first begin to emerge. Though Blanchot expresses no reservations about Jaspers’ clinical assessment, he does everything possible, according to Laplanche, to minimize its overall significance within his reading. Even with the onset of madness, Blanchot asserts, there is no radical discontinuity in Hölderlin’s poetic vision, no rupture, only a shift in style induced by his ongoing creative development. As far as Blanchot is concerned, the arrival of Hölderlin’s madness, in the first years of the 1800s, has no direct effect on the poet’s creative development. Its significance therefore resides solely in its capacity for leading the poet, rather conveniently, toward the threshold of utter effacement demanded by his poetic destiny. Madness is construed by Blanchot simply as the means by which Hölderlin’s dissolution –​a dissolution demanded by poetry itself –​comes to be accomplished. “Blanchot does not deny the psychotic process, but Hölderlin’s ‘madness’ is only one form among other possible modes of self-​consummation of a life by the absolute task of the work …”36 This is another way of saying that Hölderlin’s fate is already circumscribed by a poetic destiny that precedes the onset of madness and remains irreducible to it. It is this emphasis upon a continuous poetic destiny, coupled with the notion of an overriding poetic task, that earns Blanchot’s interpretation the epithets of “unitary” and “idealist.”37 Laplanche sees Blanchot as subordinating the question of the poet’s madness to the question of a broader, ‘spiritual development’ which requires, in the end, the poet’s effacement.38 While Blanchot probes deeply into the nature of this poetic exigency, he accords no similarly in-​depth treatment of the Hölderlin’s schizophrenia. The latter is permitted to remain almost entirely unquestioned, unexamined. Schizophrenia “is taken to be what it appears to be, how it wants to be seen: a response without a ­question.”39 Rather than thinking about madness on its own terms, Blanchot’s reading focuses solely on the unitary, continuous development of Hölderlin’s poetic destiny. Everything else is subordinated unto this destiny, until finally, even the uniqueness of Hölderlin himself is eliminated –​all in the name of the poetic exigency to which he bears witness, and which reduces him to nothing. It is this last point, in particular, that Derrida presses in the pages of “La Parole soufflé.” In an engagement with Blanchot that is somewhat more 36 Ibid., xvii. 37 Ibid., 12. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 13.

78 CHAPTER 2 conciliatory than the one undertaken by Laplanche, Derrida nevertheless chides Blanchot for neglecting, in spite of himself, the uniqueness inherent to the various cases of literary madness under consideration. What results from this, Derrida claims, are interpretations that emphasize thematic and developmental unity at the expense of genuine uniqueness. Even as he praises Jaspers for refusing to essentialize madness and reduce Hölderlin’s itinerary to a standard clinical case, Blanchot himself proceeds to essentialize the case of Hölderlin, albeit in in literary, rather than psychiatric, terms. “The unique is hailed in vain,” writes Derrida, “it is indeed the very element which disappears from [Blanchot’s] commentary. And not by chance. The disappearance of unicity is even presented as the meaning of the truth of Hölderlin.”40 At the same time that Blanchot resists the overly-​reductive tendencies of clinical psychiatry he performs a comparably ruthless reduction in the name of the poetic demand. What counts, in the end, is not Hölderlin, his life, or even his madness, but the impersonal poetic exigency which he exemplifies. Moreover, Blanchot’s essentializing tendencies are not limited, according to Derrida, to his writings on Hölderlin. They make themselves evident, perhaps even more blatantly, in two additional essays from the 1950s, both on Antonin Artaud. In an essay from 1957 simply entitled, “Artaud,” Blanchot’s focus initially appears to be directed toward the question of a possible link between madness and creativity. Yet, once again, in Derrida’s view, the emphasis quickly shifts toward an examination of an impersonal exigency in relation to which all aspects of Artaud’s life and work are subordinated. While Blanchot insists that “we must not make the mistake of reading as analyses of a psychological state the precise, sure, and detailed descriptions that [Artaud] offers us,”41 presumably in order to avoid falling into a clinical reduction of an essentialist variety, Blanchot simply arrives at the same destination by a different route. Both Artaud’s story and his madness are presented as worthy of examination only to the extent that they can show us something about the essence of what Blanchot refers to as “poetic reason”42 or “poetic consciousness.”43 Difference, in Blanchot’s reading of Artaud, is reduced to sameness. What does such reading sacrifice? Everything, in short, that makes Artaud’s life, work, and madness irreducibly unique. As Derrida puts it, rather brusquely, “Artaud’s entire adventure is purportedly only the index of a transcendental .

40 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 172. 41 Blanchot, The Blanchot Reader, 39. 42 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 293. 43 Ibid., 296.

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structure.”44 So quick is Blanchot to discover within Artaud’s protracted agony some evidence of this essential ‘unthought’ nested within thought, that he neglects everything that makes Artaud’s experience truly inimitable. Artaud thus becomes little more than an illustrative ‘case,’ an example of something far greater, far more important, than himself. Both standard psychopathology and Blanchot’s literary critical discourse, according to Derrida, thus arrive at the same place by different means. In each case, essentialism has won-​out over an acknowledgement of the subject’s uniqueness. In Artaud’s personal and creative itineraries, only that which bears witness to a transcendental structure at the heart of thought is considered valuable, or worthy of discussion. Everything else is abandoned. Blanchot, like an opportunistic clinician, has extracted everything of value from his specimen, and left a lifeless cadaver on the table. 7

Beyond the Critical and the Clinical?

What is one to make of these criticisms directed against Blanchot? Is Blanchot guilty of idealization and essentialization, as Laplanche and Derrida contend? As stated previously, it is not my intention here to defend Blanchot’s essays of the 1950s against such charges. A few points in his defense however should be made. If by ‘essence’ one means something like an indispensable or fundamental property, then it is by no means the essence of madness that is being fixed or predetermined in these essays, but rather, the essence of a certain poetic task –​a task which draws the poet dangerously into relation with his requisite dissolution. It is not madness that is being essentialized, so much as the meaning of poetic destiny. Laplanche and Derrida are nevertheless justified, I believe, in suggesting that Blanchot’s discussion of madness here is far from satisfying. The obvious flaw with Blanchot’s approach is that it seeks to annex rather coarsely the entire question of madness unto what Blanchot apparently deems the more essential, or more interesting, question of the poet’s fidelity to a creative destiny that destroys him. Understandably reluctant ‘to get in the weeds’ with schizophrenia, Blanchot never accords the question of madness the same level of detailed interrogation that he accords the question of poetry. On clinical questions, he defers to Jaspers’ authority, allowing the guiding trope of Unverständlichkeit to deflect any in-​depth investigation. 44 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 171.

80 CHAPTER 2 If there is a more fundamental shortcoming with his approach in “Madness par excellence,” however, I believe it lies in Blanchot’s inability to think the notions of impersonality and singularity alongside one another. He still lacks, in the 1950s, a suitable way of thinking the poet’s dissolution, his collapse in anonymity or impersonality, without implicitly reverting back to a formulaic notion of a poetic essence. He lacks, in other words, a way of thinking the singularity of effacement which the ‘discovery’ of the neuter, by the early 1960s, will help to facilitate. As a result, when Hölderlin falls into madness, there is nothing to save his uniqueness from being entirely effaced either by clinical, or critical, generalities. Indeed, one cannot help but think back to those lines from The Madness of the Day quoted at the outset of this chapter, in which the clinicians perform a reduction so comprehensive in scope that they reduce the protagonist to nothingness. “Where are you?” they ask. “Where are you hiding? Hiding is forbidden, it is an offence.” It might be said that Blanchot has performed a not dissimilar move with respect to Hölderlin and Artaud in his essays of the 1950s. He has lost sight of singularity in his haste to make a general point. One can only wonder whether there might there be some way to hold together, non-​dialectically, the poet’s compulsory ruination and his uniqueness. Might there be some way to think, side-​by-​side, the effacement of the poet’s personality and his singularity –​ without subordinating the one to the other? This is not just a question for clinical psychiatry, but an immensely important question for psychoanalysis, as well. Derrida offers a possible way forward in “La Parole soufflé.” The solution, Derrida argues, cannot simply be to shelter the unique against the violence of conceptualization through some recourse to moral or aesthetic precautions. It is not enough to declare that the unique must be left alone, held aloft, beyond the violent grasp of discursive thematization or reductivism. This would be to construct something akin to a theology of the Unique. No, Derrida insists –​it cannot simply be a matter of protecting the unique, or the singular, against essentialization. Instead, Derrida calls for an approach that interrogates the ostensive unity, coherence, and authority of discourse itself. By interrogating discourse to the point of its sheer rupture, one might then ‘dig-​out’ from its shaken core the traces of pure difference, singularity, and genuine uniqueness upon which all commentary is based. “No commentary,” writes Derrida, “can escape [the shortcomings of Blanchot’s approach], unless it destroys itself as commentary by exhuming the unity in which is embedded the differences (of madness and the work, of the psyche and the text, of example and essence, etc.) which implicitly support both criticism and clinic.”45 45 Ibid., 174.

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To move beyond the shortcomings of Blanchot’s 1951 essay, in other words, a dialogue would need to be opened by critical and clinical discourse on the very question of what they each presuppose as their shared condition of possibility. Such a dialogue would be “borne upon that which is beyond their two trajectories, pointing toward the common elements of their origin and their horizon.”46 What each discourse might then discover, by interrogating itself about its own condition of possibility, is that its own putative unity, coherence, and authority is founded upon the very play of differences which it works so doggedly to silence and exclude. Discourse depends for its very possibility upon the very thing it refuses to acknowledge. And it is this very element which has ruptured its coherence in advance. What I want to examine, in the second half of this chapter, is the manner in which Blanchot, from the early 1960s onward, begins to reformulate his discourse on madness in precisely such terms, leading ultimately to the radical rethinking of madness found within his 1970 “Note for a New Edition.” These developments will establish an important precedent, I want to argue, for the manner in which Blanchot comes to engage with psychoanalysis in his later writings. 8

A Murmuring Emptiness

In 1970, Blanchot composes a “Note for a New Edition” meant to accompany the latest republication of his “Madness par excellence,” written nearly twenty years prior. This supplemental note, portions of which would then re-​appear three years later in The Step Not Beyond, marks a significant moment in Blanchot’s ongoing engagement with the question of madness. Blanchot makes several key points in his 1970 note, each of which problematizes and contests, with requisite discretion and subtlety, his own earlier account of madness from the 1950s. First, he suggests that madness is a word perpetually at odds with itself, interrogative through and through, and foreign to any facile affirmation or discursive elucidation. It is a word, in short, that puts both its own possibility, and that of language itself, into question. Building from this claim, Blanchot then asserts that the word ‘madness’ can only be inscribed in discourse as having been always already barred or revoked. It cannot be thought in a unified manner as a self-​identical concept. Nor can it be thought in relation to any kind of 46 Ibid., 169.

82 CHAPTER 2 continuous, poetic destiny –​for madness involves a form of temporality that is not linear, but proleptic. As such, madness might be understood to receive its paradigmatic expression in the figure of Dionysus and the thought of eternal return, which rupture themselves before ever being whole. To engage with the question of madness is necessarily to speak in two voices at once. It is to operate both within discourse and always already beyond it. This might be accomplished, Blanchot suggests, through a kind of writing intensely attentive to the movement of the neuter. Blanchot will refer to this as fragmentary writing. Significantly, it will be in fragments that nearly all of Blanchot’s most important remarks on psychoanalytic theory, from 1970 onward, will be found. Let us now see how he arrives at these points. An initial catalyst for many of these shifts in Blanchot’s thinking is Foucault’s groundbreaking, 1961 doctoral thesis. In a reminiscence from 1986, Blanchot states that he first read Foucault’s Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, at the urging of Roger Caillois, “when the text was still virtually an untitled manuscript.”47 Foucault’s text was highly impactful upon Blanchot, though less as a history of madness, he claims, than as a history of limits –​an account of those gestures, decrees, and actions, by which a culture excludes something, banishing it outside itself. “While [Foucault] dealt only indirectly with madness,” Blanchot states, “he examined above all that power of exclusion which, one fine or awful day, was implemented in a simple administrative decree, a decision that divided society not into the good and the evil, but the reasonable and the unreasonable …”48 What is important within Foucault’s account “is the act of exclusion itself and not what is excluded, the division and not what it divided.”49 Foucault’s great discovery was to show us something about the conditions of possibility for the creation of a reasonable discourse and a reasonable society. The domain of reason was established precisely on the basis of an act of exclusion in which madness was cast to the outside and reduced to silence. The intricacies of Foucault’s argument in his 1961 doctoral thesis have been widely recounted and critiqued now for over half a century. It is not my aim here to contribute anything new to these ongoing discussions. Rather, my aim is simply to highlight those aspects of Foucault’s argument that Blanchot is most keen to emphasize in his writings, and to develop a sense of how Foucault’s groundbreaking text came to influence the course of Blanchot’s own thinking about both clinical psychiatry and psychoanalysis. 47

Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot,  Foucault, Blanchot, trans. Brian Massumi and Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Zone Books, 1987), 64. 48 Ibid., 65. 49 Ibid., 65.

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Central to Foucault’s book is the claim that madness is far more historical than is usually assumed. In an important essay from October 1961, Blanchot retraces the major nodes of Foucault’s argument on this point. We are reminded, for instance, that during the Renaissance, madness permeated everyday life, circulating throughout society in an unfettered manner. Western culture was for the most part hospitable to the phenomenon of madness, indulging its secret extravagance, its devastating knowledge, and its liberation of mysterious voices. All of this changes, however, with Descartes. In his essay, Blanchot glosses Foucault’s position with respect to the advent of Cartesian rationalism in the following terms. “Descartes … reduces madness to silence; this is the solemn break of the first Meditation: the refusal of any relation with extravagance that is required by the advent of the ratio.”50 As reason installs itself in Descartes’ philosophy as a form of thought inseparable from power, madness is excluded as “the impossible itself.”51 It is banished from the realm of human possibilities. To mad is not to be fully human. Beginning around the middle of the seventeenth century, the spirit of Cartesian thought, which denies madness any place within the domain of reason, relegating it to silence and oblivion, begins to take socio-​political form, with the construction of great internment houses throughout Europe. By administrative decree, the so-​called ‘great confinement’ is implemented. The mad are rounded-​up and forcibly confined alongside beggars, heretics, the disabled, the elderly poor, and any others who give some evidence of derangement. Here, madness mixes indiscriminately with other radical experiences, “experiences that touch upon sexuality, religion (atheism and sacrilege), or libertinage.”52 With the great confinement, madness is not yet synonymous with mental illness; rather, it is understood as a form of anti-​ social degeneracy, aberration, or ‘unreason’ which demands expulsion from the realm of social propriety and productivity. The attribute common to all those grouped together within the houses of internment, as Foucault tells us, was their inability to work –​and thus, their inability to produce, circulate, or acquire wealth. This, surely, is one of the meanings behind the famous pronouncement, in the preface to his 1961 text, that madness is, “in all probability, nothing other than the absence of an œuvre.”53 According to Derrida, the positing of a connection between madness and the absence an œuvre comprises nothing less 50 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 197. 51 Ibid., 199. 52 Ibid., 198. 53 Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006), xxxi.

84 CHAPTER 2 than “a fundamental motif of Foucault’s book.”54 Yet its meaning extends far beyond the historical fact that mad individuals, during the period of the great confinement, were forcibly sequestered alongside other individuals likewise considered incapable of productive labor. In an illuminating essay, Seferin James proposes two additional registers in which Foucault’s statement might be interpreted. First, it might be interpreted to refer to the fact that there is an “absence of a body of work representing madness as madness.”55 In the wake of the great confinement, madness is not only excluded from the world of reason, but utterly silenced. Madness is kept in isolation behind high walls symbolizing an interdiction against all dialogue, rendered mute, along with all other “excesses of thought and the heart.”56 Blanchot compares this silence to “a sort of murmuring emptiness at the heart of the world.”57 To say that madness is the absence of an œuvre, in this sense, is to make note of the fact that there is no body of work, no discourse, in which this murmuring emptiness is allowed to speak for itself. If discourse limits itself to that which is reasonable, or possible, then that which is utterly unreasonable can only be left in silence. It is only with the development of clinical psychiatry, and the redefinition of madness as mental illness, toward the end of the 18th century, that the possibility of speaking about madness, and of categorizing it, first comes to the fore. No longer are the mad mixed together indiscriminately with others deemed unreasonable. They are now brought into asylums where they can be supervised and treated precisely as mad. “Madness gains specificity,” as Blanchot writes, “it renounces being a negative strangeness and instead takes its place in the calm positivity of things to be known.”58 The individual most responsible for this shift, at least in France, was the clinician Philippe Pinel. A catalyst for the French asylum reforms of the early of the 19th century, Pinel ushered in the practice of so-​called ‘moral therapy’ in which an ostensibly more compassionate, humane approach to the treatment of the mentally ill was to be pursued. In his 1961 thesis, however, Foucault is hardly impressed by the efforts of either Pinel or his English counterpart William Tuke. According to Foucault, these supposed reformers (guided by a bourgeois morality) had simply devised a less overtly violent, but ultimately 54 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 65. 55 Seferin James, “Derrida, Foucault and ‘Madness, the Absence of an Œuvre,’ ” Meta: Research in Hermeneutics 3, no. 2 (December 2011): 385. 56 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 198. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 199.

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more nefarious way of oppressing the insane. In the wake of the Pinel reforms, the violence of physical management is replaced by the violence of another kind: the violence of mental oppression, social exclusion, and verbal isolation. In the mental asylum, speaking of madness is at last permitted, so long as madness itself does not speak. The language of clinical psychiatry, which is a language specifically dedicated to a discussion of madness in its various forms, thus remains, according to Foucault, little more than “a monologue by reason about madness.”59 This new clinical language comprises, in other words, nothing but a more insidious, more devious method of keeping madness itself muted. Indeed, as Blanchot writes, “to reduce madness to silence, whether by rendering it, in effect, mute (as in the classical age) or by confining it in the rational garden of a species (as in all the ages of enlightenment),” has been the “constant move of every Western culture concerned with maintaining a line of partition.”60 Though the forms of maintaining this partition change over the course of history, what remains constant is that wherever clinical discourse speaks of madness, madness itself remains voiceless. It lacks an œuvre of its own. Here one encounters the revolutionary significance of Freud, who opens a path toward a profoundly new approach. It was Freud, as Foucault recounts, who was the first to open a dialogue between madness and unreason. Arriving on a clinical scene where madness had been reduced to the status of an object, Freud attempts to uncover the unreason which modern psychology and psychiatry had tried so hard to suppress. Though Freud’s clinical interest, as we know, was primarily in the treatment of neurosis, not psychosis, his great contribution is nevertheless to have restored unto unreason its voice –​its ability to speak, beyond the stifling confines of the institutional straight-​jacket. What had been reduced to a murmur, from the time of the classical age onward, is finally granted by psychoanalysis the dignity of being heard aloud. In his 1961 essay on Foucault, Blanchot acknowledges Freud’s contribution in precisely such laudatory terms. Blanchot’s tone with respect to psychoanalysis as a whole, however, is far more ambivalent. The upshot is remarkably similar to what we have already encountered in “The Speech of Analysis.” If Freud is to be praised for restoring unto unreason its ability to speak, then the institution of psychoanalysis itself is nevertheless to be critiqued for its totalizing ambitions, its yearning to accommodate itself to mainstream culture, and its subservience to the ‘powers that be.’ Blanchot chides psychoanalysts, in his

59 Foucault, History of Madness, xxviii. 60 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation. 199.

86 CHAPTER 2 essay on Foucault, for their reluctance “to abandon some of the demands of the knowledge we call scientific, which wants to situate madness in a manner progressively more precise … and within a temporal, historical, and social framework.”61 As a result, Blanchot maintains, psychoanalysis runs the continual risk of stifling and suppressing the very thing that Freud had worked so hard to liberate. It runs the risk of silencing unreason anew. In certain places, Foucault adopts a somewhat harder line on Freud than Blanchot does. Having stipulated the importance of Freud’s intervention in the history madness, Foucault goes on to suggest that the differences between the father of psychoanalysis and an institutional clinician like Pinel might ultimately be far smaller than they seem. Much as Pinel had claimed for himself, in the name of order, law, and morality, a position of absolute authority as Father or Judge, so had Freud done much the same, simply transferring unto the analyst all the power structures which Pinel had set up within the asylum. The violence of the analytic situation, Foucault suggests, is but a dissimulated variant of the violence of the asylum. If Freud allows unreason to speak, then it is only allowed to speak within the limits of a pre-​existing order which circumscribes it from the start. Is this not but another (undoubtedly ingenious) way of reducing it to silence? Without question, the status of psychoanalysis in Foucault’s text is nothing if not complex. In a paper delivered at a 1991 conference celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of The History of Madness, Derrida discusses the nuanced and highly-​ambivalent assessment of Freud’s legacy found within Foucault’s text,62 arguing that the latter portrays Freud as something of a liminal figure, positioned on the borderline between two ages, two epochs. At times, Foucault sees Freud as a quintessentially contemporary thinker. At other times, Freud is explicitly linked to the trajectory of 18th and 19th century thought, still bound to the fetters of classicism. This logic of indeterminacy, as it pertains to Foucault’s treatment of Freud, is aptly illustrated, according to Derrida, by the topology of the chiasm, which allows one to think of a given point as falling simultaneously, without contradiction, both inside and outside a given series. Freud, for Foucault, is both classical and post-​classical; he falls both inside and outside the contemporary era. “This double articulation, this double movement or alternation between opening and closing that is assured by the workings of a hinge, this coming and going, indeed this fort/​da of a 61 62

Ibid., 200–​201. See Jacques Derrida, “ ‘To Do Justice to Freud’:  The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis,” in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I.  Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

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pendulum or balance –​that is what Freud means to Foucault.”63 Indeed, it is precisely this strange liminality, this logic of limits, which Blanchot wants to emphasize throughout his writings on madness from the 1960s onward. Building upon Foucault’s insights, Blanchot wants to think about what happens to the inside when it tries to reabsorb, or fold back within itself, the very thing it has always already excluded. 9

Internalizing the Outside

Beyond the history of silencing, and the exclusion from discourse that it entails, there is yet another way in which Seferin James proposes to read Foucault’s statement about the absence of an œuvre. Rather significantly, madness as the absence of an œuvre might be understood to serve as nothing less than the hidden condition of possibility for history itself. As Foucault writes in his 1961 preface, “The necessity of madness throughout the history of the West is linked to that decisive action that extracts a significant language from the background noise and its continuous monotony, a language which is transmitted and culminates in time; it is, in short, linked to the possibility of history.”64 Foucault further writes, “The plenitude of history is only possible in the space, both empty and peopled at the same time, of all the words without language … The charred root of meaning.”65 It is by excluding the absence of an œuvre that the domain of reason creates the very space in which it can understand itself and tell its story. Such an exclusion is what lets the clarion voice of reason be heard. The process of exclusion and silencing, according to Foucault, is a process ever renewing itself throughout history, allowing for the continuous development of discourse, which manifests itself in meaningful works encoded in the language of reason. Wherever history and reasonable discourse are found, a prior exteriorization of the absence of an œuvre has always already been enacted.66 63 Ibid., 64. 64 Foucault, History of Madness, xxxii. 65 Ibid. 66 Another important interlocutor in the context of this broader discussion, of course, is Heidegger. Though a detailed examination of Heidegger’s engagement with Hölderlin’s poetry would lead us far beyond the scope of this book, it should be recalled that Heidegger sees Hölderlin as the ‘essential poet,’ a poet of Being and of German destiny. More to the point, Heidegger eschews any overt emphasis on Hölderlin’s biographical itinerary, or madness per se, choosing instead to focus on the historical significance of the latter’s poetry. Hölderlin’s poetry paradigmatically exemplifies, for Heidegger, the

88 CHAPTER 2 This point, in particular, makes a big impression upon Blanchot, who prominently cites the notion of “madness as the absence of an œuvre” in The Infinite Conversation.67 Blanchot wants to play, moreover, with the notions of ‘work’ and ‘the work’ by encouraging a slippage between them. Gesturing back to his literary essays of the 1950s, Blanchot proposes that the writer is the one who seeks to produce the work, and yet whose concern for this work “engages him in the experience of that which in advance always ruins the work and always draws it into the empty depths of worklessness [désoeuvrement], where nothing is ever made of being.”68 The paradigmatic example of this is Orpheus, whose desire to reach the origin of the work leads him ultimately to refuse, or denounce, the work itself –​as though making his concern for the work synonymous with “the movement of unconcern in which the work is sacrificed.”69 Orpheus shows us that the possibility of the work is contained strangely in its impossibility. What makes the existence of the oeuvre possible, is the désoeuvrement, the idleness and incapacity, which is nothing less than its hidden resource and origin. If, for Blanchot, the work is elaborated on the basis of the work’s absence –​ then, for Foucault, the work’s absence serves as nothing less than the basis for history. In both cases, the condition of possibility for (the) work is located strangely in its impossibility. It is located, in other words, in the absence of (the) work which it excludes from its midst. It is by forcibly excluding the absence of the work, that the work of history establishes itself in all its coherence. Indeed, something similar might be said with regard to the workings of society or culture. As Seferin James writes, whatever a society forces to the outside “creates the exterior that defines the interior of that society as much as what

inaugural or foundational capacity of the poetic word with respect to history. Consider the following lines from Jennifer Anna Gosetti-​Ferencei: “In Hölderlin’s poetry, Heidegger argues, the poetic word grounds Being, establishing history by pressing on into the danger of metaphysical forgetting in order to gather the traces of remembrance. Though Heidegger rejects a biographical account of the poetry, Heidegger explains Hölderlin’s madness as the consequence of this danger.” Jennifer Anna Gosetti-​Ferencei, Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 71. Given more space, it might be interesting to explore the relation between Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin, and Blanchot’s own writings on Heidegger/​Hölderlin from the 1940s, particularly in light of Foucault’s subsequent theorizing about the conditions of possibility for history. 67 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 420. 68 Ibid., 200. 69 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 175.

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that society claims to stand for.”70 The way in which a society understands its own values and norms, in other words, is always based upon its prior rejection of what it understands itself not to be. It is against this backdrop of exclusion, exteriorization, and marginalization that the internal coherence of societal order is both constituted and maintained. This story, however, has a twist. As Blanchot tells us, it does not suffice merely to exclude the absence of the work. It is required, rather, that the excluded element be safely locked-​away inside the confines of the very structures that reject it. For otherwise the legitimacy of the inside cannot be deemed absolute. This is the key point which Blanchot emphasizes in his commentary on Foucault. Having excluded the absence of the work, and founded their imperialistic grandeur upon this exclusion –​history, discourse, and society then each attempt to reabsorb the excluded element back into their systems of total coherence and meaning, refusing to exempt it from their authority or supervision. The outside must be incorporated back into the inside. The impossible must be brought back into the fold of the possible. Nothing must be allowed to escape the cold embrace of the totalizing whole. If the work of history, the work of discourse, and the work of cultural production are thus each elaborated on the basis of the work’s absence, then neither history, nor discourse, nor culture will not rest, Blanchot suggests, until they have “reduced this absence to insignificance, or … rendered it proper to the understanding of a new order or the harmony of a new accord.”71 It is in pursuit of total understanding and absolute order, that society internalizes the absence of the work within mental institutions, confining it within the straight-​jacket of nosological uniformity and naming it madness. Toward a similar end, literature proceeds to internalize the absence of the work within its pages, allowing the murmur of the inexhaustible outside to be retained in muted form, on the unbending condition that it be subordinated unto the service of that great cultural product that it calls the Work. In both mental institutions and great works of literature, a similar outcome is reached. The outside, the absence of the work, is enveloped and subdued by the very interiority that excludes it. The absence of the work is rendered “inoffensive, innocent, indifferent,” while remaining imprisoned “within the firm limits of a partitioned, cellular space.”72

70 James, “Derrida, Foucault and ‘Madness, the Absence of an Œuvre,’ ” 389. 71 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 420. 72 Ibid.

90 CHAPTER 2 10

“A Word Perpetually at Odds with Itself”

This, roughly speaking, is the point at which Blanchot begins to call into question the assumptions earlier made within his own “Madness par excellence.” No work of discourse can approach a subject like madness and creativity in a manner that aspires to innocence or transparency. No work of discourse can operate from a presumption of internal unity or coherence. For even as the work (of history, of discourse, of society, etc.) endeavors to subdue and recuperate the absence of the work which it excludes, the absence of the work responds silently, maddeningly, by drawing the work into relation with something outside itself, beyond its control. As Blanchot writes, in an essay first published in April 1967, the absence of the work “always cites the work outside itself, calling it always in vain to its own unworking [désoeuvrement] and making the work re-​cite itself, even when it believes it has its sights on ‘the outside’ that it does not fail to include –​rather than working to exclude it.”73 No attempt at recuperation can ever be exhaustive. For even though the discourse of clinical psychiatry may enthusiastically name and classify all the various forms of madness, aiming at total coherence and total comprehension, the initial act of violent exclusion upon which the very possibility of this naming is based introduces a non-​coherence into discourse that no amount of labor can fully suture. This is because the inclusion of the word ‘madness’ within the language of reasonable discourse necessitates the prior exclusion of the very thing it names: the hidden, silent, “other madness … which has no name to enclose it.”74 Whether deployed within the discourse of history, the discourse of literary criticism, or the discourse of clinical practice, the word ‘madness’ can do little to dissimulate the fact that it derives its status, meaning, and possibility from the always prior exclusion of this other madness: the sheer absence of the work. Increasingly, throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Blanchot comes to portray this non-​coherence, ever more hyperbolically, in terms of rupture. Consider the following lines from The Step Not Beyond: “That madness is present in every language is not enough to establish that it is not omitted in them. The name could elude it in that the name as name gives to the language that uses it for a peaceful communication the right to forget that with this word outside of words language’s rupture with itself is introduced …”75 Rupture has 73 Ibid. 74 Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 21–​22. 75 Ibid., 46.

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always already been introduced into any language or discourse that attempts to speak of madness. It is precisely this rupture, moreover, to which Blanchot alludes, when he writes that “the madness that shatters language in leaving it apparently intact, leaves it intact only to accomplish in it its invisible destruction.”76 Blanchot’s point is that discursive language is ruptured, or shattered, by the very thing that makes it possible. The discourse on madness can only be understood as unitary to the extent that it has been, from the very start, radically disunified by the act of violent exclusion, or exteriorization, that founds it. The very thing that makes discourse coherent, one might say, has always already made it non-​coherent. This is the first major point that Blanchot makes in his “Note for a New Edition” from 1970. In a portion of the note which Blanchot proceeds to include some three years later in The Step Not Beyond, he writes that madness “would thus be a word perpetually at odds with itself and interrogative through and through, such that it would put its own possibility into question and thereby the possibility of the language that would include it, and therefore the interrogation as well, inasmuch as it belongs to the play of language.”77 If ‘madness’ is a word perpetually at odds with itself, this is not merely because what it signifies is a state of separation from all stable identity (as in the fissure of personality traditionally marked by the term ‘schizophrenia’), but more so because in order for this word to have any meaning at all, the very referent to which it ostensibly refers must have always already been expelled, cast to the outside of discourse, relegated to silence. Simply by virtue of including the word ‘madness’ within its carefully circumscribed borders, language as a whole is turned outside itself, ruptured in advance of being whole. In Blanchot’s 1970 note, this rupture receives its paradigmatic exemplification in the figure of Dionysus, the ‘mad god.’ It is in Dionysus that Blanchot discerns an emblem for the non-​coherence and rupture which are evident in any discourse which attempts to speak of madness. Among the gods, Dionysus is rather unique. He bears, by virtue of his divinity, an unmistakable relation to presence. He not only abides in the glory of eternal presence, but also seeks to make himself manifest, with revelatory suddenness, in the concreteness of the temporal present. Yet, as a specifically ‘mad god,’ his presence also involves nothing less than the dispersal of all presence. He embodies, in Blanchot’s words, the “presence of the outside which has always already suspended, forbidden presence.”78 Dionysus thus emblematizes the seemingly paradoxical, 76 Ibid. 77 Blanchot, The Blanchot Reader, 126. 78 Ibid., 127.

92 CHAPTER 2 incompatible alliance between absolute presence and the radical exteriority of the outside which disperses all presence before it can be given.79 His presence is always pre-​empted, suspended, by his madness. His madness, meanwhile, can only be instantiated through the revelatory suddenness of his presence. Before being whole, before being divine, before being anything, he is always already fractured, torn apart, limb by limb, by these internal contradictions that make him never coincide with himself. Blanchot has much to say about the tearing apart, the breaking up, of Dionysus –​not only in the 1970 note, but throughout his writings of the period. As Blanchot writes, in an essay initially published over two installments, between December 1966 and January 1967, “The fragmentation of the god is not the rash renunciation of unity, nor a unity that remains one by becoming plural. Fragmentation is this god himself, that which has no relation whatsoever with a center and cannot be referred to an origin …”80 The fragmentation exemplified by Dionysus does not refer back to any form of initial unity in relation to which it might be considered a lack or a deficiency. Dionysus is not, in other words, a god fragmented –​as though fragmentation were simply a predicate that could be attributed to his otherwise unified nature. Blanchot’s point is more radical than this. Dionysus is fragmentation itself –​a fragmentation outside any ­reference to an original unity, oneness, or presence. Likewise, by virtue of the exclusion from whence it derives its possibility, any account of madness –​whether it be clinical or critical in nature –​is necessarily ruptured before ever being whole. Madness does not merely rupture a preexisting, unified discourse the way in which someone might break apart or scatter a puzzle that has been completed; rather, madness engenders a rupture, a fragmentation, in which discourse is ruined, turned outside itself, before ever coming into existence. Discourse comes into being always already non-​identical with itself. To write about Hölderlin’s madness, as Blanchot had sought to do in the early 1950s, is necessarily to find discourse drawn outside itself, placed in relation with what contests its very possibility, rupturing its closure and coherence in advance. Blanchot, however, wants to go even further than this. In his final point within the 1970 “Note for a New Edition,” he wants to suggest that the rupture in question not only affects discursive language, but also time. For how can the onset of madness be understood to correspond to any fixed moment of temporal presence, he asks, if it doesn’t even correspond to itself? Madness, as Blanchot writes, is “barred by its inscription.”81 This means, as we have just seen, 79 Ibid. 80 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 157. 81 Blanchot, The Blanchot Reader, 126.

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that it only appears in discourse as always already ruptured in relation to itself. Would this not suggest, therefore, that there pertains to madness (and hence, to all writing on madness) a uniquely non-​linear form of temporality –​one in which the present is taken away even before it is given? Indeed, it is toward such a suggestion that Blanchot’s 1970 note builds. Such a temporality, which can be called proleptic, receives its paradigmatic expression in the thought of eternal return. And it is specifically in relation to the eternal return that Blanchot, in the concluding lines of his 1970 note on madness, brings together the names of Hölderlin and Nietzsche. 11

The Prolepsis of Return

Why does Blanchot see the eternal return as a paradigmatically ‘mad thought’82? In the simplest of terms, it is because the coherence of the eternal return, like the divine yet ravished body of Dionysus, presupposes its own non-​coherence. To think the thought of the eternal return is to be confronted with the impossibility of thinking it, just as to communicate its truth is to postpone indefinitely all such communication, as Nietzsche himself illustrates in the pages of Zarathustra.83 Less a doctrine than a simulacrum of a doctrine, the eternal return ruins in advance the basis upon which it might be thought, communicated, or affirmed. Far from serving as the foundation for a new p ­ hilosophy, the eternal return necessitates the radical ungrounding of all foundations –​including its own. How does the eternal return achieve this anarchic effect? Blanchot proposes that this effect is engendered by virtue of the fact that the eternal return not only vacates time of all origins and ends, but also brings about the suspension of all presence. “The demand of the return,” he writes, “excluding any present mode from time, would never release a now in which the same would come back to the same.”84 This is the key point. With presence suspended, there remains no foundation upon which identity or sameness can be established or maintained, and thus no moment in which the eternal return itself might either be thought or communicated. Through the ungrounding of presence that it engenders, the eternal return renders its own presentation, its own discursive elaboration, impossible. 82 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 276. 83 For a detailed discussion of Nietzsche’s eternal return and it connection to Blanchot’s writings, see Joseph D. Kuzma, The Eroticization of Distance: Nietzsche, Blanchot, & the Legacy of Courtly Love (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016). 84 Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, 11.

94 CHAPTER 2 This is both the thought’s profundity and its great paradox. In The Step Not Beyond, Blanchot writes that “the law of the return … as soon as one has ­approached it by the movement that comes from it … would lead us to take on … the temporality of time in such a way that this temporality, suspending, or making disappear, every present and all presence, would make disappear, or would suspend, the authority or the foundation from which it announces itself.”85 If time is circular, without either beginning or end, then what Blanchot here calls ‘the movement’ of eternal return has necessarily always already suspended its own foundation, the foundation for the very proclamation, or communication, that would announce the eternal return as law. Such is the nature of the eternal return’s prolepsis –​it takes away, disperses, or suspends itself, before it can be fully instantiated. The law of eternal return, one might say, necessitates the withdrawal of its own condition of possibility. Before the thought of the eternal return can be affirmed, it is vacated of all content and all presence, ruined in advance by the ungrounding of time which it entails. Fundamentally at odds with itself, the eternal return carries within itself “the extravagance … of relations that exclude one another.”86 Its coherence requires its always prior non-​coherence. Here the connection to madness becomes rather clear. The eternal return and madness each presuppose that something is taken away, suspended, or excluded before it is given. Like madness, which can only be admitted into reasonable discourse on the condition that madness as the absence of an œuvre has been barred or excluded  –​the eternal return withdraws in advance every moment of presence in which it might be posited, thought, or affirmed. Incommensurable with all fixed-​identity, the eternal return, like madness, can only be thought as other than itself. Not only is the thought of eternal return shattered before it can be thought, but so, too, is any individual who would attempt to think it. On this final point, in particular, the influence of Pierre Klossowski looms large in Blanchot’s 1970 note. As I move toward the closing pages of this chapter, I would like to consider Klossowski’s influence upon Blanchot’s ­evolving view of madness. 12

Every Name in History

I began this chapter by alluding to Klossowksi’s important role in bringing the poems of Hölderlin’s madness to a wider audience in France. His position with 85 Ibid., 15. 86 Ibid., 22–​23.

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respect to Nietzsche’s work was no less significant. Beginning with his translation of The Gay Science in 1954, Klossowski established himself as a key figure in the French reception of Nietzsche’s writings. With his seminal essay, “Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody,” published in 1958, and his book, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, published in 1969, this reputation was only further validated. Indeed, it is difficult to overestimate how important these texts are to the manner in which Blanchot, from the late 1950s onward, comes to think about Nietzsche’s writings, especially in connection with the question of madness. Other than perhaps Foucault, there is arguably no thinker who influences Blanchot’s stance on the question of madness, from the 1960s onward, more profoundly than Klossowski. A point of considerable emphasis, in Klossowski’s writings on Nietzsche, is the dissolution of personal identity that follows in the wake of the death of God. In Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, Klossowski argues that if the death of God is understood as an occurrence that opens up the soul to the possibility of becoming multiple, it is the revelation of the eternal return that specifically brings about the successive realization of each of these identities. The death of God, one might say, clears the ground upon which a scintillating play of Dionysian transmogrification might take place. The adherent of the vicious circle, according to Klossowski, must accept “the dissolution of his fortuitous soul in order to receive another, equally fortuitous. In turn, having passed through the entire series, this dissolved soul must itself return, that is, it must return to that degree of the soul’s tonality in which the law of the Circle was revealed to it.”87 Each identity is dissolved so that a succession of other identities might take its place. In due course, the specific identity that affirms this dissolution will eventually return, only to be once more dissolved, replaying a sequence that has no beginning or end. The self that discovers the eternal return is thus neither primary nor ultimate, neither fixed nor privileged. It has, rather, always already been preceded by host of other identities, just as it must be followed, in turn, by a host of others. The Dionysian ‘immortality’ engendered by the vicious circle of return is never a specifically individual immortality, for the circle of return suppresses all notion of enduring selfhood, just as it suspends all presence. The self plays host to a parade of simulacra, a multiplicity of others, becoming every name in history. ‘I’ is a multitude that has always already been preceded by a multitude. It is never sameness that returns, but only difference itself.

87

Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W.  Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 55.

96 CHAPTER 2 On the basis of Klossowski’s argument, Blanchot comes to propose a series of key takeaways, each of which has relevance to our discussion here. Blanchot proposes that Nietzsche, under the sway of the eternal return, was indeed perhaps mad, “but of a madness other than ours, other than his.”88 For if madness, like the eternal return, does not present itself in the form of unity or self-​presence, then one cannot affirm it as one’s own, much less verify it as such. Moreover, what the word ‘madness’ names in the discursive language of presence, unity, and sameness is something that can only shatter this very language. Consequently, even though both Hölderlin and Nietzsche are linked, in the 1970 note, to the dual-​enigmas of madness and the eternal return, Blanchot maintains that one cannot definitively place these men under the sentence of madness any more than one can attribute to them mastery over the ‘thought of thoughts.’ Hölderlin was mad –​but was he? Nietzsche affirmed the thought of eternal return –​but did he? Madness (like the eternal return) remains nothing but a perpetual question, an interrogation, with respect to itself. Even when we think we have pinned it down –​in a thought, in the clinic, in a poem –​it has dispersed itself in advance, drawing the one who thinks it into relation with an otherness outside of all identity, unity, or presence. But a final point still needs to be addressed. In the midst of this dispersion, this Dionysian transmogrification, might there be some way of thinking, side-​ by-​side, impersonality and singularity –​without subordinating the latter to the former? On the basis of Klossowski’s reading, it now becomes clear how this might be accomplished. Singularity, which Blanchot understands to refer to irreducible difference “outside the reality of the whole,”89 can indeed be retained in relation to Hölderlin’s madness, or Nietzsche’s, so long as this singularity is never tied to any notion of a fixed personal identity. Rather than privileging the singularity of the self, Blanchot follows Klossowski in proposing to emphasize the radical singularity of the moment itself –​outside all presence –​in which the eternal return of pure difference exposes the self, language, and time to the radical otherness of the infinite outside. In an essay which he claims is inspired by “the path opened and followed by Pierre Klossowski,”90 Blanchot develops this point still further. To speak of Nietzsche’s madness, Blanchot suggests, cannot be simply to speak of his final, sad collapse in Turin, or his subsequent internment in the Jena sanitarium. These are but the terminal events of a strictly linear, anecdotal recounting 88 Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, 40. 89 Ibid., 109. 90 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 451.

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of Nietzsche’s itinerary. To speak of the dissolution of Nietzsche’s identity in more profound terms is to speak of the dissolution required of any individual who formulates and seeks to think the thought of eternal recurrence. What is at stake here is not the uniqueness of any particular individual, but the uniqueness of the thought itself which makes pure difference return, and above all, the singularity of the fortuitous moment in which the established order is interrupted. With the thought of eternal return, Nietzsche “opens the circle, [and] marks its point of singularity (point at which the non-​circularity of the circle would be defined) by means of which closure and rupture coincide.”91 The singularity, the trace of pure difference, which is retained in Blanchot’s later account of madness is the temporal singularity marking the site where the rupture of time occurs (without occurring). Singularity, in other words, is encountered at the very moment where the affirmation of the eternal return disperses itself as it takes place, rupturing in advance the language that would announce it, the self that would experience it, and the temporal order that would recuperate it. Singularity thus pertains directly to what, in the previous chapter, we had discussed in terms of the neuter. It opens a space in which a relation with the other always yet to come might be announced, gesturing us toward a rethinking of community, beyond all representation, identity, or unity. 13

Writing the Rupture

Where, then, does all this leave us with regard to psychoanalysis? As it turns out, one might already see, in Blanchot’s evolving approach to the question of madness, a prescience of the manner in which he will seek to engage with psychoanalysis in his later writings, especially in The Writing of the Disaster. In the concluding pages of this chapter, I want to suggest several ways in which Blanchot’s evolving approach to the question of madness, throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, sets the stage for his subsequent writings. If every discourse, whether critical or clinical, is ruptured before being whole, then we find ourselves faced with the ineluctable demand of taking into account, as it were, two movements (or two languages) at once. According to Blanchot, this is precisely the challenge with which psychoanalysis, in both its theoretical and clinical capacity, is confronted. In dealing with the relationship between unreason and madness, for instance, psychoanalysis must take into account a 91 Ibid., 278.

98 CHAPTER 2 movement that “points to a course back toward the absence of time –​the return to a non-​origin,”92 while at the same time taking into account another movement which “develops in accordance with the sense of a history and repeats this history in certain of its moments.”93 The former movement is linked by Blanchot to a “non-​dialectical experience of language,” while the latter movement is characterized by dialectical discourse.94 On one side of this rupture resides the murmur of the work’s absence, the call of the infinite outside. On the other side of this rupture lies the work of discourse which seeks to recuperate everything, either clinically or critically, within the totality of its knowledge. Blanchot, to his credit, refuses to privilege one side of the breach over the other. He does not advocate a hermetic retreat into the murmur of mystical silence, any more than he places his trust, uncritically, in the prodigious power of discourse. His aim is rather to develop strategies for maintaining the interval or rupture that holds the two sides apart. He wants to develop strategies for holding-​open this interval in which, as we saw within the preceding chapter, the movement of another speech might announce itself. If the authority of discourse is to be acknowledged as inescapable, as Blanchot believes it must, then so, too, must we acknowledge the anteriority of radical otherness which precedes and ceaselessly interrupts this authority. If the dialectical march of history is to be acknowledged as unyielding, then so, too, must one acknowledge the radically non-​dialectical movement of return which has always already dislodged from time every moment in which the unity, totality, or absolute closure of discourse might be affirmed. Indeed, this is one of the reasons why Blanchot’s engagement with the question of madness is so important to our appreciation of his later writings. It is in the engagement with madness that we already encounter the need for acknowledging, beyond dialectical history, that other history which exceeds the bounds of discursive elaboration. This other history will become a major focus for Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster. There, he will describe it as a history “foreign to a succession of moments,” in which “nothing of the present ever happens,” and which excludes any possibility of a beginning or ending.95 In lines that clearly recall his discussion of madness in the 1970 note, Blanchot will go on to write: “The other history would be … always calling forth the void of a nonplace, the gap that it is, and that separates it from itself.”96 92 Ibid., 201. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid. 95 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 138. 96 Ibid., 139.

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To engage with psychoanalysis is necessarily to speak in two languages at once, and to acknowledge two forms of history at once. In this way alone might we hold-​open the rupture, the singular breach, in which difference returns. In this way alone might the revolutionary potency of psychoanalytic contestation be maintained apart from the totalizing ambitions of institutional authority and the prevailing political order. This becomes the task which Blanchot himself, in his writings on psychoanalysis from the 1970s onward, comes to assume. For Blanchot, from the 1960s onward, it is specifically by means of the fragmentary that such a task is undertaken. The fragmentary, in Blanchot’s texts, names something quite distinct from a mere collection of fragments. It does not refer to the simple breaking-​up of an already constituted whole. Nor does it name an identifiable genre of literature, criticism, or philosophy. The fragmentary, for instance, has nothing to do with the aphoristic. For unlike the aphorism, which is closed and bounded, marking the breakup of a prior totality, the rupture marked by the fragmentary bears no relation to any pre-​existing order. In this sense, the fragmentary is intimately linked to the figure of Dionysus, who exemplifies a tearing-​apart that likewise precedes all wholeness. Acknowledging a debt of influence to Blanchot, Deleuze and Guattari write, in the pages of Anti-​Oedipus, that the fragmentary, as Blanchot envisions, it puts into play “fragments whose sole relationship is sheer difference  –​fragments that are related to one another only in that each of them is different –​ without having recourse either to any sort of original totality (not even one that has been lost), or to a subsequent totality that may not yet have come about.”97 The fragmentary does not refer back to any origin, or point toward a future telos in which it might be reconciled within some form of totality. The fragmentary refers instead to the prolepsis of a rupture, outside all presence, which always already precedes that which is ruptured, and ceaselessly interrupts it anew. Despite the succinctness of such formulations, the fragmentary remains incredibly difficult for us to think. This is because the fragmentary is neither a style, nor a form, of writing by means of which something could be represented. Nor is it even a way of classifying a text. If the fragmentary is to be defined at all, Blanchot suggests, it is perhaps as “a new kind of arrangement not entailing harmony, concordance, or reconciliation, but that accepts disjunction or divergence as the infinite center from out of which, through speech, relation is to be created.”98 Such an arrangement, according to Blanchot, “does not

97 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-​Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, 42. 98 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 308.

100 CHAPTER 2 compose but juxtaposes, that is to say, leaves each of the terms that come into relation outside one another, respecting and preserving this exteriority and this distance as the principle –​always already undercut –​of all signification.”99 In the chapters that follow, I will turn my focus to a consideration of Blanchot’s engagement with psychoanalysis in The Writing of the Disaster, a text comprised entirely of fragments, responding to the fragmentary demand. There I will show how Blanchot’s discussion of various psychoanalytic concepts and themes –​from narcissism to the primal scene, from the death drive to trauma –​is framed by his unwavering attempt at bearing witness to the difference which precedes all sameness, the otherness which precedes all selfhood, and the anteriority of rupture which constitutes every totality as breached before ever being whole. 99 Ibid.

pa rt 2  

∵

­c hapter 3

Anti-​Narcissus 1

The Provocation

In an interview from January 2002, Phillippe Lacoue-​Labarthe makes a strident assertion about the impetus for Blanchot’s engagement with psychoanalysis in The Writing of the Disaster. “I’m convinced,” Lacoue-​Labarthe tells his interviewer, Pascal Possoz, “that what [Blanchot] wanted to destroy is, quite simply, the conventional conception of narcissism.”1 These words are jarring for their lack of subtlety. Destruction is not a term one typically associates with Blanchot’s critical approach –​the word’s resonances are too brutishly dialectical, too Hegelian. Yet the spirit of Lacoue-​Labarthe’s comment is nonetheless clear. An interrogation of narcissism is undertaken in the pages of The Writing of the Disaster which places under scrutiny nothing less than the received interpretation of one of the most foundational notions in the psychoanalytic conceptual apparatus. It is the nature of this interrogation, and its consequences, that I am interested in exploring here. Indeed, for psychoanalysis, there is little that is more fundamental to the development of the human psyche  –​or more ubiquitous in contemporary culture –​than narcissism. “All the positions of being are narcissistic, and of not-​being,”2 Blanchot writes, in one of several fragments from The Writing of the Disaster that engage explicitly with the topic. “[Narcissism’s] effect is easily discernible in everything and everywhere.” In the forty years that have elapsed since Blanchot wrote these words, his observation has been borne-​out by socio-​cultural tendencies that have increasingly normalized self-​obsession, as well as by technological developments that have made the glorification of self-​image pervasive across a variety of digital platforms. In a recent book, Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell have argued that we are living in the midst of a “narcissism epidemic.”3 We tirelessly construct profiles and avatars to represent and idealize ourselves. And even when we are momentarily drawn out of our proverbial shells by the presence of an attractive ‘other’ –​this person is inevitably someone who reminds us either of ourselves, or who we wish we were. 1 Lacoue-​Labarthe, “Interview with Pascal Possoz,” 106. 2 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 125. 3 Jean M. Twenge and William K. Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic (New York: Free Press, 2009).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004401334_​0 05

104 CHAPTER 3 But is this so-​called ‘cultural narcissism,’ the maladaptive propensity for grandiosity, self-​absorption, and arrogance –​at the expense of genuine relationality –​ultimately the target of Blanchot’s critique? Or might his critique of the conventional conceptions of narcissism strike at something more foundational? One of my objectives in this chapter is to examine Blanchot’s commentary on narcissism in order to identify what, if anything, might be capable of escaping this imperialism of the self. Does narcissism have an outside? And, if so, then what might this outside be? Narcissism is so insidious, Blanchot wants to argue, not because it blindly denies the existence of anything that puts the self into question. Rather, it is insidious because of how it seeks to put these very things to work, recuperating them (not unlike nationalism, at the level of the political) in the name of an ever-​expansive notion of unity and integration. Narcissism is so insidious because of its propensity for absorbing all forms of non-​selfhood back into the economy of the self, the same. Such recuperation, however, can never be seamless. It always leaves behind, as we saw in the preceding chapter, an imperceptible rupture, an unassimilable remainder. If narcissism, in other words, might be understood as utterly unavoidable, and inescapable, then it is nevertheless Blanchot’s contention that it presupposes certain conditions of possibility which remain, at least in part, radically unassimilable within the scope of its presumptive mastery and omnipotence. One of Blanchot’s aims is thus to bear witness to those remainders which resist either recuperation or representation. Less a ‘destruction’ of narcissism, I want to suggest, than a sober, nuanced interrogation of its limits and conditions of possibility, Blanchot’s engagement with psychoanalysis in the pages of The Writing of the Disaster leads us to a consideration of what might exceed narcissism’s tyrannical grasp. 2

Every Poet Is Narcissus

In discussing the myth of Narcissus, in The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot takes Ovid’s version of the story as his immediate point of reference. Narcissus, in this canonical tale, is greatly adored by Echo. Like the other nymphs, she is enamored with his youthful, handsome appearance. But cruelly, he rejects her. This compels the gods to punish Narcissus for his insensitivity by condemning him to fall in love with the reflection of his own image in the scintillating surface of a mountain pool. Every time that Narcissus extends his arms toward the image, in hopes of embracing what he sees, the image in the water fragments and eludes his grasp. Consigned to the futility of inexorable longing, Narcissus

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descends into melancholy, and dies. Where his lifeless body had fallen, the nymphs find nothing but a flowering plant which today bears his name. Construed in this manner, Ovid’s version of the myth cannot help but appear recuperative in at least two respects. First, the myth is recuperative in that it seeks to make something meaningful and productive out of death. The death of Narcissus generates, in a moralistic sense, a lesson about vanity and the dangers of self-​love. In dying, Narcissus tacitly delivers an exhortation against entrusting oneself to the fascination of images which are not only deceptive, but also which render all love mad. This is the most basic register within which the myth can be interpreted. The story of Narcissus is a simple cautionary tale. But there is also another sense in which the myth of Narcissus might be considered recuperative. Not only does the myth put death to work in the service of a moralistic lesson, it also puts otherness to work in the service of self-​ discovery. More specifically, the myth shows us that it is only by way of the image of the other that Narcissus first comes to know himself. Thanks to an image in a mountain pool, which plays the role of a mirror, Narcissus not only discovers himself, but proceeds to fall in love with what he discovers. Key to Ovid’s myth is the notion that the self is not given as present to itself from the start. Rather, it needs to pass by way of the other in order to recognize itself, for the first time, as itself. Only by means of the reflection in the water can Narcissus know himself to be the image’s source. Such an interpretation is neatly glossed by Pierre Legendre, who remarks that the water as a mirror “presents the origin as an outcome … an effect of representation.”4 The origin of the image is not given as primary, and then later simply represented. Instead, it is only within representation, within recuperative knowing, that Narcissus discerns for the first time the source of the image, namely, himself. Der Anfang ist das Resultat, as Hegel puts it: ‘The origin is the result.’ This is the importance of the clear, reflective surface which facilitates the act of eventual recognition. Without the reflected image of the other, recognition of the self is impossible. We will encounter, later in this chapter, a rather similar dynamic at play in Lacan’s famous account of the mirror stage. The myth of Narcissus thus proves to be more than just a simple moralistic fable. It illustrates, instead, nothing less than the condition of possibility for the emergence of selfhood. At the origin of selfhood, self-​regard, and self-​ love, one finds an initial encounter with otherness. Yet, no so sooner is this encounter with otherness emphasized than it is immediately put to work,

4 Pierre Legendre, Law and the Unconscious: A Legendre Reader, ed. Peter Goodrich (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 220.

106 CHAPTER 3 and recuperated, in the name of identity and sameness. It is folded back into the self, integrated into the freshly emergent narcissistic whole. This is the proverbial ‘bait-​and-​switch’ displayed in the myth of Narcissus. Despite the appearance of an allocentric emphasis, what ultimately receives top-​billing in the story is neither the image of the other, nor the water as a mirror, but the nascent self whose emergence these elements dutifully work to condition. It is only in relation to Narcissus’ self-​regard that everything else in the story derives its value. Otherness appears only in the form of representation, playing little more than a supporting role in the drama of self-​discovery and self-​loss. Seeking to illustrate this tendency common to narcissism, Blanchot looks to poetry. As Alexander Mathäs reminds us, poetry’s connection with narcissism is a most intimate one. “Long before the Freudian popularization of Narcissism, late eighteenth-​century German writers used the Greek myth of Narcissus to explore the understanding of the self.”5 Narcissism, in this context, m ­ anifested itself paradigmatically in the poetic desire to create an idealized image of the self and to merge with this image. For Goethe, Herder, and Schiller, among others, poetry “provided an opportunity to reflect themselves,” writes Mathäs. “In spite of all efforts to reject or conceal the narcissism inherent in self-​representation … narcissistic impetus underlies these writers’ art.”6 Poetic activity, in the age of Goethe and beyond, is often portrayed as indistinguishable from the writer’s ongoing process of autopoiesis, or ‘self-​making.’ We see this narcissistic tendency, for example, in the famous final stanza of Goethe’s “Prometheus, from 1773. Here, Goethe offers a classic exemplification of the narcissistic creator-​genius who defies the established order by poeticizing a race of beings in his own likeness. During the Romantic era, the poet not only produces like Prometheus a replication of his own likeness, but he aspires to merge with this likeness so that the distinctions traditionally separating life and art come to be completely dissolved.7 This tendency receives arguably its most concise formulation in August Wilhelm Schlegel’s assertion, “Every poet is Narcissus,”8 upon which Blanchot comments in The Writing of the Disaster. Harkening back to Blanchot’s

5 Alexander Mathäs, Narcissism and Paranoia in the Age of Goethe (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 13. 6 Ibid., 206. 7 For a robust discussion of the trope of autopoiesis in the so-​called ‘Goethezeit,’ and beyond, see Joseph D.  O’Neil, Figures of Natality:  Reading the Political in the Age of Goethe (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). 8 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 135.

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extended commentary on Jena Romanticism in an essay from 1964, one might see Schlegel’s statement, which appears in a fragment from the journal Athenaeum, as emblematic of “a certain romanticism according to which creation –​ poetry –​is absolute subjectivity and the poet a living subject in the poem that reflects him, just as he is a poet by virtue of having transformed his life into poetry.”9 No longer content to see the poetic exigency as merely involving the production of beautiful works, the Jena Romantics understand the poet to be the living site wherein poetry “will produce itself in a movement without term and without determination.”10 Poetry, here, becomes synonymous with everything, swelling to become coextensive with subjective consciousness itself. It is “taken over not only by life, but even by biography,”11 Blanchot tells us. Not within works, verses, or theories, but in the poet’s desire to live romantically and make his character ‘poetic’ is the essence of poetry now found. To say that “Every poet is Narcissus,” is thus to say that one recognizes in the poetic act a clear and unmistakable reflection of its creator –​just as one recognizes, in the omnipotent, Promethean creator, a poeticizing force which is one with its creation. All facets or life and death are seemingly gathered together in the absolute narcissism of the continuous, poetic act. The poet has indeed become Narcissus, and Narcissus, in turn, has become indistinguishable from his poem. This, in short, is how Ovid’s version of the myth is presented to us by Blanchot. It is presented as a tale in which everything is recuperated.12 Death, the water, the reflection, the image of the other –​all these elements are put to use productively and without remainder, in service of the self, the same. Blanchot, for his part, does not dispute the appeal of such a reading. It satisfies, among other things, our desire for narrative-​closure, for definitive beginnings and endings. Blanchot, however, wants to bear witness to the manner in which the recognition, recuperation, and integration emphasized within Ovid’s account might nevertheless be forestalled by the very process through which they are instantiated. In commenting upon the myth of Narcissus, Blanchot wants to offer, in other words, an alternative reading in which he seeks to draw-​out the aspects of the myth that he believes Ovid forgets. 9 Ibid. 10 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 354. 11 Ibid., 357. 12 The myth of Narcissus exists in several forms. The version contained within Ovid’s Metamorphoses was written in 8 ce, and is usually considered the myth’s most elaborate account.

108 CHAPTER 3 3

Anti-​Narcissus: or, What Ovid Forgot

When Narcissus bends over the spring and gazes upon its glistening surface, Blanchot envisions the demigod, in contrast to his portrayal in Ovid’s tale, not recognizing himself in the fluid image that the water sends back to him.13 Far from an event of epiphanic self-​discovery, or lustful self-​admiration, the gaze produces no knowledge, no discovery, whatsoever. Indeed, this event of non-​ recognition is crucial to what Blanchot wants to say about the myth as a whole. Narcissus, according to Blanchot, does not see himself in the water, first and foremost, because the water is not a mirror. It does not produce “a distinct and definite image.”14 What Narcissus sees, instead, is an image which resembles no person or thing, but which exudes the attraction of the fathomless void. Playing perhaps on the homophony of the Latin terms imago and vorago, the latter referring to a whirlpool, chasm, or abyss,15 Blanchot’s contends that the allure of the image produces an effect akin to the disorientation, the vertigo, conjured by an abyss. And what does Blanchot further tell us about the nature of this dangerously seductive image? He tells us that what Narcissus sees is “the unstable unknown of a representation without presence, which reflects no model.”16 In contrast to our conventional understanding of the image as a stand-​in for an absent thing, or a representation that helps us grasp the thing in its ideality, Blanchot is gesturing us toward a radically different notion of the imaginary in which images refer us back, vertiginously, toward nothing but other images, ad infinitum. Without an original model, a prototype, or any point of fixed presence to orient them, the images Narcissus encounters are less representations, or even simulations, than they are simulacra. In his ambitious collage-​work, Narkissos (1976–​91), the San Francisco-​based artist Jess adopts an outlook on the Narcissus gaze that resonates strongly with Blanchot’s depiction here. The 6-​by-​5 foot canvas places images of multiple Narcissi into proximity with one another in a radically decentered space. The work produces its vertiginous, undeniably seductive, effect by displaying images pasted upon images, without establishing any logical or causal chain of reference among them. As the critic David Lomas writes, “Narkissos is a vast echo chamber, an assemblage, a comprehensive résumé of the visual history and interpretation of the Narcissus myth. Everything in the work is a citation taken

13 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 125. 14 Ibid., 134. 15 Legendre, Law and the Unconscious: A Legendre Reader, 246. 16 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 134.

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from another source.”17 This approach strikes a neat parallel with Blanchot. Indeed, for both Blanchot and Jess, the traditional representational precession of the original, the source, is displaced in favor of a notion of the imaginary unmoored from every point of origination. Recuperation is indefinitely suspended. Everything here becomes a reflection of a reflection, a citation of a citation, a translation of a translation –​without beginning or end.18 Already in his 1951 essay, “The Two Versions of the Imaginary,” Blanchot had moved in this direction by differentiating between images that stand-​in for (or idealize) absent objects, and those other images which threaten to relegate us “to the neutral double of the object in which all belonging to the world is dissipated.”19 When Blanchot writes here of ‘neutral doubling’ he is suggesting that distance and difference, in the context of such images, no longer mediate between a thing and its image, but rather, inhabit each image internally, separating each image from itself, and thus rendering all hope of representational coherence vain. In this realm of the ‘other’ imaginary there exist only relations of pure difference. No reference to either identity or fixed presence is to be found. It is no wonder, then, that what Narcissus encounters amid the dizzying surface is in fact something akin to madness itself –​a madness, as Blanchot insists, which is commensurable no less with any notion of a self, or ego, than it is with any concept of time oriented in relation to the present. Ensnared by the allure of this ‘other’ imaginary, Narcissus falls outside of the world, time, and sense. Here we begin to discern what Ovid forgot. If Narcissus is incapable of recognizing himself amidst the dizzying iridescence of simulacral images, then to what extent, we might ask, is he really Narcissus at all? Having never been touched, or addressed, by the other –​and lacking any sense of self-​identity –​ he seems, at most, a kind of ‘Narcissus-​in-​waiting,’ a mere he/​it. Nameless, selfless, solitary, lacking any real language, outside of the world and time, Blanchot describes him as existing “in the oscillating, intermediary zone between a consciousness not yet formed and an unconsciousness that lets itself be seen and thereby turns vision into fascination.”20 Unknown to himself and others,

17

David Lomas, Narcissus Reflected: The Myth of Narcissus in Surrealist and Contemporary Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 90. 18 Other examples of ‘non-​recuperative’ artworks dealing with the Narcissus myth could be mentioned. Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus Garden, a major installation from 1966, comes to mind. So, too, does the work of Columbian artist, Oscar Muñoz, who portrays his own disappearance in a politically-​inspired work entitled, Narcisos en proceso. 19 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 262. 20 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 126.

110 CHAPTER 3 Narcissus is precisely not the Narcissus of traditional narcissism. He is someone anonymous, impersonal, neutral. He is someone as yet undetermined. We might coin the phrase ‘Narcissus-​Cataphor’ to describe this unnamed, pre-​ personal entity, gazing over the watery surface in search of his postcedent. Or we might go as far as Blanchot himself, in The Writing of the Disaster, and call him simply ‘anti-​Narcissus,’ the one who does not recognize himself in the effect he produces. Either way, this pre-​personal demigod, without name or character, offers us less an illustration of how one makes oneself on the basis of identification with an image, than a case-​study in how the seductive pull of the ‘other’ imaginary draws everything toward dissolution, non-​coherence, and madness. In The Writing of the Disaster, these two readings –​Ovid’s and Blanchot’s –​ are provocatively juxtaposed with one another. While the former perspective emphasizes recognition, integration, and the production of selfhood, the latter perspective emphasizes the vertigo, impersonality, and the non-​recognition associated with a fall into the ‘other’ imaginary. While one emphasizes possibility, the other emphasizes impossibility. How can the same mythical gaze, we might ask, elicit such differing effects? Indeed, with this question we arrive at Blanchot’s main point. For if Narcissus seems bound up, inextricably, with anti-​Narcissus, then perhaps this is a way of suggesting that the very possibility of narcissism is somehow inseparable from its impossibility. Blanchot’s response to the Jena Romantics thus becomes clear. Surely, there is a sense in which Schlegel is right. Every poet is Narcissus. But crucially, this means that the poet must also be anti-​Narcissus. For one must not repeat Ovid’s mistake and neglect to consider the non-​recuperable aspects of the Narcissus gaze. One must remember that in gazing at the watery surface, there is a sense in which Narcissus sees no discernable reflection and recognizes nothing –​but rather falls, outside all knowledge, power, and time into the ‘other’ imaginary where he can only lose what he has never yet possessed: a self. In this space, pervaded by the absence of time, the work drifts into the absence of the work. Nothing is produced. To the extent that Narcissus is always undercut by anti-​Narcissus, in other words, there is no consolation to be attained through poetic activity. For one cannot transform, through the labor of writing, the immobile dissolution undergone by anti-​Narcissus into a form of subjective experience, or absorb it within some romantic version of an expansive, poetic consciousness. As anti-​ Narcissus, the poet is necessarily excluded from what he writes, recognizing within the poem no trace of himself, or his personality, just as he recognizes nothing at all in the vertiginous abyss of simulacral images divorced from any origin. Lest we mistake this for yet another iteration of Roland Barthes’s

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famous La mort de l’auteur, Blanchot insists that the poet’s exclusion from what he writes should not be conflated with any facile notion of authorial death, for death is every bit as impossible to attain here as self-​recognition or self-​expression. “[U]‌nable even to be present by virtue of the non-​presence of his very death –​he has to renounce all conceivable relations of a self (either living or dying) to the poem which henceforth belongs to the other, or else will remain without any belonging at all.”21 Washed away amid the vertiginous scintillation of images, anti-​Narcissus dies before having ever been born. Anti-​Narcissus, as poet, would thus be the one who, through poetry, bears witness to the impossibility of narcissism. His poetry, irreducible to any form of self-​expression, would testify unto the otherness and the dying which ­exceed every whole, remaining irreducible to every form of ­narcissistic ­recuperation. In offering this counter-​reading of the myth, however, Blanchot is seeking to do more than just reinterpret the story of Narcissus. He is implicitly seeking to propose a critique of the notion of narcissism itself. He wants to suggest that the very conditions that make narcissism possible, even inescapable, are also what compromise narcissistic sameness and omnipotence. This, it seems, is the point toward which Lacoue-​Labarthe is gesturing when he claims that Blanchot is engaged in a ‘destruction’ of the conventional conception of narcissism. But how precisely does this critique, undertaken implicitly within Blanchot’s text, proceed? What kind of narcissism is Blanchot interested in contesting here? And on what basis can it be said, with regard to the prevailing psychoanalytic accounts, that the possibility of narcissism presupposes its impossibility? To begin addressing these questions, let us turn toward a closer consideration of the so-​called conventional conceptions of narcissism. 4

Primary Narcissism and the Recuperation of Otherness

The challenges posed by such an inquiry are considerable. First among these is the challenge posed by terminology itself. Going back to Freud, and even earlier, to Havelock Ellis, who first used the notion in a clinical context at the end of the 19th century, narcissism has been a term fraught with ambiguity, riven by disparate, seemingly incommensurable, meanings. Béla Grunberger, in his classic 1971 study, writes of the “paradoxical polysemy of the concept 21 Ibid., 135.

112 CHAPTER 3 [of narcissism].”22 To say nothing of its various cultural appropriations (and misappropriations), the clinical notion of narcissism has been defined in such widely-​divergent ways over the course of its relatively short history that coming to offer a unitary view of its essential features becomes far more difficult than those who might readily identify narcissism, cleanly and simply, with pathological self-​absorption might ever assume.23 Traditionally, there have been (in keeping with the Freudian taxonomy) two narcissisms: primary and secondary, each of which will have to be unpacked in turn. While Freud’s various accounts of secondary narcissism, though far from homologous, remain roughly commensurable with one another throughout the course of his writings, his various accounts of primary narcissism are anything but consistent. In the roughest of terms, one might understand secondary narcissism to involve an attempt at recapturing a state of early infantile life associated with the feeling of omnipotence. Within this state, conventionally identified as primary narcissism, the infant feels itself to be fully-​integrated and whole. It takes itself –​in its ostensive unity –​as a first love-​object. Throughout the course of one’s life, it is supposedly to some version of this idealized state that we all seek to return. First loves die hard.24 Some clarification, though, is immediately needed. For there exist in Freud’s writings two distinctly different ways of describing primary narcissism. In the account of primary narcissism developed within Freud’s hastily composed 1914 text, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” primary narcissism is not really ‘primary’ at all, but already an intermediary stage, situated between auto-​eroticism and object-​love.25 Indeed, it is out of auto-​eroticism that primary narcissism 22 23

24

25

Béla Grunberger, Narcissism:  psychoanalytic essays, trans. Joyce Diamanti (New  York: International Universities Press, 1979), 2. The somewhat superficial conception of narcissism as egoism, vanity, or megalomania has been widely disseminated in numerous, contemporary socio-​cultural accounts, most famously in Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism:  American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1979). One might also distinguish between a ‘healthy’ amour de soi, understood by Rousseau (among others) as the ‘self-​love’ that defines humans in their natural state, and amour propre, or narcissistic pride. What comprises the point of distinction between the two? For Rousseau, the origin of narcissism resides in the desire for social distinction, and in a feeling of one’s own importance. Based on this account, inequality and narcissism stem from the same source. Freud’s very first reference to narcissism appears in the Leonardo essay from 1910, where it is used as a description for the object-​choice of homosexuals who “look for a young man who resembles themselves and whom they may love as their mother loved them.” Standard Edition, vol. 7, 145, n.  1. Other early references to narcissism, pre-​dating the 1914 “On Narcissism” essay, can be found in the Schreber case history (c. 1911) and the second essay of Totem and Taboo (1912–​3).

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first emerges. To speak of auto-​eroticism is to describe a state in which each of the pre-​unified sexual drives, or what Freud calls ‘component’ drives, pursues satisfaction in a relatively autonomous and disorganized manner. If the ego is defined in conventional terms as a unified image of the body, then no such entity can be thought to exist at this early stage. The infant’s fragmented body exists merely as a field of erogenous zones still unintegrated into any corporeal whole. In the absence of central organization, the component drives have not yet been steered to converge upon a common, unified object. Rather, they play upon the various regions of the infant’s own body more or less independently of one another, each seeking sexual gratification. The eroticism of the mouth functions quite separately from the eroticism of the anus; the eroticism of the toes, for example, functions separately from the eroticism of the genitals. To speak of auto-​eroticism, is to speak of a sexuality yet unrelated to any notion of either a whole self, or a whole object. It involves an anarchy of the drives, a polymorphous perversity.26 In a manner that remains largely unexplained by Freud, something remarkable then occurs that allows for the simultaneous emergence of primary narcissism and the original libidinal cathexis of an ego. Freud suggests that in the very midst of auto-​eroticism ‘something’ is added to the auto-​erotic drives –​“a new psychical action,” he calls it –​which brings about the beginning of primary narcissism.27 Contemporaneous with this occurrence, libido cathects a newly founded ego, forming a psychic unit commensurate with the unified, bodily schema. Primary narcissism and the ego thus emerge side-​by-​side as a surmounting of the state of original organic chaos. In this account, all sexual objectification is initially self-​directed, with the sexual objectification of the other person arising only later. In a text from 1911, Freud expresses this developmental itinerary in the following terms:  “There comes a time in the 26

Auto-​eroticism itself might be understood as preceded by, and dependent upon, an even earlier stage in which the sexual drives are satisfied in tandem with the self-​preservative drives. This dependence of the sexual drives upon the self-​preservative ones –​wherein the former aim at the same object as the latter –​is what Freud calls Anlehnung, or ‘anaclisis.’ Indeed, at this primitive stage of development, even the word ‘object’ is a misnomer. For although the sexual drives depend upon the self-​preservative ones for their perpetuation, and thus inevitably find themselves directed toward the same ‘object’ –​for instance, the mother’s breast –​this object is hardly perceived by the infant as belonging to a unified person. Moreover, the infant’s relation to this object soon comes to be split, with the sexual drives detaching themselves from the self-​preserving ones, whose sole aim is that of acquiring sustenance. Having detached from their oral, self-​preserving counterparts, the sexual drives lose their original object and turn toward phantasy. This move marks the beginning of auto-​eroticism. 27 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 14, 75.

114 CHAPTER 3 development of the individual at which he unifies his sexual drives (which have hitherto been engaged in auto-​erotic activities) in order to obtain a love-​ object; and he begins by taking his own body as his love-​object and only subsequently proceeds from this to the choice of some person other than himself.”28 What follows over the course of the individual’s life is then an interminable see-​sawing of libidinal cathecting and decathecting regulated by the economic principle of conservation. Psychic energy is alternately invested and disinvested in a variety of internal and external objects. Freud’s descriptions of this process and the analogy he selects to illustrate it are well-​known. He writes of “an original libidinal cathexis of the ego, from which some is later given off to objects, but which fundamentally persists and is related to the object-​cathexes much as the body of an amoeba is related to the pseudopodia which it puts out.”29 The more the ego is cathected, the more object-​libido comes to be depleted. The more that objects are cathected, the more the ego-​libido is depleted. In conformity with the First Law of Thermodynamics the total quantity of libidinal energy is never diminished, but merely made subject to perpetual transfer. Libido flows back and forth, from self to object, and then back again, in response to the vicissitudes of life. It is in passionate love relations [Verliebtheit], Freud writes, that object-​ libido is maximally employed. By contrast, in a paranoiac’s apocalyptic deliria (such as those of Judge Schreber), one encounters a wholesale libidinal disinvestment of the external world such that the ‘freed’ libido inevitably turns back around the ego, cathecting it to the maximum. This latter, regressive tendency (characteristic of certain forms of psychosis) to reactualize an idealized state of lost, infantile omnipotence is one of the ways Freud describes secondary narcissism. Of course, secondary narcissism need not be so extreme. Anytime object-​libido is withdrawn from an object and redeployed into the immediate service of the ego, such as in the case of mourning, a narcissistic process is involved. And to the extent that the ego is understood, in accordance with Freud’s first topography, as the proverbial reservoir from which all libido springs, a certain measure of narcissism can be seen to persist as an indelible structural feature of the self.30 All external objects can

28 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 12, 60–​61. 29 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 14, 75. 30 With the transition to the so-​called “second topography” around 1920, this ceases to be the case. In The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud makes the id the ‘reservoir’ out of which all cathexes are sent to objects. This leaves the ego with no autonomous energy sources of its own. The “new psychical action” explanation for the emergence of the ego is likewise replaced by a new account in which the ego originates through identification with

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be decathected; the narcissistic ego, by contrast, remains protected from the possibility of total libidinal disinvestment. Hence, we arrive at the inescapability of narcissism that so many thinkers, including Blanchot himself, come to discern. As Jean-​Bertrand Pontalis writes, narcissism must be understood as “an insurmountable and permanent component of the human being.”31 From the moment that egoic life begins, narcissism remains an irremissible structure of the psyche. To the extent that I have an ego, I exist within a state of narcissism. Much, however, remains curious about this account. Perhaps most quizzical perhaps is the moment when auto-​eroticism first gives way to the emergence of the narcissistic ego. What is this “new psychical action” to which Freud refers? How exactly does it bring about the contemporaneous emergence of primary narcissism and egoic life? To address this question, one might readily consult Lacan, whose depiction of the emergence of the narcissistic ego has been so influential. In terms borrowed (without attribution) from Henri Wallon, Lacan famously describes the mirror stage as a phase in infantile development in which the narcissistic ego is formed through identification with the specular image of the other. In his 1949 paper, Lacan describes this process as one in which the infant, at some point between six and eighteen months of age, recognizes in a mirror, or elsewhere, the form of another human.32 The moment is significant, because until this point, the infant hasn’t yet fully adjusted to extra-​uterine life. Abiding in a state characterized by motor incapacity and a lack of central nervous system integration, the infant is completely reliant upon others for feeding, cleaning, and general care. The infant, we might say, exists in a state of sheer helplessness, or Hilflösigkeit. With its bodily experience fragmented, precariously disunified, the infant suddenly finds itself confronted, not unlike Narcissus in Ovid’s myth, with an attractive image of unity and cohesion. The perceptual grasping of this image comprises a kind of primal epiphany for the infant, for it makes the body which had been experienced internally as chaotic, suddenly appear permanent, solid, and whole, anticipating a future situation in which the infant’s helplessness might be fully overcome. The ego is thus constituted

31 32

love-​objects that had been previously cathected by the id, and subsequently lost. The ego here is an aggregate of identifications. J. B. Pontalis, “The birth and recognition of the ‘Self,’ ” in Frontiers in Psychoanalysis: Between Dream and Psychic Pain, trans. C. and P. Cullen (London: Hogarth Press, 1981), 136. Indeed, the mirror (or reflective surface) in question need not be an actual mirror. The image of the parent, hovering in front of the infant, more than suffices to comprise an ideal image suitable to draw the baby’s enamored gaze.

116 CHAPTER 3 through an identification with this image of wholeness, an image which provides the infant with an ideal trajectory for the further integration of the self. Of course, as Lacan insists, the image in question is anything but ‘real.’ The infant’s entire relation to the spectral image is couched in misrecognition, misidentification. It is an image of unity and completion where neither are actually present. The primary narcissistic ego is ultimately little more than an imaginary construct predicated upon the infant’s refusal to acknowledge the reality of its fragmentation, lack, and incompletion. Moreover, the ‘mirror experience’ disunifies the infant as much as it unifies it. This is because it creates, at the very core of the newly constituted ego, a schism between the fragmented psyche that appropriates the image, and the fully-​integrated object which it takes itself to be –​or wishes itself to become. Because this object is necessarily located outside of the infant, in the external world, an aporia quickly announces itself: to recognize myself as myself, is inevitably to see myself outside of myself, as other. Every moment of self-​recognition becomes, at the same time, a moment of self-​alienation, because the representation of myself with which I identify is precisely not me at all, but something imaginary, something other. My ego is a ruptured construct characterized by the endless, futile attempt to cover over the gap separating me from my ideal image.33 This rift is not a contingent, but a constitutive, element of egoic life. The narcissistic ego is not subject to alienation and division; rather, it is on the very basis of alienation and division that the narcissistic ego is formed in the first place. In light of all this, Lacan understands a central aim of psychoanalytic therapy to be (in contrast to Hartmann’s approach, for example) the progressive weakening of the ego, leading to an acknowledgement on the part of the patient that any future search for imaginary wholeness and completion is futile. Though the ego and its ideals will perhaps never cease to exert their seductive and deceptive influence, a successful transference will mitigate the suffering caused by this ongoing deception, allowing the patient to find humor and perhaps even enjoyment in the ceaseless play of imaginary identifications. In several respects, then, Lacan’s account of narcissism might appear to anticipate Blanchot’s approach. Lacan thoroughly dismantles, for instance, all naïve belief in the presumptive coherence and self-​sameness of the ego. Lacan posits the ego not only as an imaginary object, but also as fundamentally split, alienated in relation to itself. It is both founded and sustained through misidentification. Like Freud, but in a more comprehensive manner, Lacan shows 33

A similar dynamic is repeated in the individual’s passage from imaginary to symbolic identification, namely, in the individual’s successive identifications with the various subject positions provided by language and culture.

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us that the self-​absorption and self-​enclosure which appear to characterize primary narcissism are conditioned by something outside the self. Narcissism is always conditioned, and in fact structured, by some form of externality or otherness.34 The notion of an ego “free from conditioning by the other’s presence can be posited only as a heuristic ‘fiction.’ ”35 Before there can be a self, otherness must already be in play. These are unquestionably radical, Copernican moves which would appear to make Lacan an ally with respect to Blanchot’s account. And yet, despite these strong hints of allocentrism in Lacan’s account, a nagging similarity to Ovid remains. As in the myth of Narcissus –​reflection, mirroring, and otherness are not emphasized in their own right, but dutifully put to work and recuperated in the name of the self, the same. Though a constitutive relation with otherness is emphasized, it is ultimately toward the construction of a primary narcissistic ego that this imaginary relation leads. The other is once again reduced to the status of a representation which is violently grasped, captured, and absorbed. As Josh Cohen explains, “Self-​recognition and the apparently stable, differentiated ‘knowledge’ it brings, involves a kind of violent effacement of the otherness that conditions it.”36 The infant ‘uses’ the image of the other, greedily and violently, in order to construct and sustain its fantasy of the self. To use a Hegelian phrase, one might say that otherness, understood as a condition of possibility for the installation of the narcissistic ego, is ‘negated.’ This means that it is transcended while being simultaneously destroyed and preserved. Though indispensable to the formation of the ego, otherness is ultimately absorbed back into the economy of sameness, playing little more than a supporting role in a story whose clear focus is the installation and sustenance of the narcissistic ego. Moreover, in embracing this recuperative approach, Lacan –​like Ovid –​neglects any overt consideration of the ‘darker’ aspects of the specular gaze: the vertiginous slide into a space of simulacral fascination where all belonging to the world is dissipated, where all sense is suspended, and where time is dislodged from any relation to the present. Indeed, both Freud and Lacan fail to take into account the manner in which the experience of Narcissus, as Blanchot writes, inevitably opens onto the vertigo of anti-​Narcissus –​that nameless 34

This point comes to be discussed in great detail throughout Pleshette DeArmitt’s excellent book, The Right to Narcissism: A Case for an Im-​Possible Self-​Love (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 35 Josh Cohen, “ ‘I-​not-​I’: narcissism beyond the one and the other,” in Narcissism: A Critical Reader, eds. Anastasios Gaitanidis and Polona Curk (London: Karnac, 2007), 38. 36 Ibid., 39.

118 CHAPTER 3 doppelganger who abides amid the eternal drift of images divorced from all fixed reference. While Lacan’s account, for example, offers us an admittedly profound elucidation of one side of the experience of the imaginary, there is another, darker side that he fails to notice. This is the side in which Narcissus does not discover himself in the play of images. This is the side where Narcissus, strictly speaking, is not Narcissus at all. In the space of the ‘other’ imaginary, there is no moment of recognition and no self-​discovery to be had –​only a fall into the scintillating abyss where nothing is produced, nothing is put to work. To fall here, as Blanchot suggests, is not to discover oneself in the attractive visage of the other, much less to grasp this otherness as one’s own. It is rather to slide toward a dissolution that forestalls any consolidation of fixed identity and precludes any recuperation of otherness. Yet this is still only half of the story. For, recalling Ovid, we note that it is not only the specular image of the other that is recuperated in the classical myth –​it is also death. And while Freud curiously neglects to include any detailed analysis of the Narcissus myth in his writings, he nevertheless follows Ovid perhaps more closely than he realizes, by implicitly proposing a link between narcissism and a state of quasi-​monadic enclosure which in sameness and unity abide. In order to explore this connection, however, we must turn toward Freud’s other account of primary narcissism. 5

A Return to the Zero-​Point

In the years immediately preceding his 1914 “On Narcissism” essay, and then with ever greater frequency in the years following it, Freud speculates on occasion about the existence of a primal, objectless state in which the infant lacks any relationship whatsoever to the outside world. The first instance of such a depiction can be found in his 1911 text, “Formulations Regarding the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” where Freud posits this hypothetical state as one in which the organism comprises a biologically closed system in relation to its environment. Though the word ‘narcissism’ is not specifically invoked in this text, the situation which Freud describes here bears an unquestionable resemblance to the state of biological enclosure with which the notion of primary narcissism, by the 1920s, will become increasingly associated in his work. Freud describes primary narcissism, in these latter writings, as a state of quasi-​ monadic oneness in which neither subjects nor objects, persons nor things, are present. “This state would not be defined by a cathexis of the ego,” Laplanche explains, “since it would be prior even to the differentiation of an ego, but by a kind of stagnation in place of libidinal energy in a biological unit conceived

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of as not having any objects.”37 Primary narcissism, here, is a state in which the earliest extra-​uterine life resembles, in nearly every way, its intra-​uterine antecedent. As Freud writes, in 1921, “by being born we have made the step from an absolutely self-​sufficient narcissism to the perception of a changing external world and the beginnings of the discovery of objects.”38 He tells us in the very next sentence that the infant can hardly endure its newfound existence and is thus persistently drawn back to that prior state from which it was snatched. It reverts back to its “former condition of absence of stimulation and avoidance of objects”39 through sleep, that close-​cousin of death.40 The desire to revert backward, from a world of stimulating objects, existing in space and time, to a prior state of minimal perturbation is a clear expression of what Freud, beginning in 1920, describes as the Nirvana principle [Nirwanaprinzip]. This notion, borrowed from the English psychoanalyst, Barbara Low, refers to a tendency of the mental apparatus to reduce “to nothing, or at least keep as low as possible, the sums of excitation which flow upon it.”41 As many readers of Freud have noted, there is no small of measure of ambiguity in these words. Is the Nirvana principle supposed to ally itself more closely with the economic ‘principle of constancy’ which aims at relative homeostasis –​or, by contrast, with the ‘principle of inertia’ which aims at a complete divestment of all energy?42 This ambiguity is never satisfactorily resolved by Freud, though certain passages clearly hint at the latter option. Commenting 37

Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 70. 38 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 18, 130. 39 Ibid. 40 Allusions to this notion of an absolute, primary narcissism –​preceding the installation of the ego –​can already be discerned in Freud’s work going back to the mid-​teens. In “A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams” he writes that, “Somatically, sleep is a reactivation of intra-​uterine existence, fulfilling as it does the conditions of repose, warmth and exclusion of stimulus; indeed, in sleep many people resume the foetal posture. The psychical state of a sleeping person is characterized by an almost complete withdrawal from the surrounding world and a cessation of all interest in it…to the point of restoring primitive narcissism.” Standard Edition, vol. 14, 222–​223. These words, written in 1915, but not published until 1917, already hint at an absolute primary narcissistic state prior to all objects. Moreover, in “On Narcissism,” Freud writes that, “The development of the ego consists in a departure from primary narcissism and gives rise to a vigorous attempt to recover that state.” Standard Edition, vol. 14, 100. This suggests that absolute primary narcissism is a state prior to the installation of the ego, as well. A distinction between ‘earlier’ Freudian accounts of primary narcissism, and ‘later’ (1920s and beyond) accounts of primary narcissism is thus difficult to uphold as absolute. 41 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 19, 159. 42 See the note in Standard Edition, vol. 14, 121 for a discussion of these two principles.

120 CHAPTER 3 on the Nirvana principle in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, for instance, Freud not only describes it as “the dominating tendency of mental life,” but identifies its functioning as “one of our strongest reasons for believing in the existence of the death drive.”43 Four years later, in “The Economic Problem of Masochism” Freud places the Nirwanaprinzip entirely “in the service of the death drive, whose aim is to conduct the restlessness of life into the stability of the inorganic state.”44 The search for Nirvana, in these texts, appears to be much more than just a search for constancy, or homeostasis. It involves nothing less than a tendency to restore what Freud, appropriating the words of Romain Rolland, famously calls the ‘oceanic feeling’ –​a feeling of unboundedness, or oneness with the universe.45 It is a pursuit of the undifferentiated stasis characteristic of life in the womb. In an illuminating essay, Josh Cohen makes explicit the nature of this connection intimated, but left undeveloped, within Freud’s writings: the connection between narcissism and the death drive. While such a connection may seem counter-​intuitive, given the important role that narcissism plays in self-​ preservation, there exists a sense in which both narcissism and the death drive share an implicit aim, namely, that of returning the organism to the undivided unity of the primordial whole. Cohen suggests that narcissism might be understood, in this sense, to comprise a fundamental link between Freud’s first dual drive theory (ego and sexual drives) and the second (life and death drives). “What would be described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as the organism’s will to extinguish all internal tension,” Cohen writes, “first appears as the desire for total decathexis of the ego.”46 The psychoanalyst André Green refers to this tendency to return to the zero-​point, the point of primal inertia, as ‘death narcissism.’ He describes it as an instinctive longing to return to the divine breast, the lost unity, from which we have been all-​too-​quickly, and cruelly, separated. Under the sway of death narcissism, Green claims, oneness itself is cathected. Death narcissism becomes a “Desire for the One.”47 What is sought here is a regression to a state prior to individuation, prior to the emergence of organic entities. Primary narcissism, construed in these terms, has nothing to do with a surmounting of auto-​eroticism, and even less to do with an identification with the specular image of the other. It describes rather a state without egos and 43 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 18, 55–​56. 44 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 19, 160. 45 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 21, 72. 46 Josh Cohen, “ ‘I-​not-​I’: narcissism beyond the one and the other,” 40. 47 André Green, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, trans. Andrew Weller (New  York:  Free Association Books, 2001), 25.

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objects, selves and others –​a state which might be described as one in which life and death become impossible to distinguish from one another. One naturally thinks here of Sándor Ferenczi’s Thalassa, published in 1923. In Ferenczi’s text, it is argued that both death and sleep, as well as coitus, aim similarly at a return to the state of lost wholeness and unity enjoyed by the fetus in the womb. “Death exhibits utero-​regressive trends similar to those of sleep and coitus,” Ferenczi writes. “It is not mere chance that many primitive peoples inter their dead in a squatting or fetal position, and the fact that in dreams and myths we find the same symbols for both death and birth cannot be a mere coincidence.”48 In both the death throes and sexual excitement there exist a comparable tendency to return to a state of primal equilibrium and repose. According to Ferenczi’s text, the journey of life can be explained, in the most fundamental terms, as an attempt at finding one’s way back to the maternal womb, that state of undifferentiated oneness beyond the fetters of spatio-​temporal individuation. The parallels with both Schopenhauer and the tradition of German Romanticism are likewise difficult to miss. It was Schopenhauer who asserted in his writings that death is the ultimate purpose of life.49 He proposed, moreover, that death returns us to the cradle of reality, the thing-​in-​itself, from which we are divorced by virtue of our spatio-​temporal individuation. Within German Romanticism, this liberating death is frequently equated with Ruhe, deep repose, a regression to a prior state of wholeness. One thinks, for example, of Novalis, who apostrophizes the deathly twilight with the words:  “In this sorrow-​laden life, I desire only thee, in thee I hope for healing, in thee I expect true rest.”50 Far from a rejection of narcissism, such a longing for a return to the darkness of the primordial womb perhaps becomes narcissism’s quintessential expression. The pursuit of nirvana, the immolation of the self, the relinquishing of the ego –​all of this is recuperated under the province of narcissism. Blanchot is acutely sensitive to this point in The Writing of the Disaster, writing that “the rigors of spiritual purification, even the absolute withdrawal into the void can be seen as narcissistic modes: relatively undemanding ways for a disappointed subject, or one uncertain of his identity, to affirm himself by annulling himself.”51 It is not the self, in other words, that is the ultimate 48

Sándor Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, trans. Henry Alden Bunker (Albany: The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Inc., 1938), 95. 49 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 18, 49–​50. 50 Novalis. Hymns to the Night & Spiritual Songs, trans. George MacDonald (London: Temple Lodge, 1992), 20. 51 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster. 125.

122 CHAPTER 3 object of libidinal investiture within such a narcissism, but rather, the self-​ sameness of the primordial whole, beyond space and time. Suicide, asceticism, and ­Liebestod all show themselves to be party to the same primal longing for oneness. True identity can only be found in primordial oneness. Death is not opposed to narcissism, here, but comprises a privileged conduit for returning the self to this desired state of pre-​individual unity.52 Narcissism thus shows itself to be as inseparable from death as it is from life. There is no escape from its totalitarian grasp. What are we to make of this account? Despite the fact that Freud stops short of articulating it as a fully-​fledged theory, critics have been unrelenting in their attacks upon this ‘monadic’ account of primary narcissism. Laplanche and Pontalis see Freud “re-​opening the door –​and in the naivest way –​to a version of the idealist fallacy made all the more flagrant by being expressed in ‘biological’ language.”53 How, they ask, “are we supposed to picture the transition from a monad shut in upon itself to a progressive discovery of the object?”54 What would provoke the monad to abandon the convenience and impregnability of its enclosed state? And to what extent could a self-​enclosed biological entity even survive in the first place? Even Freud himself wonders, at one point, whether such an organization could “maintain itself alive for the shortest time.”55 Lacking any empirical support, this ‘monadic’ account remains entirely speculative, even mythical in nature. For her part, Melanie Klein rejects outright any notion of an original objectless state, suggesting that phantasy object-​relations are always already in play for the infant, even from the very start of life. There can be no such thing as an absolutely self-​enclosed, primary narcissism, she insists. What remains unquestionable is that this Freudian account, with its insistence upon an absolutely primary narcissistic state, stands in sharp contrast to Freud’s other depiction of primary narcissism as an intermediate stage, situated between auto-​eroticism and object-​love. In fact, these two accounts of primary narcissism appear in some ways almost diametrically opposed. In the ‘intermediate stage’ account (as supplemented by Lacan’s theory), we saw the

52

Such a reading of the complicity between the Nirvana principle, aiming toward a restoration of absolute, primary narcissism, and the death instinct is problematized by Freud’s own assertion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, SE, xviii, 52, that narcissistic libido “had necessarily to be identified with the ‘self-​preservative instinct.’ ” 53 Jean Laplanche and J.B Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-​ Smith (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1973), 257. 54 Ibid. 55 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 12, 220.

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structuring presence of the other serving as a condition of possibility for the installation of the narcissistic ego. There could be no ego without the other always already being there. Even auto-​eroticism is preceded by an anaclitic relationship to a partial object, something external to the infant’s own, fragmented body. Otherness, in this account, is an ineluctable condition of possibility for primary narcissism. In Freud’s ‘monadic’ account, by contrast, the primacy of otherness is entirely eschewed in favor of an emphasis upon the pre-​differentiated unity out of which life emerges, and toward which it aims to return. Narcissism is linked here to a tendency, as Josh Cohen writes, “to rid consciousness of the agitating force of the other.”56 The condition of possibility for primary narcissism is neither otherness nor the structuring presence provided by an external object. Neither of these elements are yet in play. Rather, the possibility of primary narcissism is linked implicitly to a state of primordial equilibrium and repose characterized by the total absence of all objects. Yet, despite their seeming incommensurability, these two accounts of primary narcissism do share at least one very important thing in common. It is something that links them, perhaps unexpectedly, to Ovid’s version of the Narcissus myth. For what each of these accounts have in common is an aspiration of exhaustively recuperating the ‘non-​self,’ folding it back into the unity of the same. Just as in Ovid’s recounting of the myth where both otherness and death are made eminently productive –​it is otherness and death which are likewise recuperated here, without remainder. Everything is put to work in the name of an increasingly expansive concept of the unified whole. This is what makes narcissism so daunting:  its inescapability, its presumed universality, and its resistance to direct challenge. Nothing remains outside the whole; nothing is excluded from narcissism’s tyrannical grasp. 6

Narcissism, Nationalism

Given all this, it becomes evident why narcissism, for Blanchot, is not simply an aesthetic question, or a psychoanalytic one, but a fundamentally political one. It is not difficult to see that many of the same tropes that emerge in discussions of narcissism –​integration, oneness, omnipotence, grandiosity –​are encountered, from 1958 onwards, in the context of Blanchot’s polemic against nationalism. Nationalism, as we recall, is characterized by its prodigious power 56

Josh Cohen, “ ‘I-​not-​I’: narcissism beyond the one and the other,” 39.

124 CHAPTER 3 to integrate, to fuse together diffuse multiplicities under the banner of a common oneness. “Nationalism,” Blanchot writes, “always tends to assimilate and unify [intégrer] everything.”57 Might Blanchot see the narcissistic ego, in some sense, as the psychoanalytic correlate of the nationalist political order? The thought is certainly worth considering. In the figure of de Gaulle, for example, it is clear that Blanchot discerns both a personification of arch-​ nationalist perversity, as well as an embodiment of a collective yearning to regain a squandered national power and prestige. Closer to the present day, the correlation between a nationalistic ‘politics of grandeur’ and narcissistic cult of personality grows harder to ignore with every passing day. One might argue that the resurgent nationalism, in the United States and in Europe, is at core a quintessentially narcissistic endeavor –​an attempt at collective wish-​ fulfillment that is insular, regressive, and fixated obsessively upon an image of an ideal oneness and enclosure. Faced with nationalism and narcissism, we might pose the following questions:  Is anything capable of resisting, or eluding, the totalizing embrace of the self, the same? How does one oppose a system which aspires to encompass the whole, without this opposition being recuperated by the very thing it critiques? In addressing the problem of narcissism, Blanchot’s approach bears an unmistakable resemblance to the critical posture he assumes, throughout his writings, in response to various other totalizing accounts –​whether they be political or philosophical. Consider, for example, Blanchot’s approach to Hegel. It is never Blanchot’s aim, over the course of his numerous engagements with Hegelian philosophy, to contradict Hegel, or argue against the author of the Phenomenology. Such an attempt at ‘negating’ Hegel simply confirms the superiority of Hegel’s doctrine. To attempt to confront the system head-​on, to oppose it with force and fury –​is simply to be recuperated by it. The principle holds true in politics, as well. To oppose the tyrant directly is to accord him justification for his continuing policies of violent suppression. Acts of negation are not an adequate means of opposing the system. Blanchot’s strategy with regard to Hegel is never to mount a full-​frontal attack. His approach is more nuanced, more discrete. He begins by acknowledging the inescapable, totalizing enclosure of the Hegelian system. It exhausts the entirety of the possible. In the most basic sense, we call something possible “when a conceivable event does not run up against any categorical impediment within a given horizon.”58 Possibility, in this sense, means that “logic does

57 Blanchot, Political Writings, 1953–​1993, 173. 58 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 41.

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not prohibit it, nor does science or custom object.”59 But there is also another aspect to the notion of possibility, Blanchot insists. “Possibility is not what is merely possible and should be regarded as less than real. Possibility … is more than reality: it is to be, plus the power to be. Possibility establishes and founds reality: one is what one is only if one has the power to be it.”60 It follows from this that “our relations in the world and with the world are always, finally, relations of power [puissance], insofar as power is latent in possibility.”61 All the positions of being and non-​being are accounted for within Hegel’s thinking –​ nothing can escape. Indeed, here the analogy with narcissism becomes clear. For Narcissism, though not a system per se, is likewise a universal, inescapable, and apparently insurmountable structure co-​extensive with all human endeavor. Conceived either as a perceived state of infantile omnipotence, or as a pursuit to regain this lost state of omnipotence, narcissism bears the closest relations with power. The realm of narcissism is coextensive with the realm of the possible. For does not every action ultimately bear some relation to narcissism, or betray an underlying narcissistic motivation? Self-​preservation and self-​annihilation, as Blanchot notes, both suggest narcissistic motives. Asceticism is no exception. It may be, as Derrida writes, that “[n]‌arcissism has no contrary … respect for the other, self-​denial in favor of the other do not interrupt any narcissistic movement.”62 To love oneself, or to love someone who reminds us of ourselves –​is there really much of a difference? Whether narcissism is rendered in terms of the privileging of the ego, or in terms of a quasi-​monadic primordial oneness to which we all seek to return, the basic point is the same. Narcissism seeks to master otherness no less than death in a quest for total integration. And who would be so narcissistic as to think themselves clever enough to argue against the sheer ubiquity of narcissism? To do so would be a supremely narcissistic gesture. No, the approach to the problem of narcissism –​as to that of Hegel’s philosophy –​must be of a different kind altogether. “The correct criticism of the System,” writes Blanchot, “does not consist (as is most often, complacently, supposed) in finding fault with it … but rather in rendering it invincible, invulnerable to criticism or, as they say, inevitable.”63 But systems are messy things. To the extent that they enclose themselves and 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 42. Emphasis added. 61 Ibid. 62 Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say…, trans. Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 115. 63 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 61.

126 CHAPTER 3 erect limits, they presuppose an outside which they tirelessly work to subdue. In order for a system to have an inside, and for this interiority to have any meaning, there must be an exteriority already in play. We have already seen this in our discussion of Foucault, and in Blanchot’s response to the latter’s writings on madness. Certainly, the exteriority in question may be silenced, ignored, repressed, or dismissed simply as ‘impossible’ –​but it remains, nevertheless, a necessary impossibility. The system, as Blanchot insists, always presupposes a point of origination, or a foundational principle, that remains partly unassimilable within the system itself. This is the system’s dark secret, namely, that it draws its resources from something beyond itself, something it can hope, but never fully manage, to control. Assuming that narcissism’s hold, over culture, over the psyche itself, is every bit as suffocating as that of the great, totalizing System, then perhaps we might ask ourselves: what is narcissism’s outside? What is the conditioning element without which narcissism is unthinkable, yet in relation to which it has always been preempted and destabilized? If the realm of narcissism is coextensive with the realm of the possible –​and possibility, in turn, is defined in terms of power –​then might this outside mark, in some strange sense, the very point at which power (without being negated) ceases to be power? But where would this point be reached? Though relations of power may indeed encompass the entirety of what is possible, Blanchot refuses to see in possibility, or in the power latent within it, the limit of the human. There belongs to the human being, he insists, a strange ‘capacity’ for incapacity. There belongs to the human being a ‘potential’ for powerlessness that cannot be neatly assimilated into any integrated whole. In his essay on Robert Antleme and the death camps, Blanchot describes this as “the experience of man reduced to the irreducible,” in which man is destroyed as a subject, dispossessed of everything –​including the ability to be dispossessed.64 In situations of great affliction, when man has been wasted away, worn past the nub, something indestructible yet remains which is “not compatible with humanity (the human species).”65 It is a part of man as incompatible with power as it is incommensurable with presence. In the midst of such an ordeal, man leaves the realm of the possible, and enters into contact with what Blanchot is obliged to call ‘the impossible.’ I want to suggest that it is in terms of the otherness of dying that Blanchot initially seeks to think about the notion of ‘the impossible’ in his writings on

64 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 133. 65 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 30.

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narcissism. Blanchot’s suggestion is that the things that make narcissism possible –​otherness and death –​are precisely the things which, when transposed into the otherness of dying, make absolute recuperation and integration impossible. Beyond unity, beyond productivity, beyond representation, there is a side to death which narcissism cannot recuperate, and which cannot help but suspend its pretense of omnipotence. 7

Turning toward Disaster

This is where Blanchot’s engagement with the conventional conceptions of narcissism leads us. Blanchot maintains that narcissism is inescapable. Narcissism, no less than the Hegelian dialectic, or the nationalistic political order, turns all externality into interiority, swelling the self, the same, until it becomes co-​extensive with the All. Every position of being or non-​being is indeed narcissistic. Yet no sooner is this pronouncement made than it is interrupted by a voice from elsewhere. It is a voice belonging to the silenced other, reminding us that the images which make us and shape us, have always already unamde us by drawing us into a space of endless dying which we are powerless either to attenuate or to undergo. This is the voice which recounts the other side of the Narcissus story, the side that Ovid forgot. If, from Ovid to Freud, and beyond, the conventional accounts of Narcissus and narcissism emphasize the absolute recuperation of otherness and death –​then Blanchot’s implicit rejoinder to these accounts might be summarized in the suggestion that not all images are recuperative, and not all exposure to otherness, or death, is productive. The very things that make narcissism possible, even inescapable, have simultaneously rendered it, always already, impossible. For there persists, at the heart of the recognition, identification, negation, and recuperation that engender primary narcissism, an obstinately non-​recuperable remnant:  an otherness alien to all possible recognition, a scintillation that draws one maddeningly outside all selfhood, outside of time. Where the conventional conceptions of narcissism insist upon privileging recognition, oneness, integration, mastery, and power –​Blanchot wants to tell us that there abides within the ‘other’ imaginary and the otherness of dying something that can never be recognized, unified, or integrated by any ego. It is something that exceeds every worldly possibility and cannot be productively put to work, something older than every moment of past-​presence. This ‘something’ is not really anything, but the glimmer of the image, a repetition

128 CHAPTER 3 without origin –​which remains intractable to all power and mastery. “The disaster alone holds mastery at a distance,” writes Blanchot. “I wish (for example) for a psychoanalyst to whom a sign would come, from the disaster. Power over the imaginary provided that the imaginary be understood as that which evades power. Repetition as un-​power.”66 This critique is a subtly trenchant one, leaving narcissism entirely untouched, while at the same time entirely ruined. My plan, in the following chapters, is to turn my focus toward what is unquestionably Blanchot’s most famous engagement with psychoanalysis. I am referring, of course, to the piece entitled ‘(A primal scene?).’ Here, a vast range of psychoanalytic, philosophical, literary, and poetic motifs intersect with one another in a manner that is inexhaustibly complex. My aim will be two-​fold. First, I will endeavor to explicate the piece’s connection to Freud’s Wolf Man case, and to highlight the manner in which Blanchot’s ‘(A primal scene?)’ serves as an implicit rejoinder to the psychoanalytic privilege accorded to the origin. Second, I want to follow the thread of Blanchot’s thinking about the otherness of dying and show how it finds itself further adumbrated in the context of his engagement with Winnicott and Leclaire. This discussion will then build toward a consideration of the death drive, the disaster, and the trauma of responsibility. 66 Ibid., 9.

­c hapter 4

Primal Scenes 1

The Window of Mértola

In 1669, there appeared in a Parisian bookstore a slight volume bearing the title Lettres portugaises. Though the book’s contents were modest –​five short love-​letters, supposedly translated into French from a lost Portuguese source –​ the breadth of passion to which these letters spoke, and the rawness of pain they evoked, quickly made them a literary sensation. Readers speculated upon the identities of the two correspondents, wondering who the Portuguese nun and her forbidden lover might be. Over the centuries that followed, the text’s legend grew ever larger. Countless translations followed, including an achingly beautiful one by Rilke. But what exactly was being translated here –​a selection of intimate correspondence between two anonymous, forbidden lovers? Or the fictional product of a 17th century writer’s own creation? Was it possible to know? In the years that followed the book’s initial publication, one theory in particular rose to prominence. The letters, it was believed, had been written by a 17th century Portuguese nun, Mariana Alcoforado, to her lover, a French army officer who had come to fight in the Portuguese Restoration War (1663–​1668). As legend had it, Alcoforado first saw the soldier from her convent-​window in Beja, Portugal. The window, known by locals as janela de Mértola, or ‘the window of Mértola,’ soon acquired a place in national folklore on account of its role at the origin of this great romance. It mattered little to those inspired by the story that the nearby town of Mértola was not in fact visible from the window in question –​or any window, for that matter, in the town of Beja.1 One must not allow facts to get in the way of a good story. By the early 20th century, however, it had become generally acknowledged among scholars that the letters had not been a translation from a lost Portuguese source, but a work of literary fiction created entirely by their purported translator, the Comte de Guilleragues. Of course, the notion that an author might present a work of fiction under the guise of a translation is far from unprecedented in literary history. One might think, for example, of Cervantes’

1 Anna Klobucka, The Portuguese Nun: Formation of a National Myth (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000), 118.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004401334_​0 06

130 CHAPTER 4 playful account of the origins of Don Quixote, which he claimed to have translated from Arabic. Or perhaps one is reminded of James Macpherson, who attempted to pass-​off his Ossian cycle of epic poems as a translation of a 3rd century Gaelic bard. What makes the case of the Lettres portugaises somewhat unique, however, is that despite broad scholarly consensus regarding the nature of their fictional origin, there still remains for some readers a stubborn belief that the letters might be more than just a ‘mere’ work of fiction. In 2006, Myriam Cyr published a book entitled Letters of a Portuguese Nun: Uncovering the Mystery Behind a Seventeenth-​Century Forbidden Love in which she argues that Mariana Alcoforado was indeed the author of the letters, effectively returning to a 19th century stance on the question of the book’s provenance.2 I am not interested here in addressing Cyr’s sensationalistic claims. What interests me is less the question of the letters’ provenance, than the underlying motivation for an effort like Cyr’s to ‘rescue’ a text from the domain of fiction, and restore it with all proper dignity to the annals of biography, history, and factuality. Certainly, there might be a sentimental motive at play in such efforts. We all want to believe, for instance, that the passionate love exemplified so paradigmatically by the Portuguese nun has a place in the real (rather than the merely fictional) world. However, I would submit that there is also an additional motive behind efforts likes Cyr’s. We are unsettled by the absence of an origin. The idea that a translation might be all there is, or that the translation might not refer back to any real source, seems too difficult, too unsatisfying, for us to accept. We will look high and wide to find something more original, more definitive, than a mere translation. Even if the nun’s original letters cannot be recovered, we must go on believing that at some point they did exist, if for no other reason than to establish a concrete grounding for the story we have received. Such an attitude is often prevalent in Freud’s thought. As Blanchot writes, Freud is “animated by a kind of passion for the origin.”3 One finds in Freud’s tireless efforts at uncovering the primal scene at the origin of his patient’s neuroses a conviction that stories, dreams, recollections, fictions, and translations  –​though invaluable within the context of analysis  –​are simply not enough. There must be a real catalyst. By means of analysis, Freud invites us “to look back behind ourselves in order to find there … a primary ‘event’ that is individual and proper to each history, a scene constituting something important and overwhelming.”4 In coming face-​to-​face with this overwhelming event, by 2 See Cyr Myriam, Letters of a Portuguese Nun: Uncovering the Mystery Behind a Seventeenth-​ Century Forbidden Love (New York: Hyperion Books, 2006). 3 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 231. 4 Ibid.

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means of transference, one might gain control over it, and thus drain it of its pathogenic force. Of course, for Freud, the pursuit of this bedrock event was to be met with much difficulty and disappointment. The primal scene which he so ardently sought, always seemed to slip away from his grasp. My aim, in this chapter, is to explore the manner in which Blanchot, in The Writing of the Disaster, implicitly responds to Freud’s quest for the primal scene, highlighting the impossibilities associated with such a search. In the course of this discussion, I will consider Blanchot’s engagement with the writings of D.W. Winnicott and Serge Leclaire, and explore the reasons why both primal agonies and primal scenes are so particularly resistant to inclusion within language and personal history. My discussion here will conclude with a reflection upon the death drive, and Blanchot’s response to it within his text, setting the stage for a broader consideration of trauma, responsibility, and the exigencies of the political, in the chapters that follow. 2

Frames inside Frames

Published in October 1980, The Writing of the Disaster is a book comprised of 403 unnumbered fragments. These fragments vary in both length and content, addressing an incredibly diverse range of topics, and referencing a host of various writers and philosophers. Here, across the span of some dozen fragments, deployed discontinuously, yet related to one another by a shared thematic emphasis, Blanchot offers some of his most incisive remarks on psychoanalysis. As though inviting a dialogue with Freud himself, three of the text’s fragments begin with the parenthetical, interrogative phrase: ‘(Une scène primitive?).’ The most well-​known of these is the 268th fragment, appearing roughly half-​way through the book. It reads: (A primal scene?) You who live later, close to a heart that beats no more, suppose, suppose this:  the child  –​is he seven years old, or eight perhaps? –​standing by the window, drawing the curtain and, through the pane, looking. What he sees: the garden, the wintry trees, the wall of a house. Though he sees, no doubt in a child’s way, his play space, he grows weary and slowly looks up toward the ordinary sky, with clouds, grey light –​pallid daylight without depth. What happens then: the sky, the same sky, suddenly open, absolutely black and absolutely empty, revealing (as though the pane had broken) such an absence that all has since always and forevermore been lost therein  –​so lost that therein is affirmed and dissolved the vertiginous

132 CHAPTER 4 knowledge that nothing is what there is, and first of all nothing beyond. The unexpected aspect of this scene (its interminable feature) is the feeling of happiness that straightaway submerges the child, the ravaging joy to which he can bear witness only by tears, an endless flood of tears. He is thought to suffer a childish sorrow; attempts are made to console him. He says nothing. He will live henceforth in the secret. He will weep no more.5 Numerous aspects of this passage cry out for interpretation. One might wonder, for instance, about the significance of the child’s age, the meaning of the broken window pane, and the ominous, emptiness of the sky. And what about the child’s response –​his seemingly inexplicable happiness, his tears of joy? What is the secret that he will henceforth live? While this fragment’s importance has been widely-​acknowledged by commentators, its meaning has remained difficult to pin-​down. Blanchot’s biographer, Christophe Bident, considers it to be a depiction of an event “at one and the same time, psychological, metaphysical, and mystical … opening the way to the whole atheological scope of [The Writing of the Disaster].”6 Christopher Fynsk sees the child’s ecstasy as having something to do with the origin of language.7 Kevin Hart notes similarities to St. Augustine’s audition at Ostia, suggesting a connection to the sacred.8 Leslie Hill acknowledges, on the other hand, a temptation to read it as “a statement of radical nihilism or ontological atheism,” while demurring to speculate upon whether it might best be considered a cosmological fable, or a waking dream.9 Others, such as Hélène Cixous and Phillippe Lacoue-​Labarthe, have considered the piece to be autobiographical in nature. In his extensive commentary on the piece, Lacoue-​Labarthe notes his own role in bringing an initial version of it to print. In 1976, as a co-​editor for the new literary journal, Première Livraison, Lacoue-​Labarthe solicited short-​texts not exceeding one page in length from a handful of intellectual luminaries, including Blanchot, Lacan, and a host of others. Fifteen days later, Lacoue-​Labarthe received from Blanchot a piece entitled, ‘A primal scene.’ The contribution, Lacoue-​Labarthe surmised, had been written rather spontaneously, in less than a fortnight. Emerging from the desk of a writer for whom discretion and anonymity were watch-​words, ‘A 5 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 72. 6 Bident, Maurice Blanchot, Partenaire Invisible, 18. 7 Christopher Fynsk, Infant Figures (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 61. 8 Kevin Hart, The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 55–​57. 9 Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 333–​337.

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primal scene’ was a gesture as unexpected as it was unprecedented. Lacoue-​ Labarthe considered it a hapax, a text without equivalent, understanding it to comprise the first autobiographical piece ever produced by Blanchot.10 At long last, Lacoue-​Labarthe believed, Blanchot was revealing a deeply personal part of himself, entrusting a most intimate memory to posterity. This poignant anecdote drawn from a reminiscence of childhood appeared to offer a rare insight into one of the most enigmatic figures in 20th century French thought –​a proverbial ‘skeleton key’ with which to unlock Blanchot’s crypt. As appealing as such an interpretation might have seemed, it could only be disrupted by the subsequent publication of The Writing of the Disaster, some four years later. For here one finds a republished version of the piece in question –​only now, its form has been radically altered. Blanchot places the words ‘A primal scene’ in parentheses and adds a question mark, in addition to making several other notable changes to the piece. These changes, according to Leslie Hill, have the effect of challenging “the coherence of the term [primal scene], the appropriateness of its use, and the terminological authority on which it relies.”11 The function of the question mark, Lacoue-​Labarthe concedes, “is to suspend both the title and the thing as a whole.”12 With the introduction of these changes any sense of certainty surrounding the piece has vanished. The fragment is cast into radical indeterminacy, and the reader is left to ponder what Blanchot is trying to say. Is the event recounted here a parodic restaging of the Freudian primal scene? Is it a primal scene of a different variety? In what sense is the scene in question really primal? To what extent is it even a scene? The questions seem to ramify without resolution, destabilizing not only the fragment itself, but the book within which it appears. Key to the fragment, as numerous critics have noted, is the ceaseless play of framing (and reframing) that it engenders. Like matryoshka dolls nested one within another, frames are presented here within frames, opening onto a proliferation of additional frames. At the most basic level, the fragment depicts something exceedingly banal:  a young boy’s observation of a garden scene directly outside his home, an observation through a window-​frame. This scene is complicated from the outset, however, by a narratival voice that exudes an air of the fictive: ‘suppose, suppose …’ The scene is then further reframed the moment the sky is revealed as absolutely black and absolutely empty –​and modulated, yet again, by the 10 Lacoue-​Labarthe, Ending and Unending Agony: On Maurice Blanchot, 93–​94. 11 Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 333. 12 Lacoue-​Labarthe, Ending and Unending Agony: On Maurice Blanchot, 97.

134 CHAPTER 4 switch to a future tense that appears near the fragment’s close. Each prominent element in the scene –​the window, the nothingness, the secret ecstasy, the tears of joy –​opens the fragment onto a panoply of further, intertextual frames. Scholars have noted possible allusions here to Pascal’s posthumous Mémorial, as well as texts by Blake, Hölderlin, Mallarmé, and Baudelaire, among others. It is difficult, moreover, to read of the child’s ravaging joy and endless flood of tears without thinking of Nietzsche’s experience of negative ecstasy along the shores of Lake Silvaplana in the autumn of 1881, where the thought of the eternal return first came to him. “I had cried too much … these were not tears of tenderness, but tears of jubilation …”13 Various other texts by Blanchot himself are also implicated in this play of framing and reframing. Beyond the pages of The Writing of the Disaster, the fragment inevitably invites comparison with earlier versions of the piece, published in Première Livraison and in Le Nouveau Commerce, during the late 1970s. One thinks, additionally, of certain lines from The Step Not Beyond in which Blanchot seems to foreshadow his depiction of the boy at the window, writing that the “Self” was “as if fissured, since the day when the sky opened upon its void.”14 Furthermore, it is impossible not to acknowledge the fragment’s possible relation to a letter that Blanchot sent to Roger Laporte, on September 24, 1966, in which the former offers his correspondent a kind of ‘preview’ of the scene in question, describing it as a “memory […] at the center of oblivion.”15 Which of these frames is most primary? Which is most original? Do any of them qualify to be considered an uncontested, source text? The play of framing and reframing, however, extends even further. For in the midst of this intertextual play, the fragment in question also distances itself from itself by virtue of its parenthetical, interrogatory title which is repeated at the heading of two additional fragments found in The Writing of the Disaster. These fragments, in turn, open onto a host of further psychoanalytic and philosophical frames which are referenced in the surrounding pages. By placing this supremely complex fragment near the very heart of The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot has opened a series, as Leslie Hill states, which seems “capable of infinite expansion, making it impossible to decide where the series begins or ends.”16 Each fragment, each frame, is extracted “from one site and projected

13

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New  York:  Random House, 1974), 181. 14 Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, 2. 15 Lacoue-​Labarthe, Ending and Unending Agony: On Maurice Blanchot, 21. 16 Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 334.

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or rejected towards another, in a movement that can continue unchecked in limitless fashion as reading advances.”17 What is at stake in such framing and reframing? In his 1978 book, The Truth in Painting, Derrida broaches the question of the frame by way of Kant, and some aspects of his commentary may perhaps be applicable here. Drawing upon the Kantian notion of the parergon, Derrida describes the frame as a kind of liminal space reducible neither to the work nor the outside of the work. “Neither work (ergon) nor outside the work (hors d’oeuvre), neither inside nor outside, neither above nor below, [the parergon] disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work.”18 While the parergon itself remains outside all oppositions, it serves as an indispensable border that gives the notions of inside and outside their respective meanings. The frame, the parergon, is a structure of great importance to the extent that it contextualizes what is being framed, comprising a boundary that validates the inside of the frame as ‘art,’ and the outside of the frame as ‘non-​art.’ It is because of the frame that one is able to differentiate content from mere context. When the frame is broken, however, or made subject to continual reframing, the neatness of what is framed cannot help but become irreparably compromised. One of the reasons why ‘(A primal scene?)’ is such a provocative text is because of the manner in which it puts the very notion of framing so radically into question. Blanchot appears to be telling us something here about the impossibility of establishing a master frame, or a master scene. He is showing us something about the impossibility of stipulating a simple beginning to the story. Indeed, if the purpose of a frame is to delineate the precise contours of the object under consideration, then any such sense of clarity and precision is precluded from the start by the sheer proliferation of textual layers to which the fragment in question gives rise. Even if one wishes to consider the depiction of the boy at the window strictly as a fictional text, then one must nevertheless ask where exactly the fiction begins and where it ends. Would the fiction extend to the fragment as a whole –​ or perhaps even to the book as a whole? What about to the other two fragments in The Writing of the Disaster which bear the same title? Are they likewise fictional pieces? Alternately, one might be inclined to read the scene at the window, in a manner akin to Lacoue-​Labarthe, as a quasi-​autobiographical, or philosophical, in nature. But where, then, does the autobiography end? What is real and what is imagined here? What is actual and what is embellished? Or, 17 Ibid. 18 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 9.

136 CHAPTER 4 in terms especially familiar to the readers of the Lettres portugaises: what is translation and what is original? A comparison with the scintillating surface within which Narcissus falls before ever having found himself also comes to mind. Might this play of framing and reframing be a subtle way of evoking the vertiginous, maddening sea of images within which the child-​god in Ovid’s myth loses a self he has never known? Every time one establishes a frame within which to consider Blanchot’s ‘(A primal scene?)’  –​that frame is immediately opened onto a plurality of further frames. Each scene opens onto another scene, and then onto another. As readers, as interpreters, we seek a definitive, bounded, original scene. Yet this is precisely what Blanchot’s fragment denies us. It offers nothing but a series of unstable textual frames capable of infinite expansion, infinite ramification. Each one opens inevitably onto another, making it impossible to know precisely where the series begins or ends. It is for this reason that Blanchot himself proposes that the term ‘scene’ only be used here with the greatest qualification. “The term is ill-​chosen, for what it supposedly names is unrepresentable, and escapes fiction as well; yet ‘scene’ is pertinent in that it allows one at least not to speak as if of an event taking place a moment in time.”19 By presenting ‘(A primal scene?)’ as irreducible to either reality or fiction, and as ambiguously situated in a time outside of time, Blanchot is exploiting the term’s already precarious status in Freud’s own writings. By means of his piece, Blanchot is seeking to complicate the assumption that there exists something like a primal event whose recovery and translation might become possible within the analytic situation. I want to propose that ‘(A primal scene?)’ might be read, in other words, as an implicit commentary upon –​and critique of –​the psychoanalytic privilege traditionally accorded unto the notion of the primal. Blanchot wants to push the theories of Freud and his epigones to their respective limits and ultimately propose, in a manner which must itself be placed under requisite suspicion, a set of reasons why such theories inevitably fail to recover the ever-​elusive event which they seek. Let us explore this idea further by considering Freud’s account. 3

A Source of the Nile

The search for the primal scene [Urszene] is unquestionably an integral component of both Freud’s research and his therapeutic practice. “All the 19 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 114.

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consequences radiate out from it,” Freud writes of the primal scene, “just as all the threads of the analysis have led up to it.”20 Though much of our focus in what follows will be on the Wolf Man case, and its fall-​out, it is important to note that the search for a primal scene had been a central preoccupation for Freud from far earlier on. As early as 1895, Freud had attempted to establish the etiology of the three psychoneuroses: hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and paranoia, by tracing them back to sexual scenes from early childhood. In an unpublished manuscript from 1897, Freud even uses the precise term Urszenen to refer to “certain traumatic infantile experiences which are organized into scenarios or scenes.”21 It was these primal scenes, Freud believed, which might unlock the hidden logic behind his patients’ neurotic symptoms. If only these Urszenen, traumatic in nature, could be satisfactorily uncovered, the foundation of his patients’ neurotic symptoms would be laid bare and a cure potentially achieved. In his essay, “The Primal in Psychoanalysis,” André Green terms such an approach, which prioritizes the pathogenic efficacy of real events in early childhood as catalysts for subsequent developments, genetic psychoanalysis. Not unlike a certain (perhaps outdated) approach to history which is suspicious of structural explanations and which strives “to take origins as its starting-​ point, giving the picture of a cumulative development,”22 genetic psychoanalysis operates under the assumption that origins precede the multifarious structures, and symptoms, which are formed in their wake. By identifying a point of origin, and tracing the process of ontogenetic development that follows from this starting-​point, one can see how the neurotic organizations of the psyche are formed. “Like the Leibnizian monad,” Rainer Nägele writes, a primal scene might be understood in this context as an “infolded universe” containing all future developments, all the paths that one will eventually take.23 The key presupposition, of course, is that structure is indeed formed on the basis of primal events, rather than the other way around. In order to understand a patient’s neurotic symptoms one must simply locate and identify the primal, formative events from the individual’s early childhood which ultimately give rise to the various pathologies in question. All roads lead back to the origin. 20 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 17, 55. 21 Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 335. 22 André Green, Diachrony in Psychoanalysis, trans. Andrew Weller (New  York:  Free Association Books, 2003), 54. 23 Rainer Nägele, introduction to Hölderlin and the Question of the Father, trans. Luke Carson (Victoria, b.c.: els Editions, 2007), xi.

138 CHAPTER 4 Going back to his first major address to his peers, in April 1896, there is no question that Freud held an affinity for this kind of approach. In “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” Freud saw himself as proposing a solution to “a more than thousand-​year-​old problem: a ‘source of the Nile.’ ”24 The ‘Nile’ in question here was hysteria, an ailment whose etiology, according to the influential school of Charcot, was to be found exclusively in realm of heredity. Freud’s paper, however, proposes a radically different cause. Based on extensive clinical work, Freud had reached the conclusion that his female patients were not ill on account of hereditary factors, but rather, because they had been subjected to traumatic acts of sexual abuse as infants. The etiology of hysteria was to be found in the phenomenon of seduction [Verführung] in which “a real sexual act is forced on a young child who in no way desires or encourages it.”25 Naturally, such an act of abuse would remain utterly incomprehensible to the infant, generating symptoms only much later in life. Freud’s ‘neurotica,’ as he sometimes called this theory of seduction, attempted to ground the adult patient’s symptoms upon the reality of sexual traumas undergone by them while they were still mired in infantile helplessness [Hilflösigkeit]. Well before the Wolf Man case, before castration-​anxiety, before the Oedipus complex  –​one finds here the earliest version of a primal scene in Freud’s writing: the scene of seduction. The theory was as provocative as it was short-​lived. On September 21, 1897, in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, Freud already confesses that he no longer believes in his ‘neurotica.’ In the years that followed, as the seduction theory is replaced by an account of endogenous psychosexual development, Freud alludes rather dismissively to these early diagnoses, suggesting that clinical error and excessive reductionism had mistakenly led him to prioritize the role of infantile, sexual trauma. The rejection of the seduction theory, opened the path to the birth of psychoanalysis as we know it, paving the way for the first topography, the discovery of infantile auto-​eroticism, the theory of the drives, and much more. Blanchot, for his part, is highly-​attentive to these developments in Freud’s early thought. In his 1956 “Freud” essay, as we earlier noted, Blanchot makes frequent reference to the Freud-​Fliess letters which had just been published, noting the initial apprehension with which Freud came to accept that the source of neurosis was not to be found in a scene of infantile seduction, but in intra-​familial dynamics related to the Oedipus complex.26 Rather perceptively, 24 Max Schur, Freud:  Living and Dying (New  York:  International Universities Press, 1972), 104. 25 Jeffrey M.  Masson, The Assault on Truth:  Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 5. 26 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 454.

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Blanchot understands that –​even with the turn away from the seduction theory –​Freud’s interest in primal trauma does not wane, but only seems to grow more urgent, as the conceptual framework which he erects around these childhood agonies ceaselessly evolves. What remains constant in Freud’s writings is an insistence that in order to achieve a cure, the ultimate cause of the pathology in question must be uncovered. If repression, as Freud writes to Fliess in 1896, can be defined in part as a “failure of translation,”27 then finding the source text for the failed translation becomes imperative. The success of therapy, in other words, hinges upon a successful excavation of the beginning of the story. 4

“The Most Delicate Question”

Perhaps nowhere does one find this illustrated more famously than in Freud’s recounting of the Wolf Man case. It is here, in “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” published belatedly in 1918, that one finds Freud’s first published use of the term Urszene. The details of the case have been widely recounted. In February 1910, a wealthy young Russian named Sergei Pankejeff entered into treatment with Freud. Pankejeff, who had contracted gonorrhea several years earlier, was suffering from the feeling of being “cut off from the world by a veil,”28 as well as complaining of severe intestinal problems. Early in the course of his treatment, he revealed the details of a pathogenic dream that he had experienced at roughly four years of age, and which had not ceased to haunt him well into adolescence. The dream is transcribed as follows: I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed. (My bed was stood with its foot towards the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-​time.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-​dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up.29 27

Sigmund Freud, Letter from Freud to Fliess, December 6, 1896, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–​1904 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986), 208. 28 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 17, 75. 29 Ibid., 29.

140 CHAPTER 4 Freud’s analysis of the Wolf Man’s dream focuses upon its relation to a primal scene that Freud determined his patient must have witnessed when he was roughly one and a half years old. The dream stemmed from an observation, on the infant’s part, of parental coitus a tergo. Freud’s discovery of the multi-​ layered relation between the patient’s observation of this primal scene, the dream of the white wolves, and the emergence of the patient’s neurosis, was particularly significant in the context of Freud’s theory at the time, for it appeared to serve as a direct refutation of both the Jungian and Adlerian denials of infantile sexuality. Here was a case involving an individual who, as a young child, had witnessed parental intercourse. Discovering the reality of castration, the individual was now living with the various pathological consequences resulting from his infantile experience. For Freud, it amounted to undeniable evidence that certain neuroses could indeed be traced back to “a real occurrence –​dating from a very early period.”30 Freud’s initial resolution of the Wolf Man case in July 1914 suggested, moreover, that the successful treatment of neurotic patients could potentially be achieved by identifying events of infantile trauma and bringing them into the light of present experience through transference. Neuroses could be dissolved if only the primal, pathogenic scenes at their origin could be identified as such, and effectively translated.31 Yet Freud himself, in the months before the case study was belatedly published in 1918, was already expressing reservations about certain of his findings. Pankejeff (at least at first) accepted Freud’s analysis of the dream, concurring with the ‘primal scene’ hypothesis.32 But questions remained. For one thing, the Wolf Man had never directly recalled observing parental coitus as a young child, and was unable to establish the precise chronological sequence of various key events in the case. The primal scene had only been surmised by Freud “gradually and laboriously from an aggregate of indications.”33 One might wonder whether Freud had been guilty of imputing a presumptive, heavy-​handed interpretation upon his patient’s dream? Or had Pankejeff himself perhaps confabulated the events in question? Jung cast further doubt over the matter by contending that all recollections of primal scenes

30 Ibid., 34. 31 Pankejeff participated in a second course of treatment with Freud from November 1919 to February 1920. 32 Freud writes, “the patient related the dream at a very early stage of the analysis and very soon came to share my conviction that the causes of his infantile neurosis lay concealed behind it…” Standard Edition, vol. 17, 33. 33 Ibid., 51.

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amounted to nothing but ‘retrospective phantasies’ [Zurückphantasien], backward projections made by patients from the perspective of the present. Could it be that the primal scene at the heart of the Wolf Man case had merely been the product of an elaborate phantasy? Freud was quick to acknowledge the gravity of these concerns. “I admit that this is the most delicate question in the whole domain of psycho-​ analysis, the possibility that what analysis puts forward as being forgotten experiences of childhood … may on the contrary be based upon phantasies created on occasions occurring later in life.”34 In 1917, a year before publishing the Wolf Man case study, Freud composed two important additions to his manuscript, hoping to confront these issues head-​on. Perhaps the primal scene was a reconstruction, Freud concedes. But even so, some real event must have furnished the child with basic perceptual cues. “For a child, like an adult, can produce phantasies only from material which has been acquired from some source or other.”35 If not an act of parental copulation per se, the child must still have perceived something which troubled or confused him enough to elicit a pathological response. “Perhaps what the child observed was not copulation between his parents but copulation between animals, which he then displaced on to his parents, as though he had inferred that his parents did things the same way.”36 The key point, according to Freud, is that regardless of what was witnessed by the child, the basis for the child’s subsequent neurosis must have been a real event that actually occurred at some point in the patient’s past. Even phantasy had to draw its resources from somewhere. With this addendum, it seemed to him that the objections of Jung and others had been sufficiently rebuffed. Yet a certain measure of damage had nevertheless been done. Doubts about the reality of the primal scene had been raised in Freud’s own mind. Without any direct access to the proverbial bedrock of the event, could one ever know precisely what (if anything) the patient had really witnessed? Unable to give up his assumption that some kind of ‘real’ catalyst resided at the origin of his patients’ neuroses, but finding himself thwarted at every turn from directly accessing this elusive event, Freud began to search for a supplemental explanatory paradigm. Might there be a greater role for phantasy to play after all? Freud was not unsympathetic to the idea. It was Freud after all who had first recognized the important role played by phantasy in symptom 34 Ibid., 103. 35 Ibid., 55. 36 Ibid., 57.

142 CHAPTER 4 formation.37 But if phantasy was involved in structuring the child’s experience of primal scenes, then surely this could not be the ‘retrospective phantasies’ that Jung proposed. For such Zurückphantasien, projected from the present onto the past, left unresolved the question of the initial catalyst. Instead, by 1915, Freud found himself gravitating toward the much more speculative hypothesis of ‘primal phantasies’ [Urphantasien], phylogenetically-​ inherited memory traces, which would transcend individual experience and remain irreducible to retrospective wish-​fulfilment. Urphantasien would serve as organizing structures which, in tandem with empirical perceptual cues from the individual’s own experience, would produce the unconscious primal scenes buried in the depths of the psyche. Shortly after the initial completion of the Wolf Man case, but some three years before the publication of its case study, Freud writes, in 1915: “Among the store of unconscious phantasies of all neurotics, and probably of all human beings, there is one which is seldom absent and which can be disclosed by analysis: this is the phantasy of watching sexual intercourse between the parents. I call such phantasies …‘primal phantasies [Urphantasien].’ ”38 As Freud must have realized, this solution did not so much resolve ‘the most delicate question’ –​as it did further deflect it. For the primal phantasy hypothesis left unanswered how these Urphantasien themselves would arise. To help answer this question, Freud turned to the realm of speculative metabiology. Commenting on the origin of the primal phantasies, in the Wolf Man case study, Freud asserts: “I am inclined to take the view that they are precipitates from the history of human civilization.”39 The ultimate roots of a patient’s neurosis might extend, in other words, beyond the vicissitudes of early childhood, and into the dimmest reaches of the patient’s ancestral past. Exposure to the primal scene might be biologically determined. One can easily see why this sort of view would have appealed to Freud. For one thing, it promised to relieve Freud some of the burden of having to parse his patients’ myriad screen-​memories and dreams in hope of catching a glimpse of the primal scene at the root of their neuroses. Or, rather, if such a parsing nevertheless remained an indispensable part of treatment, these fleeting memories and inscrutable dreams could at least now be grounded upon the more reliable bedrock of the Urphantasien.40 Where a patient’s individual 37 Ibid., 103. 38 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 14, 269. 39 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 17, 119. 40 Ibid., 97. Freud explicitly states his preference for beginning with the ontogenetic approach, and taking it as far as possible, before considering factors pertaining to species

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history came up lacking any definitive evidence of a primal pathogenic catalyst, Freud could simply make recourse to the universal, anthropological datum of the primal phantasies. As Laplanche and Pontalis remark, in their seminal essay “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” “the historical life of the subject is [no longer] the prime mover, but rather something antecedent, which is capable of operating as an organizer.”41 Real perceptions from early childhood now have the more limited role of stimulating the primal phantasies, activating the primal montage, so to speak, and ‘bringing to life’ the universal schemata already contained within the child’s psyche at birth. It is primal phantasy that comes first, with empirical perceptions and impressions merely fleshing-​out the scenes in question.42 But one might wonder –​which aspects of the primal scene then genuinely derive from a patient’s personal history, and which aspects derive from phylogenetically-​inherited primal phantasy? Is there any way to know what stems from lived experience, and what comes from ancestral prehistory? Such epistemological questions, Freud insisted, were hardly important. Toward the end of the Wolf Man case study, in fact, Freud not only declines to specify the precise admixture of ‘real’ infantile trauma and phylogenetic influence that is involved in the recollection of specific primal scenes, but he also refuses to privilege either the ontogenetic or the phylogenetic line of inquiry over the other. For Freud, the two approaches –​ontogenetic and phylogenetic –​were neither mutually exclusive, nor opposed to one another. Rather, Freud saw them as two avenues converging upon the same truth. “A child catches hold of this phylogenetic experience where his own experience fails him,” writes Freud. “He fills in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth.”43 Freud, for his part, never wagered to propose a detailed scientific account of how such inter-​generational transmission would work in the first place. When Freud writes of inherited memory-​traces, archaic constitutions, or history. “I regard it as a methodological error to seize on a phylogenetic explanation before the ontogenetic possibilities have been exhausted,” he writes here. 41 Jean Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” in Formations of Fantasy, eds. Victor Burgin et al. (New York: Methuen, 1986), 17. 42 It is important to note that the notion of primal phantasy never received a full-​elaboration from Freud, remaining a marginal concept in his theory as a whole. As Laplanche and Pontalis write, the notion of primal phantasy “has the value of an ‘index’ and requires clarification.” Its relation to other key notions, such as trauma, the unconscious, and repression, among others, would still need to be worked-​out. See Laplanche and Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” 31. 43 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 17, 97.

144 CHAPTER 4 primal phantasies, it is never exactly clear what (in scientific terms) he has in mind –​or how the transmission of such elements could be achieved. Nevertheless, Freud maintained his belief in the structuring role played by hereditary givens all the way to end.44 The desperation with which Freud clung to his phylogenetic theories makes it clear how indispensable such notions ultimately became to his thinking.45 Indeed, as the Wolf Man case demonstrates, Freud’s phylogenetic speculations responded to a theoretical need that he could not shirk. This was the need to ground his patient’s neuroses in relation to some point of absolute origination  –​a hidden center point from which his patient’s neuroses radiated. It mattered little to Freud whether this primal pathogenic event was ultimately found in the patient’s early childhood, or whether it occurred much further back, in depths of ancestral prehistory. They key point was that the primal scene, according to Freud, was not simply a product of retrospective phantasy constituted in the present. It was a real event that actually occurred at some point in the patient’s ontogenetic or phylogenetic past. This event would remain hidden from view until adequately reconstructed through analysis, but neither its reality, nor its etiological primacy, could be doubted. At the therapeutic level, Freud’s efforts were met with limited success. Despite Freud’s belief, by midsummer 1914, that a cure had been reached in the case of the Wolf Man, the patient’s symptoms persisted intermittently throughout the rest of adulthood. For many years, the Wolf Man continued to suffer recurrent attacks as pathogenic material from his childhood resurfaced. “Like sutures after an operation, or small fragments of necrotic bone,”46 the residue of a primal event remained lodged in his flesh. Every time that it appeared an absolutely primal scene had been exhumed –​an even more primal scene soon appeared lurking behind it. From ontogeny to phylogeny, one scene gave way to an ever-​more ancient one. Scenes of early childhood opened onto scenes of ancestral agonies. Still, the ultimate scene, the truly primal scene, eluded Freud and his patient. And so long as the definitive source text could not be recovered, the translation remained incomplete.

44

References to the transmission of archaic memory-​traces can be found as late as his Outline of Psycho-​Analysis and his book on Moses. See Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 23, pp. 99, 167, 207. 45 One can only wonder how (if at all) he would have seen fit to revise his theories had he lived to see the prodigious advances in molecular genetics that began to take shape in the 1940s. 46 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 23, 217–​218.

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Indefinite Anteriority

How does all this relate to Blanchot’s text? If the Wolf Man case is relevant to our discussion, then its specific importance should be understood to reside neither in the particularities of Paknejeff’s pathogenic dream, nor even in Freud’s conviction, which finally came to be tempered, that the catalyst for the dream of white wolves was to be found in the young child’s direct observation of parental intercourse and concomitant discovery of castration. Blanchot is not trying to contest Freud on these points, or challenge his diagnoses. Rather, I believe that the Wolf Man case is important here because of what it reveals about the great lengths toward which Freud was prepared to go in order to ground his patient’s neurosis in relation to a real event from the past, and the inevitability of failure associated with any such efforts. Freud’s approach, as we have seen, had been to exhume actual events from individual or species history, and to use these recovered elements as a basis for treatment. But each exhumed scene actually raised more questions than answers. Each scene, as Blanchot writes in the 1956 “Freud” essay, opens onto “a prior scene, and each conflict is not only itself but the beginning again of an older conflict it revives and at whose level it tends to resituate itself.”47 The sheer regress of scenes leads backward toward no determinate starting-​point. Freud’s approach thus “dissolves everything that seems first into an indefinite anteriority: every complex dissimulates another.”48 There is no definitive beginning to the story, only (partially incomplete) translations layered upon (partially incomplete) translations. It all amounts to frames layered upon frames, with no beginning or end in sight. One thus arrives at the disconcerting discovery that every supposed origin presupposes a prior origin, and that to begin the story one must have always already begun it. To begin is to begin again, as Blanchot (in a Nietzschean voice) might say. In The Writing of the Disaster, roughly a page removed from Blanchot’s second ‘(A primal scene?)’ fragment, one finds the following lines: “There is no origin, if origin presupposes an original presence … every beginning is a beginning over.”49 How, then, is one to proceed? Blanchot’s provocative suggestion is to propose a pivot away from the futile search for missing origins, and toward a different kind of inquiry  –​one that incidentally owes much to Foucault and Derrida. The task must no longer be to pursue the ever-​elusive beginning of the story; rather, one must ask an 47 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 231. 48 Ibid., 232. 49 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 117.

146 CHAPTER 4 entirely different set of questions, questions about conditions of possibility. As Foucault insists in his 1970 inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, we must no longer entrust ourselves to the search for origins, but analyze the external conditions that make discourse itself possible. This is what Blanchot, in short, wants to do with regard to the question of the ‘primal scene.’ Rather than focusing on origins, he wants to turn our focus toward the conditions of possibility for the story itself. As one of the nameless interlocutors in the second ‘(A primal scene?)’ fragment comes to impute, the emphasis must now fall upon ‘the pre-​story [L’avant-​récit].’50 The focus must turn toward that which precedes, exceeds, and remains radically outside the story in question, all the while making it possible. If Freud’s discourse operates under the presupposition that the primal, pathogenic event really happened to a self, then Blanchot wants to ask the question of what precedes (and ultimately conditions) the installation of this self. If Freud, moreover, assumes that the primal scene is an event that really occurred at a specific moment in history, then Blanchot wants to ask questions about what makes history, and time itself, possible in the first place. His suggestion, which I take to be one of the main themes of his text, is that unities or totalities of any kind (be they egoic, historical, political, or textual) are imperceptibly undermined and ruined by the very things that make them possible. It is to this ‘pre-​story’ that we owe everything, including the impossibility of this everything ever being whole. But let us examine these points in greater detail. 6

“I Died … There Had Been Rehearsals”

In 1975, only months before his composition of the first version of the ‘primal scene’ piece, two texts of considerable importance found their way into Blanchot’s hands. The first was a French translation of D.W. Winnicott’s posthumous essay, “Fear of Breakdown.”51 The second was Serge Leclaire’s text, A Child is Being Killed: On primary narcissism and the death drive. Both texts, in different ways, focus heavily on the notion of a ‘pre-​story.’ They both seek to portray early infantile life as conditioned and radically disrupted by otherness, indeed, by death itself. Written in the early 1960s, but not published until 1974, three years after Winnicott’s death, “Fear of Breakdown,” is a lucid and evocative piece of 50 Ibid., 115. 51 Blanchot encountered the essay in its French form as “La Crainte de l’Effondrement,” translated by Jeannine Kalmanovitch, and published in 1975.

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psychoanalytic literature focused on the way in which agonies endured in the state of infantile helplessness contribute to the formation of mental illnesses later in life. What Winnicott is specifically seeking to develop, here, are therapeutic approaches for treating patients who live haunted by a persistent fear of breakdown. Winnicott proposes that such patients need to be led gradually to discover that the event of disintegration which they fear has already happened in the distant, pre-​personal past. Psychic dissolution has preceded psychic integration, so to speak, and is thus nothing to be feared. “There are moments,” Winnicott writes, “when the patient needs to be told that the breakdown … has already been.”52 Winnicott’s account leads us back to the early days and weeks of life when the infant-​mother relationship is of particularly decisive importance. Here, it is “not only how the mother’s presence is experienced by the infant which is of tremendous importance, but also the meaning of her absence.”53 If this absence is too extreme, too protracted, Winnicott argues, it might be experienced by the infant as a primal agony, an “unthinkable state of affairs.”54 Or, rather, not experienced at all  –​but nonetheless undergone. Indeed, Winnicott’s contention is that such an agony, undergone in early infancy, achieves its pathogenic effect precisely because it precedes any consolidation of selfhood on the infant’s part. If the infant’s under-​developed ego is too immature to gather into its sphere of personal mastery the ‘unthinkable state of affairs’ that has just occurred to it, such agonies may lead to the development of illness syndromes later in life. Primitive agonies exert such a profound, ongoing impact because they cannot be understood by the patient as belonging to the past, until they have first been experienced by a self as fully present. “Unless the ego can first gather it into its own present time experience and into omnipotent control now,”55 the agony in question remains ongoing, recursive. Hence the aim of therapy, which seeks to make present (for the first time) a psychic breakdown which has always already occurred in the past. By means of the transference, the patient can safely bring the unthinkable event into the present, and thus reintegrate it into his personal history, mastering the very thing which had been previously so feared. 52 D.W. Winnicott, “Fear of Breakdown,” International Review of Psycho-​ Analysis 1 (1974): 104. 53 Dodi Goldman, In Search of the Real:  The Origins and Originality of D.W. Winnicott (London: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1993), 32. 54 Winnicott, “Fear of Breakdown,” 103. 55 Ibid., 105.

148 CHAPTER 4 Toward the end of his essay, however, Winnicott makes a further move, which interestingly draws the patient’s fear of breakdown into relation with another phenomenon. “Little alteration is needed,” he writes, “to transfer the general thesis of fear of breakdown to a specific fear of death.”56 Like a primal agony, death would be “something that happened to the patient but which the patient was not mature enough to experience.”57 Much as in the context of the breakdown psychosis, Winnicott suggests, the key to overcoming the fear of death would reside in the patient’s willingness to accept that this death has always already taken place before the ego was present to experience it. If the patient understands his own death to precede him, then the future death which yet awaits him offers little to fear. To overcome the fear of death, one must simply recuperate death into one’s personal history by stipulating its anteriority with respect to the ‘here and now.’ This is an approach which Winnicott, moreover, seeks to employ with respect to himself. Consider the following lines: I died … There had been rehearsals … When the time came I knew all about the lung heavy with water that the heart could not negotiate, so that not enough blood circulated in the alveoli, and there was oxygen starvation as well as drowning … Let me see. What was happening when I died? My prayer had been answered. I was alive when I died. That was all I had asked for and I had got it.58 This is not a clinical observation. Rather, it is a fragment, written in pencil, on the inner-​flap of a notebook, discovered by Winnicott’s wife, Clare, on the day of his death, in 1971. For nearly a decade, she had been urging him, with little success, to write an autobiography. And yet, despite keeping a notebook around him at all times, we are told that by the time of his death he had managed to write no more than a handful of pages. Yet, there could hardly have been an inscription of greater relevance to his “Fear of Breakdown” essay than the one hastily inscribed on the notebook’s inner-​cover: “I died … There had been rehearsals.” For what Winnicott seems to be suggesting here is that the death which awaits him has been preceded by a death long-​since past, a ‘rehearsal’ comprised of those moments of pre-​ egoic life in which the infant has no sense of self, time, or reality. Perhaps this

56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 106. 58 Goldman, In Search of the Real: The Origins and Originality of D.W. Winnicott, 33.

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rehearsal might even be linked to intrauterine life and the immersion within maternal oneness. Winnicott’s point is that the death which awaits him in the future promises nothing different from what he, without realizing it, or even experiencing it, has already undergone in precisely such a past. By writing the words, “I died … There had been rehearsals,” Winnicott is implicitly seeking to draw this event, older than his earliest memories, into the coherence of time, assimilating it into his personal biography as an event already lived. He is aiming to assert mastery over an event which excludes all mastery, and make personal what precedes his very personhood. The possibility of surviving death is corroborated by the fact that it has already been done by him. To be alive is to have lived through one’s death. Such is Winnicott’s proposed antidote to the fear of which grips those unsettled by their own mortality. Though he acknowledges Winnicott’s approach to be “impressive” and “perhaps therapeutically useful,”59 Blanchot expresses great skepticism over its recuperative aim. Is it really possible, Blanchot wonders, to restore unto a linear temporality, by means of transference, a death which occurs by definition to ‘no one,’ outside of every possible memory and every moment of past-​presence? The shortcoming with Winnicott’s approach, it seems, resides in his insistence upon seeking to “individualize that which cannot be individualized.”60 Given the radical otherness of the death in question, would not such an event remain at least in part nonrecuperable, untranslatable? Would there not remain something about this death that resists inclusion within personal experience or personal history? Indeed, it is here that Blanchot turns to Leclaire’s book, where we encounter a somewhat more nuanced account of the ‘pre-​story.’ Central to Leclaire’s account is the enigmatic figure of the infans –​a figure upon which Blanchot lavishes considerable attention in The Writing of the Disaster, and whose significance we must now attempt to unpack. 7

A Child Is Being Killed

Who, or what, is the infans? This is a question that demands to be answered on several levels. In the most basic sense, it is any young child who has not yet acquired the ability to speak. The infans is the silent one. Leclaire, of course, goes

59 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 66. 60 Ibid.

150 CHAPTER 4 much further than this. He tells us that the infans exudes a kind of tyrannical majesty, a regal stature, “radiating forth absolute power.”61 This presumed omnipotence is not merely a function of the child’s status as a being who has not yet differentiated himself from his surroundings, it is also, importantly, related to his status in the eyes of others. Why does ‘His Majesty, the Baby’ possess such an auspicious bearing? Because, as Leclaire tells us, the infans embodies all the “wishes, memories, hopes, and dreams” of his parents and those who witnessed his birth.62 Endowed, or rather saddled, with all the expectations conferred upon him by his parents, not to mention society-​at-​large, the infans comprises as a sort of crystalline image of infantile potentiality and ideality, waiting in silence for real life to begin. Leclaire calls this majestic child the primary narcissistic representation. It is an unconscious image radiating pure nostalgia, as though heralding, in advance, all the ways in which this infant’s life, on the cusp of truly beginning, might fulfill the promise, lost or abandoned, of its parents.63 Yet, in order for the young child’s life to begin in earnest, in order for the child to begin to exist, to desire, to speak, to develop a history, and to make its way through time –​an inaugural act of violence must be performed. The infans must be murdered. As Leclaire writes, “there can be no life without killing that strange, original image.”64 It is only by killing the infans that the child truly begins to live, entering time as a human agent, and leaving behind the silent eternity of primary narcissism. The parallels with a Kojèveian Hegel, here, are striking, though perhaps unsurprising given Leclaire’s formative immersion with the Lacanian milieu. It was Kojève who called Hegel’s philosophy, in the final analysis, a philosophy of death. For Hegel, human objective reality [Wirklichkeit] and empirical existence [Dasein] are founded by means of nothingness which manifests itself as negative action.65 Man, we are told, is simply death living a human life. In much the same way, Leclaire makes the negative act the foundation of his developmental account. Life can only begin once the infans has been killed. It is this act of primal negation that ‘starts the clock’ on 61

Serge Leclaire, A Child is Being Killed: on primary narcissism and the death drive, trans. Marie-​Claude Hays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 3. 62 Ibid. 63 In “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” Freud writes: “The child shall fulfill those wishful dreams of the parents which they never carried out –​the boy shall become a great man and a hero in his father’s place, and the girl shall marry a prince as a tardy compensation for her mother.” See Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 14, 91. 64 Leclaire, A Child is Being Killed, 2. 65 Georges Bataille, “Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice,” trans. Jonathan Strauss, Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 10.

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the child’s existence, making possible his entry into language and conditioning his being in the world. Death is the condition of possibility for life. But here the complexity and paradox begin to emerge. The fact that I am writing this sentence, walking around in a world of others, desiring, speaking, pursuing my interests, and constructing my personal history, suggests that I  have indeed killed the infans, the primary narcissistic representation. For how else could I be doing these things? And yet, several factors point to the sheer difficulty, even impossibility, of the act having been committed. First, there is the problem of the perpetrating agent. The murder, it seems, has occurred –​but who exactly was the murderer? The assumption is that ‘I’ killed the infans. Yet this would be impossible because ‘I’ can only come into existence as a result of the murder. It is only through the death of the majestic child that my agency in the world is instantiated. How can an effect serve as its own cause? Blanchot, for his part, minimizes this potential objection to Leclaire’s account by insisting that “there is no designated or designable dealer of death. It is an impersonal, inactive, and irresponsible ‘they’ that must answer for this death and this murder.”66 The illogicality is thus seemingly averted by making both the perpetrator and the victim impersonal, anonymous, entities. No one is directly involved. The second problem, however, is more difficult to resolve. If, as Leclaire insists, the infans is an unconscious representation, then how can one get close enough to kill it? To ‘consciously’ seek to eliminate this primary narcissistic representation would be a fool’s errand, since the representation in question evades all thought. The moment I think it is in my grasp, it is necessarily elsewhere. Hence, as Blanchot writes, one is faced with the maddening difficulty of having to destroy “that to which one has not now, nor has one ever had, nor will one ever have access.”67 If the unconscious, moreover, is understood to be indestructible, then we are dealing here with a murder perpetrated against an indestructible entity by an undetermined, impersonal assailant, in a region inaccessible to conscious thought. But the paradox extends even further. The third, and arguably most significant, question raised by Leclaire’s account concerns the issue of time itself. The murder has already occurred –​but when exactly was the decisive blow struck? If the temporality of my existence as a person, as an agent in the world, only begins with the death of the infans, then the murder itself necessarily precedes the earliest moment of my personal history. It occurs –​but in what past moment? The answer can only be ‘none.’

66 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 71. 67 Ibid., 67.

152 CHAPTER 4 For if temporality is a result of the murder, then time is always playing ‘catch-​ up’ in relation to the act that engenders it. Even if one were to think backwards toward one’s earliest moments as a person, one would never arrive at the moment of the murder, which would always be just over the horizon. This is because the murder of the majestic child is what serves as the condition of possibility for the first moment of one’s existence. As such, the murder remains forever outside all presence, outside all time. The act of constitutive violence, the murder of the infans, remains necessarily on the periphery of the temporal order it inaugurates. It belongs, one might say, to a time outside of time, or to a history that is radically non-​historical. It is at this point, in The Writing of the Disaster, that Blanchot makes his move. If the killing of the infans must have happened, but not in any particular moment of past-​presence, then on what basis can we conclude that the event was fully accomplished? The answer, of course, is that we cannot assume that it ever was. For if temporality is a result of the killing, then there was literally no time in which the accomplishment of the murder could have taken place. The act in question remains outside every moment of the past, shrouded in indeterminacy. By way of illustration, we might imagine a detective convinced that a murder has taken place. Yet without direct-​access to the victim in question, and without a precise time or place of death, what would such a detective likely conclude? Naturally, that the death remains strangely in abeyance. The victim abides, perhaps, still in limbo. Perhaps the murder is still, in some sense, ongoing. Leclaire attempts to capture this indeterminacy with a phrase upon which Blanchot repeatedly plays: “impossible but necessary murder.”68 The killing is an act every bit as essential (to the possibility of personhood, desire, language, and time) as it is impossible to complete or verify. When did the murder begin? When was it completed? There can be no definitive answer. Hence the act lingers, outside of time, outside of both consciousness and unconsciousness, outside of language itself, as a constitutive act more ancient than every past moment, in a space where even its very accomplishment remains unverifiable –​except in the unmistakable effects it produces. And so we know of this murder only by the way it continues to haunt us. Without a time of its own, a presence of its own, this pre-​original death imposes itself upon us like an ‘orphaned,’ nameless event searching for a home, a place to be at rest, but forever finding none. It persists within a “silent passive … dead eternity to which a temporal form of life must be given.”69 To be finished,

68 Leclaire, A Child is Being Killed, 2. 69 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 71.

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once and for all, with the act of the killing  –​this is what is both necessary and impossible. The killing is never complete; the infans must always be struck down again, and again. Even when we assume, with good reason, that the murder has been completed, the infans is still there, a revenant, haunting us. In a key passage, Blanchot goes on to compare Leclaire’s infans to anti-​Narcissus, the doppelganger about whom Ovid forgot. With his vertiginous fall into the ‘other’ imaginary, Blanchot insists, the child-​god forever unknown to himself is very similar to Leclaire’s infans, “always already dead and nonetheless destined to a fragile, attenuated dying.”70 It is likewise easy to be reminded here of Poe’s “Tell-​Tale Heart,” in which the dead and decomposing victim nevertheless re-​emerges, as though demanding to be killed forever once again. More to the point, one might think of Lacan’s Antigone, neither fully dead nor alive, but lingering “in-​between-​two-​deaths.”71 Antigone’s fate, as Lacan famously recounts in his 1959 seminar, is to be walled-​ up in a cave as punishment for having defied the state by according funeral rites to her brother, Polynices –​an act of transgression which Lacan identifies as a model of “pure desire.”72 Significantly, an interval elapses between the moment in which Antigone is encased within her living-​tomb, and the moment of her actual death (by hanging). Lacan is interested in Antigone’s status between these two events: the first (symbolic) death and the second (biological) death. In this interval, Antigone is strangely neither dead nor alive. She is in-​between, dead to the state, excluded from its order, its law, and its language –​and yet still living. She exists wholly beyond symbolization, outliving her death, but only on condition that it is not she who survives, but someone other, someone without a name, a title, a status, or any other form of symbolic identity. Does she not resemble somewhat Leclaire’s infans, necessarily dead, yet consigned to a protracted, unspeakable demise? Blanchot summarizes his reading of Leclaire in a series of particularly dense lines. Commenting on the title of Leclaire’s book, A Child is Being Killed, he tells us that “[the phrase] signifies that the deed cannot be done once and for all, that the operation is completed at no privileged moment in time –​that, inoperable, it operates, and that thus it tends to be none but the very time which destroys (effaces) time.”73 Blanchot is suggesting here that the murder in question is both constitutive and disruptive, operative and inoperative, foundational and 70 Ibid., 126. 71 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–​1960, ed. Jacques-​ Alain Miller (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997), 272. 72 Ibid. 73 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 71.

154 CHAPTER 4 foundationless. It is an event upon which all subsequent developments of human life are based, and yet which remains strangely impossible for any individual. This event of dubious provenance haunts, without fully entering, our conventional temporal constructs, our personal histories –​conditioning them and compromising them, in turn. The coherence and continuity of experience, one might say, are thus silently interrupted, forestalled, by the very thing that makes them possible. Psychic life is shown to be dependent upon (and in conflict with) something that consciousness cannot reach, cannot subdue. The most important, most formative, event of ‘my’ story  –​is the one that never happened to me, and yet must have always already happened. On this point, we circle back to the significance of Blanchot’s deliberate recourse to the word ‘scene’ –​which he elects, despite great equivocation, to employ in his text. He justifies this use, as we recall, on account of the fact that it allows us not to have to speak of an event taking place at a moment in time. If the constitutive murder precedes time, not to mention selfhood and language, then it is neither as biography nor philosophy, neither as memory nor phantasy, that this ‘pre-​story’ can be brought into language. It is only as a scene, a piece of ambiguously decentered fictive writing, bordering upon what French literature calls a récit, that this haunting return, this faint gleam, might be indicated.74 To evoke it in any other manner would be “to insert into history, into experience, or reality, as an episode or a tableau, that which has ruined them (history, experience, reality), leaving them intact.”75 The importance of the notion of the scene, in other words, is that rather than comprising part of a continuous narrative with a distinct beginning, middle, and end  –​the scene opens onto an infinite series of other scenes, implying a series without any determinate point of origin or end. Each scene is haunted by others, and it is through these various scenes, linked to one another in a ceaseless play of relay, repetition, and mutual contestation, that Blanchot hopes to evoke the spectral indeterminacy of an ordeal that is not an accomplished fact, but an ongoing injury. 8

Death Drives?

How does all of this relate to Freud’s theories? And how might this relate to Blanchot’s broader aims within the text under examination? In one of many bold statements from his interview with Pascal Possoz, Lacoue-​Labarthe 74 Ibid., 114. 75 Ibid., 116.

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insists that The Writing of the Disaster can be viewed as “a great book on the death drive.”76 This may be so. But only in a very specific sense. We know that the death drive, as posited by Freud, refers to a tendency of organic life to “undo connections and so to destroy things … [in order to] return to an earlier state.”77 Beginning as a self-​directed, masochistic tendency, it comes to be externalized into outward aggression, manifesting itself in a desire for mastery and the compulsion to repeat. It is present (for example) in the young child’s Fort/​Da game, in the excitement we receive from watching a building being demolished, and in the morbid curiosity we experience when driving past the scene of an accident. It is even there in the orgasm  –​that entropic, messy, blissful ‘little death’ through which we are transported albeit symbolically to the long-​lost state of oneness. The work of death can be observed all around us. We can see it, represent it, and imagine it. Late capitalism has even become predictably successful at monetizing it. Moreover, it is precisely by harnessing this power of death, and putting it to work in a productive manner, that civilization builds itself. “Destruction in view of possible creation,”78 is what Blanchot calls this productive aspect of the death drive, so reminiscent of the Hegelian negative. It is in the ominous potentialities associated with the nuclear age that Blanchot notes a particularly potent example of this aspect.79 With nuclear power, not to mention nuclear weapons, Blanchot reminds us, much can be accomplished. Things can be constructed, and things can be obliterated. Death and destruction have the ability to transform the world, for better or for worse. As an efficacious, transformative force, death (and the power to wield it) becomes subject to political calculations and existential imperatives of the highest order. It comes to be construed as a historical, ‘worldly’ possibility –​perhaps even as the ultimate possibility –​which remains wholly within our power to name, to think, and to undergo. But this is not the only side to death. As early as his first novel, Thomas the Obscure, Blanchot had insisted that there is also another side, a side which remains radically resistant to all recuperation, mastery, and experience. It is a side which Blanchot, in The Writing of the Disaster, suggests may also be lurking along the margins of Freud’s own text. Blanchot poses his question to Freud in the following manner: If consciousness cannot conceive of its own mortality, 76

Lacoue-​Labarthe, “Interview with Pascal Possoz,” in Ending and Unending Agony:  On Maurice Blanchot, 102. 77 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 23, 148–​149. 78 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 119. 79 Ibid.

156 CHAPTER 4 then might this already be a way of signaling to us that dying involves something utterly unrepresentable? And might this dying be unrepresentable, in part, because human experience can never hope to absorb, explain, or accommodate in its entirety an event that has always already taken place outside all presence? Try as we might to subdue it, or assimilate it into our temporal constructs, this death outside all presence, outside all time, evades our every grasp. What can be produced from such a death  –​a death that can neither present itself nor be represented, within the time of dialectical progress? Nothing, Blanchot writes, can be done with such death. It is a form of negativity that is wholly inoperative, “the inoperation of sheer inertia –​endurance without duration.”80 Which is to say, it is a kind of dying that never really happens, and is never really completed, remaining on the outside of time, the outside of history. There is, as Blanchot tells us, nothing personal about such dying –​as Rilke discovers around the time that he composes The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. It is a dying that never involves the self, but which remains impersonal, anonymous.81 Its sentence is neverthless unequivocal, asserting itself in equal measure as impossible and necessary. “Dying means: you are dead already, in an immemorial past, of a death which was not yours, which you have thus neither known nor lived.”82 Dying means that any hope for a proper death, an authentic death, a meaningful death, a completed death, is rendered vain. There can be no terminal act of self-​actualization, or mortal wisdom gained at the threshold of annihilation. There is no return, in dying, to a state of primordial omnipotence or potentiality. Dying, rather, is ‘un-​power.’83 Prior to life itself, the terminally unaccomplished act of dying has divested the self henceforth of any power to die. Before ‘I’ can ever become a self, dying has already exposed me to an otherness that preempts the establishment of the self, and thus precludes any possibility of self-​annihilation. Dying is prolepsis: it takes away what has not yet been given. Returning ceaselessly, like a revenant from a time older than every moment of past-​presence, it does not announce itself in overt destruction or aggression, but in detachment and rupture, Blanchot tells us. We sense it, perhaps above all, in fragmentary writing and the play of the neuter, which have always already separated us from every unitary imperative. In describing this otherness of dying, lingering on the 80 Ibid., 118. 81 See Blanchot’s extended remarks on the “two kinds of death” in relation to Rilke’s writings, in The Space of Literature, 120–​133. 82 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 65. 83 Ibid., 48.

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fringes of the death drive, are we not then evoking what Blanchot, in the pages of his text, calls the disaster? Toward the end of a key fragment which Blanchot begins by referencing Freud by name, we find the following words: “the disaster would be beyond what we understand by death or abyss, or in any case by my death, since there is no more place for ‘me’: in the disaster I disappear without dying (or die without disappearing).”84 Unrepresentable, outside all productivity, and radically unassimilable to any form of knowledge or personal experience, the notion of the disaster in Blanchot’s text might be understood as a name (under erasure) for those aspects of the death drive which break from all worldly possibility, all desire for absolute repose, and all hope of total integration. Far from being synonymous with the Freudian death drive conceived as a unified whole, the disaster indicates the nonrecuperable aspects of the death drive, gesturing us toward that residue of negativity, of nothingness, which remains left behind when everything has been annihilated, when there is nothing left to destroy. Disaster is a way of indicating that no drive, no self, no history, no text, no political order can ever constitute itself as whole without having been always already exposed to the trace of otherness that compromises it, ruins it, before it can be given. Disaster is what makes narcissism possible, even inescapable –​ on the condition that it be always already exposed to its own impossibility, ruined in advance. It is in this, heavily-​qualified, sense that I believe Lacoue-​Labarthe’s comment about the death drive should be understood. Both the death drive and the disaster share the common feature of referring us back, through the play of obsessive repetition, to a past entirely outside all memory. But whereas the Freudian death drive presupposes oneness, sameness, at the origin, leading us ineluctably toward a nostalgic reunion with the primordial whole –​a return to the ‘zero-​point’  –​the obsessive repetition that we find in Blanchot’s text involves something entirely irreducible to any unity, any sameness, any whole. Even at ‘zero,’ something remains indestructible, as Blanchot’s important essay on Robert Antelme makes eminently clear.85 “There is not the death drive,”86 Blanchot insists. Rather, what we call the death drive must be understood as multiple, refracted, and disunified from the start. Nothing like a primordial oneness exists in Blanchot’s texts, and nothing like a unified drive is discernable either. Difference and dislocation are always already in play from the beginning. Whereas the death drive aims at 84 Ibid., 119. 85 See “The Indestructible” in The Infinite Conversation, 130–​135. 86 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 46.

158 CHAPTER 4 equilibrium and terminal repose, Blanchot’s notion of the otherness of dying involves a deferral of all resolution. “In death,” Blanchot writes, “one can find an illusory refuge … the end of the fall.”87 In dying, by contrast, one falls interminably. The end of the fall, the pleasure of completion and certainty, is evasive. 9

Return to the Window

I began this chapter by commenting on the play of framing and re-​framing that the ‘boy at the window’ fragment engenders, and its connection to the proliferation of frames and scenes found in Freud’s search for a primal, pathogenic catalyst. I then proceeded to show how Blanchot, responding to the writings of Winnicott and Leclaire, seeks to challenge the prevailing psychoanalytic privilege accorded to the notion of the primal, rejecting the search for an absolute beginning to the child’s story, and supplanting it with an inquiry into the ‘pre-​story.’ Engaging with Leclaire’s text, in particular, Blanchot discovers this ‘pre-​story’ to be a murderous event involving nothing less than the requisite ruination of the very thing it conditions. Having outlined these moves, I then turned toward a consideration of the death drive and the disaster, highlighting once again Blanchot’s recurrent emphasis upon the primacy of difference and otherness which puts all unity and all origins radically into question. But so far very little has been said, in the midst of all this, about what the child in Blanchot’s own fragment actually sees or undergoes. Without attempting here to unpack in all its complexity the significance of the nothingness outside the window, the fissured pane, or the child’s tears –​an initial comment or two about the boy’s experience might now be in order, as a way of setting the stage for the final chapters of this book. In the second of three ‘(A primal scene?)’ fragments in The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot offers us an extended, italicized commentary on the piece in question. Here we find the suggestion that what the child sees is nothing less than “the happy murder of himself which gives him words’ silence.”88 This is clearly a direct reference to Leclaire. It suggests that what the child perceives in the absence, in the void beyond the broken window pane, may be some manifestation of the ‘pre-​story’ just recounted, the impossible yet necessary murder of the infans. According to this reading, the child in the window receives a

87 Ibid., 48. 88 Ibid., 115.

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glimpse of the constitutive violence which, outside of all time and all personal history, has always already made him a survivor of his own death. On what basis, though, can such a glimpse be permitted? To what extent can the non-​experience of the murder be experienced as such? To suggest that the child (and by extension, the reader) might capable of accessing the inaugural act, and understanding it as such, is seemingly to return to Winnicott’s position in the “Fear of Breakdown” essay, or even to Freud’s own belief, that origins might somehow be recuperated in full and made meaningful. If such a view, as Blanchot suggests, is indeed a naïve one –​then is he not guilty of a similar misstep by virtue of granting the child (and the reader) access to what cannot be accessed? What I want to propose is that if the boy’s glimpse into the void indeed offers him an exposure to the event of his own murder, then this event is never given as such, but only ever given in the form of a translation. In a manner recalling the Lettres portugaises, one might call it a translation without an original source, or a translation of something that has never happened. The event can only return in a form that is necessarily otherwise than itself. In the boy’s exposure to the void, I am convinced, he is not being presented with the recurrence of something he has previously undergone. It is not a recurrence of the same. What returns, instead, is an experience never yet lived by him, but which must be lived always yet again. Is this not precisely the temporality of trauma? In the final two chapters of this book, I want to explore the question of trauma in Blanchot’s text. It will be my argument that the trauma which returns in ‘(A primal scene?)’ is none other than a trauma of responsibility for the other person. In the unbearable demand associated with having to translate and then ceaselessly retranslate this traumatic responsibility, I will argue, the political contours of Blanchot’s engagement with psychoanalysis at last become evident.

­c hapter 5

The Trauma of Responsibility 1

Rethinking Responsibility

What comes to mind when we hear the word responsibility? Etymologically related to respondere, ‘to respond,’ the term relates to being accountable for one’s actions, being answerable to someone, or for something. In varying contexts, the word responsibility may carry an association with the notion of liability, or perhaps, with the ideas of duty and obligation. Some philosophers seek to minimize this semantic ambiguity by drawing a neat distinction between ex post responsibility, understood as one’s answerability for some past act, and ex ante responsibility, which involves a demand to take care of something or someone in the future. Such distinctions only underscore responsibility’s sheer breadth as a concept. Whether one examines small social units or global communities, the question of responsibility, the need to ‘respond’  –​to some crisis or ­injustice –​seems to announce itself almost everywhere. At the cross-​roads of ethics and politics, responsibility is a concept seemingly indispensable to both. Hans-​Werner Bierhoff and Ann Elisabeth Auhagen call it a “fundamental human phenomenon,”1 and suggest that a renewed focus upon the notion of responsibility may be crucial “for the survival of modern democratic structures.”2 From environmental degradation to poverty, from violence against children to the persistence of racism and sexism, there is no shortage of problems desperately in need of attention. To take these issues (and many others) seriously, to acknowledge one’s culpability for past harms, to work toward viable redress, to promote the cause of justice, to plan for a better future –​all of this seems commensurate with the actions of a responsible individual. And never, we are told, has the need for responsibility been more urgent. But where does responsibility come from? How does one become responsible? Is it enough simply to choose to be responsible? In The Writing of the Disaster, a text whose major theme, I would argue, is the question of responsibility, Blanchot develops a critique of the stereotypically ‘responsible man,’ 1 Ann Elisabeth Auhagen and Hans-​Werner Bierhoff, “Responsibility as a fundamental human phenomenon,” in Responsibility: The Many Faces of a Social Phenomenon, eds. Ann Elisabeth Auhagen and Hans-​Werner Bierhoff (London: Routledge, 2001), 1. 2 Ibid.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004401334_​0 07

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showing him to be beholden, ultimately, to little more than a defense of the pre-​existing order, an allegiance to the status quo. The depiction is as incisive as it is scathing. Responsibility, in this banal sense, is for Blanchot “a notion moralistically assigned to us a (political) duty.”3 To describe a responsible individual is to describe someone “mature, lucid, conscientious … who acts with circumspection, who takes into account all elements of a given situation, calculates and decides.”4 Naturally, there is a strong moral component to his actions. Paradigmatically of a bourgeois demeanor, the responsible man will rarely be swayed by wild passions.5 Rather, his responses are deliberate, intentional, purposive. He upholds a received morality and applies its principles consistently. His thinking, judgments, and actions, are all teleologically-​driven, making him a master of ends.6 Such an account presupposes, among other things, that responsibility is fundamentally autocentric; it is something that pertains to the self. Though I may be responsible at times for the other person, it is ultimately up to me to decide whether to acknowledge this responsibility or not. Responsibility is something that concerns me, the sovereign subject. I  may choose to accept my responsibility, or I may choose not to accept my responsibility –​but either way, it is still my choice. Herein lies the importance traditionally assigned to education, to formal and informal sanctions, and to the political order itself, each of which reinforces the correct path, the righteous path, the just path. To be a responsible human being is to defend this moral, rational order as much as it is to be guided by it. Blanchot’s account of responsibility, by contrast, signals a radical shift away from this classic, autocentric account. For Blanchot, responsibility begins not with me, but with the other person. It precedes and exceeds any willed assumption of duty on my part, removing me from the center of the story. For Blanchot, responsibility “is not an activating thought process put in to practice, nor is it even a duty that would impose itself from without and from within.”7 It is not something I can choose, or even fully think. Why is this? Because responsibility, for Blanchot, is profoundly disruptive, even disastrous in nature. 3 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 25. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Max Weber, in 1919, argues that a good politician must learn to balance a moralistic idealism and commitment with a pragmatic realism in order to benefit the common good. Weber terms the former approach an ‘Ethic of Conviction’ [Gesinnungsethik] and the latter approach an ‘Ethic of Responsibility’ [Verantwortungsethik]. Aspects of both approaches seem to be present in Blanchot’s characterization of the stereotypically ‘responsible’ man. 7 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 25.

162 CHAPTER 5 It arises from a traumatic exposure to the other person who invades and ultimately inhabits a vulnerable body bereft of self. Preceding all lived-​experience, the traumatic implantation of the demand of responsibility is an occurrence that announces itself only ‘after the fact,’ in the form of the return of an event that has never taken place. What I want to suggest, over the course of these final two chapters, is that Blanchot’s discussion of responsibility in The Writing of the Disaster marks a critical juncture in his engagement with psychoanalysis. First, because in rethinking the notion of responsibility, Blanchot implicitly draws his account into relation with psychoanalytic theories of trauma, even reinscribing the radically non-​linear form of temporality these theories presuppose. Second, because Blanchot’s account of responsibility also gestures us, in a different voice, toward the limits of these respective theories. I want to suggest that Blanchot uses both psychoanalysis and philosophy, in his discussion of responsibility, to contest one another. Philosophy (in particular, the philosophy of Levinas) confronts psychoanalysis with the demand that it attempt to think trauma in terms of responsibility, and responsibility in terms of trauma. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, pushes the philosophy of Levinas to a limit where the asymmetrical, ethical obligation to the other person demands to be translated, in light of the après-​coup, into a doubly dissymmetrical responsibility toward every other –​opening the path toward a rethinking of the notion of community itself. To read Blanchot’s pages on responsibility, is to see him orchestrating this give-​and-​take, this play of mutual contestation, pushing both psychoanalysis and the philosophy of Levinas toward their respective limits. In exploring the question of trauma, I want to use the opportunity to stage a long-​overdue encounter between Blanchot and one psychoanalytic theorist in particular whose emphasis upon the invasiveness of the other, the enigma of language, and the exigency of unending translation, bears a marked similarity to Blanchot’s own. This individual is Jean Laplanche. 2

The Alien inside My Body

As the story goes, it was Freud’s suppression of the seduction theory, in mid-​ 1897, that first opened the path to the birth of psychoanalysis as we know it. It was a necessary sacrifice which paved the way for the first topography, the discovery of infantile auto-​eroticism, the theory of the drives, and much more. For Laplanche, however, this suppression plainly suggests that Freud was unwilling to pursue his Copernican Revolution to its point of completion. Freud had declined to follow through with his most radical theory, a theory which

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placed traumatic, exogenous influences at the heart of human pathology. Laplanche sees his own psychoanalytic project as beginning where Freud, in 1897, left off. Laplanche seeks to place a consideration of primal trauma, once more, at the forefront of psychoanalytic theory and practice. According to Laplanche, a major reason why Freud ultimately abandoned his so-​called ‘neurotica’ resides in the clinical difficulty of ever corroborating the pervasiveness of either incest or intra-​familial sexual violence. With both perpetrators and victims reticent to admit to its occurrence, and with the lack of any reliable method for empirically gauging its transcultural ubiquity, the matter becomes unverifiable. But what if intra-​familial seduction were not a random occurrence, a contingent matter dependent upon the willful misdeeds of a perverse adult, but something more like an unavoidable, structural component of all adult-​infant communication whatsoever? What if, in other words, the trauma in question had less to do with overt ‘child abuse,’ and more to do with the unconscious implantation of sexual messages couched in the framework of everyday parental care? It is this path which Laplanche wishes to pursue in developing his general theory of primal seduction. Laplanche wants to go beyond a mere consideration of abusive events in order to describe infantile trauma as a structural condition for the very possibility of being human. The aim is ultimately to radicalize Freud’s theory of seduction into a general anthropological account that makes all recourse to biology unnecessary. As with Freud’s seduction theory, Laplanche’s account begins with an examination of the adult-​infant relationship in its earliest stages. The baby, as Freud had previously noted, exists in a state of vulnerability, or infantile helplessness [Hilflösigkeit], which makes it utterly dependent upon an adult figure (typically its mother) for survival. In the context of this relationship, which the psychologist John Bowlby famously characterizes as one of care and attachment, the adult is expected to feed, protect, and nurture the child, providing safety and security.8 This involves practices such as nursing, stimulating, holding, caressing, cleaning, and washing the baby. While caring for the infant, Laplanche suggests, messages are continually transmitted from the adult to the baby. These messages, which Laplanche also sometimes calls ‘signifiers,’ can include words, but are not strictly linguistic in nature.9 They may also include actions, gestures, affects, and conventions transmitted through common, care-​giving practices. Every time an adult speaks to the baby, touches the baby, or plays

8 See John Bowlby, Attachment (New York: Basic Books, 1982). 9 From the 1990s onward, Laplanche exclusively uses the term ‘messages’ rather than ‘signifiers.’

164 CHAPTER 5 with the baby, the infant is bombarded by messages from the ‘outside’ which it struggles to understand. The state of infantile helplessness, according to Laplanche, is characterized by the baby’s constant exposure to such messages, enigmatic in nature, transmitted (principally) by its parents. Inevitably, there is a sexual component to some of these messages, though Laplanche acknowledges that the adult in question may hardly be aware of it. At the level of conscious thought, a mother offering her breast to an infant is engaged purely and simply in an act of care, just as a father who attentively cleans an infant’s genitals while changing a diaper will likely believe that there is nothing sexual about his actions. These are not perverted adults, as in Freud’s seduction theory, engaged in acts of predation. Rather, they are caregivers holding, kissing, hugging, or rocking the infant in good-​faith. Such caregivers, in Laplanche’s account, are not conscious of the sexual component inherent within attachment activity. The use of the term ‘seduction’ for describing all this might therefore appear quizzical. If Laplanche insists upon retaining the term, despite the absence of nefarious intent on the part of the adult, it is because of what the term connotes etymologically in German. The word Verführung, which Freud employs for his own seduction theory, suggests that something is diverted from its natural goal and led outside itself. Philippe Van Haute glosses its connection to Laplanche’s theory in the following manner. “Our normal, caring dealing with the small child inevitably contains a number of sexual messages,” he writes, which lead the child away from its “relation of pure care and attachment” to the adult.10 Seduction, here, simply implies that something ambiguous or confusing is ‘added’ to the standard messages of care and attachment issuing from the adult. These ambiguously sexual elements, unacknowledged by the adult, and utterly incomprehensible by the infant, have the effect of diverting their relationship into dark, unintended quarters beyond the scope of innocent parental care. This account of seduction clearly resonates with certain aspects of Sándor Ferenczi’s later work. In particular, one thinks of the Ferenczi’s important essay on the “Confusion of Tongues,” from 1933. In this essay, Ferenczi describes a close, playful relationship between the adult and the child which innocently veers into scenarios of an amorous nature. Examples of such playful contact may include kissing and snuggling, or even role-​playing. While for the child such play is interpreted as a form of tenderness, for the adult, by contrast,

10

Phillippe van Haute, Confusion of Tongues: The Primacy of Sexuality in Freud, Ferenczi and Laplanche (New York: Other Press, 2004), 123.

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the interaction cannot help but evoke an act of passion.11 This confusion of tongues is emblematic of the fundamental discontinuity between the world of the child and the world of the adult. Even in the midst of bonding activities, radical asymmetry prevents the parent and the child from getting on the ‘same page.’ Their respective worlds, languages, and perspectives are simply not sufficiently attuned to one another. For the child, the effect of this radical discontinuity is jarring, even traumatic in nature, potentially leading to pathological consequences. Though Laplanche resists Ferenczi’s overly-​ reductive generalization, namely, that adults always interpret such scenes in the language of passion, while children interpret them in the language of tenderness, Laplanche shares Ferenczi’s belief in the fundamental asymmetry between parent and infant. Unlike the parent, the infant does not yet have either an ego or an unconscious. The infant is, crucially, a being lacking any ability to bind, or make sense of, the sexual messages with which it is bombarded. Indeed, there is little that the child can do, in the face of this bombardment, but passively absorb the messages with which it is confronted. Laplanche describes a process of violent intromission and implantation, whereby the other’s messages literally lodge themselves under the infant’s skin. The psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu has written extensively about the surface of the infant’s skin, and its importance as a basic point of reference for all forms of sense data.12 “The skin is the surface of the body that receives and creates sensations that give the infant the sense of a constant unity of contact with the mother.”13 Serving both as screen and filter, the infant’s ‘skin-​ego’ is understood by Anzieu as a boundary that keeps together the primitive parts of the psyche, allowing for individuation to occur, while also serving as a “conduit and communicative envelope formed with the first exchanges between mother and baby.”14 A major role of the skin-​ego is to protect the neonate against intrusive or excessive stimuli, which might be likened here to inscriptions and messages coming from the outside. Anzieu describes the skin-​ego as “the original parchment which preserves, like a palimpsest, the erased, scratched-​out, written-​over, first outlines of an ‘original’ pre-​verbal writing made up of traces upon the

11 Sándor Ferenczi, “Confusion of the Tongues Between the Adults and the Child,” International Journal of Psycho-​Analysis 30 (1949): 227. 12 Christine Anzieu-​Premmereur, “The Skin-​Ego: Dyadic Sensuality, Trauma in Infancy, and Adult Narcissistic Issues,” Psychoanalytic Review 102, no. 5 (2015): 662. 13 Ibid., 660. 14 Ibid., 661.

166 CHAPTER 5 skin.”15 If the skin-​ego cannot be built or maintained, the self is damaged before ever coming to be fully formed. Laplanche’s account, one might say, is a way of describing what occurs when this parchment or palimpsest which Anzieu describes is marked in the enigmatic language of the other, even in advance of any skin-​ego being formed.16 In Laplanche’s account, before the earliest installation of a self, the baby is already penetrated somatically by messages that remain utterly inexplicable to it. In order to cope with the implantation of these strange messages, and attempt to integrate them somehow, the baby begins to build an inside. The infantile ego, according to Laplanche, is thus created in direct response to this ‘too much otherness’ with which it is confronted. The infant’s “way of coping with this strangeness is to build an ego. [The infant] starts Copernican and Ptolemizes.”17 What begins with allocentrism soon gives way to autocentrism, as the violent intrusion of external reality engenders the creation of an egoic inside. The self, according to Laplanche, develops in direct response to an antecedent otherness that is both overwhelming and confusing. It is for the purpose of translating the other’s enigmatic messages that the inside, the ego, is formed. Yet, as Laplanche insists, such translations necessarily leave behind an untranslatable remainder; something about the messages in question remains irreducibly enigmatic. This is because the messages which invade the infant’s body are themselves invaded by the unconscious of the other person. The adult is not conscious of the sexual content which saturates the messages she transmits to the infant. And the infant, for its part, has no idea what the adult wants, or how it is supposed to respond. As a result, these enigmatic messages are repressed by the infant, coming to form the basis of its own unconscious. At the heart of the infant’s psyche there comes to reside an otherness, an unconscious, which is not only implanted by the other person, but also imbued with the other person’s own unconscious. As Laplanche writes, “the unconscious [is] an alien inside me, and even one put inside me by an alien.”18 It is this re-​doubling of otherness that makes Laplanche’s general theory of primal 15 16

17 18

Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1989), 105. In connection with the skin-​ego’s capacity as an inscriptive surface, one might also consult Piera Aulagnier’s writings on the notion of the ‘pictogram.’ See Piera Aulagnier, The Violence of Interpretation:  From Pictogram to Statement, trans. Alan Sheridan (Philadelphia: Brunner-​Routledge, 2001). Cathy Caruth, “Traumatic Temporality: An Interview with Jean Laplanche,” in Listening to Trauma, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 30. Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, ed. John Fletcher (London: Routledge, 1999), 65.

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seduction so radical, so consummately Copernican. Everything begins with otherness which can never be fully recuperated, haunting a self which is never whole. “The unconscious cannot be considered the kernel of our being,” Laplanche contends. “Far from being my ‘kernel’ it is the other implanted within me … [it is] forever an internal foreign body.”19 The untranslatable remainder of the other’s enigmatic message is the alien inside the infant’s body. Incapable of being fully translated, or deciphered, the enigmatic message is encrypted within the baby as a kernel of radical otherness that remains utterly foreign to the very self which would seek to ‘bind’ or make sense of it. Such a message is buried within the self, while remaining radically alien to the self. To be human, is to house within oneself the other of the other, the unconscious of the very person who implanted the enigmatic message under one’s skin. The impact of this untranslated enigmatic message is not measured in terms of what it does, but rather, by its apparent lack of any immediate effect upon the self. The invasive message makes no noise, and creates no stir. Yet its stillness and seeming lack of efficacy are utterly duplicitous and deceitful, Laplanche contends. By all appearances innocuous, the implantation of the message within the infant sets in motion a range of delayed, pathological consequences. This is because the implanted message, ostensibly benign, is nothing less than a primal, traumatic catalyst. What makes the implantation of the message traumatic to the infant is not the fact that it is sexual in nature. Rather, as Laplanche states, the message is traumatic because it is irreducibly enigmatic. It is precisely because the infant, lacking any self, lacking any language, has no ability to translate the enigma of the parent’s message (which not even the parent herself fully understands), that the implantation of this message ultimately achieves its pathogenic effect. Undoubtedly, such an account might seem foreign with respect to Blanchot’s text. What could seduction theory possibly have to do with the arguments found within The Writing of the Disaster? If Laplanche’s theory is indeed relevant to us, it is not on account of its emphasis on sexuality, but on account of its emphasis on the irreducible enigma of the other’s message. Sexuality is important here only as a function of something more fundamental: relational asymmetry. Indeed, it is on account of relational asymmetry that sexual messages from parent to infant assume the status of something enigmatic, something traumatic. As Philippe Van Haute asserts, “It may not be the primacy of sexuality, but rather the essential 19 Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 256.

168 CHAPTER 5 asymmetric relation between child and adult –​that is, the structural and constitutive confusion of tongues between the two –​that is the shibboleth of psychoanalysis.”20 The question I would now like to pose, with an eye toward Blanchot’s account of responsibility in The Writing of the Disaster, is whether there might be other types of messages, perhaps of a non-​sexual nature, that are likewise rendered enigmatic on the basis of this “essential asymmetric relation.” Might there be a sense in which the very notion of responsibility, for example, remains for both the mother and the infant every bit as enigmatic as sexuality? Might its meaning, like that of sexuality, be transmitted through the touch and the glance, the soothing whisper and the embrace, the mouth and the breast –​ all the while remaining an inexhaustible mystery, an enigma? And might this message of responsibility, transmitted from mother to infant, then announce itself to the recipient perhaps only after the fact, as a translation, returning from a past that was never present, as something other than itself? Might responsibility, in short, be something traumatic? 3

Subissement

Trauma makes language falter; words can only say so much. There is very little that can be communicated straightforwardly about an event that only takes place long after having taken place, remaining on the periphery of experience, evading all forms of mastery or knowledge. Discursive language is woefully inadequate to capture, to represent, the extremity of such states. For trauma therapists working in clinical practice, the problem is an especially acute one. In his essay, “Trauma and Memory,” psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk recounts the findings of various neurophysiological experiments involving victims of trauma. In one particular experiment, “subjects were read a detailed sensory script of their catastrophic experiences and were then scanned [using positron emission tomography] as they entered flashback states.”21 What the scans revealed was that subjects demonstrated heightened brain activity only in the areas most involved in emotional arousal, while other parts of the brain fell entirely silent. Broca’s area, “the part of the left hemisphere responsible for translating personal experience into communicable language  –​‘turned 20 Haute, Confusion of Tongues: The Primacy of Sexuality in Freud, Ferenczi and Laplanche, 143. 21 Bessel van der Kolk, “Traumatic Memory,” in Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society, eds. Bessel van der Kolk et al. (New York: Guilford, 1996), 293.

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off.’ ”22 Individuals literally became speechless when re-​traumatized. The patients’ brains failed to translate the catastrophic event into a verbally encoded experience. It wasn’t just that traumatized subjects didn’t want to talk, it was that they couldn’t. Blanchot’s concern, of course, is not brain science. Yet the sheer inadequacy, even incapacity, of discursive language in the face of trauma asserts itself as something of a recurrent theme in The Writing of the Disaster. Language, in Blanchot’s text, constantly struggles to bear witness to what is radically other, particularly as this otherness puts the self (not to mention the coherence of time) violently into question. Scarcely does Blanchot introduce a key term or concept, in The Writing of the Disaster, without qualifying its usage, placing it under erasure, or suspending it parenthetically. Blanchot’s approach to the so-​called ‘primal scene’ is but one example of this. Equally consequential is the manner in which Blanchot, throughout his discussion of responsibility, grapples with the challenge of how to describe the vulnerable and exposed state of a traumatized body, a body which (beyond choice, beyond consent) is violently invaded by the other person. Trauma means ‘wound’ –​and the trauma of responsibility, in Blanchot’s text, involves a real, not merely figurative, wounding. It involves a violence that preempts both egoic mastery and conscious thought. It is a violence, moreover, that precedes language. How can one describe the trauma endured by a body which, prior to selfhood, thought, or language, is already invaded, violated, and irreparably compromised by the other person? What sort of words might be adequate to such a task? With great qualification, Blanchot suggests that before the installation of egoic life, before the distinction between consciousness-​unconsciousness, there exists simply a “body which belongs to no one.”23 It is a body without defenses, without protection, utterly vulnerable in the face of an overwhelming, impinging exteriority.24 Yet no sooner does Blanchot propose this configuration than he places it under suspicion. The word ‘body,’ he suggests, is already problematic. For what it evokes, particularly in the context of physicalist philosophy, is something foundational, even primordial: an uncontested, 22 Ibid. 23 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 29. 24 The Blanchotian “body of no one” shares several features in common with the famous “body without Organs” posited by Deleuze and Guattari. Most notable among these is perhaps the trait of impersonality. Deleuze and Guattari write: “[T]‌he BwO is never yours or mine. It is always a body.” See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 164.

170 CHAPTER 5 physiological baseline in relation to which all lived-​experiences might be reduced. “It gives one the illusory impression of being outside of meaning already, free from the contamination of consciousness-​unconsciousness.”25 It marks, in short, the “insidious return of the natural, of Nature.”26 Such a conception of the body is erroneous, according to Blanchot, because it suggests a grounding for lived-​experience that is objective, unified, and ‘untainted.’ But there has never been anything foundational or uncontested about the body, Blanchot insists. This much had already been made clear by Foucault, whom Blanchot, as we know, had read carefully. For Foucault, what we call ‘the body’ is in fact constructed by the various ideational meanings that predominate within a given social field. The body, as Foucault argues, in The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, is a site of culturally contested meanings, a site of conflict between competing power regimes.27 There is no such thing as ‘the body’ outside the context of its socio-​cultural inscription. There is no body prior to the law.28 Of course, it is not only Foucault of whom Blanchot is thinking here. It is also, in a different register, Lacan. For just as the body can have no ontological status preceding its inscription, neither can the epithets of unity or integration be applied to the body in anything but an imaginary sense. The body cannot serve as an unproblematic ground for experience, or a stable basis for selfhood, for the body exists initially only in ‘bits and pieces,’ and assumes the epithet of unity only through the process of imaginary misidentification. One can thus speak of the body only with the utmost qualification, Blanchot suggests, because what we call the body has always been “unreal, imaginary, [or] fragmentary.”29 If both Foucault and Lacan, in different ways, repudiate the physicalist portrayal of the body as an objective, unproblematic foundation for human experience  –​then Blanchot insists on pushing this point further still. The body, as Blanchot wants to argue, cannot in fact be reduced to an aggregate of historically contingent inscriptions, as Foucault would have it, because these inscriptions are themselves preceded by a traumatic ‘pre-​inscription’ which falls outside history. In a key passage, Blanchot insists upon “a pre-​inscription 25 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 45. 26 Ibid. 27 Also see Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” In Language, Counter-​Memory, Practice:  Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F.  Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 153. 28 Judith Butler problematizes this reading of Foucault. See Judith Butler, “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions,” The Journal of Philosophy 86, no.  11 (November 1989): 601–​607. 29 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 45.

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[pré-​inscription] which ever effaces itself as a production of meaning without thereby becoming meaningless.”30 This pre-​inscription, which precedes, conditions, and ultimately destabilizes the inscription of the body, is directly linked, by Blanchot, to the notion of responsibility. The word “responsibility,” Blanchot writes, “comes as though from an unknown language … One would thus have to turn toward some language that never has been written –​a language never inscribed but that is always to be prescribed [prescrire] –​in order that this incomprehensible word be understood in its disastrous heaviness [lourdeur désastreuse].”31 A  comparison with Laplanche’s account might already be discerned. Messages, irreducible to language, bombard a body yet uninhabited by a self. Prior to the inscription of the body by socio-​cultural forces, prior to the unitary image of the body, prior to the skin-​ego, there is the body of no one: the body as “cadaverous, exposed, flattened, sheer surface,”32 always already impacted by the trauma of responsibility. Blanchot’s name for this state of traumatic exposure  –​prior to all meaning or bodily cohesion –​is passivity. The term has great currency in Blanchot’s text, even as its appropriateness is repeatedly called into question by him. “It is very difficult for us … to speak of passivity,” Blanchot claims, “for it does not belong to the world, and we know nothing which would be utterly passive.”33 One of the problems with a term like passivity is that it remains ensnared within a dialectical structure that generates meaning through the sublation of real difference. No sooner is the word ‘passivity’ uttered than it silently evokes its opposite: activity. One of Blanchot’s aims, in The Writing of the Disaster, as we know, is to bear witness to the trace of radical difference that remains outside all such dialectical pairings. Therefore, when he uses the term passivity, Blanchot takes great care to insist that it be understood in a very specific sense as “a passivity which … has abandoned the level of life where passivity would simply be the opposite of active.”34 Not unlike Derrida’s archi-​writing, which is theorized as anterior to the distinction between speech and writing, thus remaining irreducible to writing in the mundane sense  –​Blanchot’s notion of radical passivity might be considered a kind of ‘archi-​passivity,’ a passivity beyond dialectical recuperation, beyond representation, and beyond the unity and coherence of discourse. Such passivity, Blanchot suggests, pertains to “that ‘inhuman’ part of man which, destitute of power, separated from unity, 30 Ibid., 118. 31 Ibid., 26–​27. 32 Ibid., 40. 33 Ibid., 15. 34 Ibid., 13.

172 CHAPTER 5 could never accommodate anything able to appear or show itself.”35 Passivity, in other words, has nothing to do with either simple receptivity or the momentary cessation of action. It refers instead to a state of vulnerable exposure and powerlessness, of suffering, beyond the grasp of either phenomenological thematization or dialectical recuperation. Passivity is a name for a traumatic exposure that is impossible to think, to represent, or to undergo, yet which has always already been undergone, anonymously or impersonally, by a body bereft of self. “We might coin a word for the absolute passiveness of total abjection –​le subissement,” Blanchot writes.36 This neologism, subissement, is a portmanteau comprised of the words subir, ‘to undergo,’ and subitement, ‘suddenly.’ It connotes a sudden suffering undergone by a body in the throes of radical passivity; or perhaps, as Blanchot writes elsewhere in the text, a ‘nonnarcissistic suffering.’37 The passivity of subissement is measureless. It cannot be subordinated unto any modality of either being or non-​being. It describes the state of a traumatized body on the very outside of both dialectic and ontology. Subissement is particularly important to Blanchot’s account, for it is explicitly linked in his text to the notion of responsibility. In a key passage, Blanchot tells us that “responsibility is the extreme of subissement.”38 Over and above the absolutely passive body stands the other person. It is this other person, according to Blanchot, who “wounds, exhausts, and hounds me, tormenting me.”39 Responsibility is inseparable from this wounding which undercuts any consolidation of bodily cohesion, not to mention egoic mastery. This responsibility to which the other person consigns me, as Blanchot writes, “calls me into question to the point of stripping me of myself … [it] disqualifies the me in me till it becomes torture [supplice].”40 And yet, remarkably, Blanchot insists that it is not the other person who is responsible for this violence. Rather, it is me –​the very one who is ostensibly its victim –​that is saddled with all the responsibility. “This lassitude which leaves me destitute becomes my responsibility …”41 But how can the self be held responsible for something that precedes, undermines, and radically destabilizes it? Would this not be imposing upon the self an utterly impossible demand?

35 Ibid., 16. 36 Ibid., 15. 37 Ibid., 29. 38 Ibid., 22. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 22–​23. 41 Ibid., 22.

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173

The Invasive Other

It is widely acknowledged that Blanchot’s discussion of responsibility, in The Writing of the Disaster, comprises a direct response to the ethical metaphysics of Emmanuel Levinas. Indeed, it is Levinas, according to Blanchot, who is to be credited with opening up and renewing the notion of responsibility beyond its staid associations with bourgeois, moral prudence.42 Signaling less a break from the tradition of Western (Hellenistic) thought, than a sober accentuation of its limits, and its surpluses –​Blanchot sees Levinas’s philosophy as bearing witness to “something beyond the universal, a singularity which can be called Jewish and which waits to keep on being thought.”43 Beginning with his 1961 text, Totality and Infinity, Levinas seeks to develop a rigorous articulation of ethics as first philosophy, in a theoretical space radically in excess of both the Absolute Idealism of Hegel and the fundamental ontology of Heidegger. Beyond all representation, prior to the opening of all logical and ontological systems, exceeding the bounds of thought itself, the face-​to-​face relation with the other person, the neighbor, introduces me to an obligation that I cannot refuse. This is the philosophy of Levinas. The neighbor calls upon me to give him the food from my table, the shirt off my back, and all the resources that I myself lack. Such is the ‘infinite’ demand to which the other’s face consigns me:  a demand to place the other before myself. Not to be confused with a call to mere altruism, Levinasian ethics are far-​removed from any willful assumption of duty. Levinas is not describing here “the psychological event of compassion or empathy,” but rather, a pre-​condition for the possibility of “putting oneself in the place of another.”44 I do not choose to aid the other; rather, before I become a self, an ego –​I have already been pressed into service, yoked to my task, without any choice of acceptance or refusal. Blanchot initially engages with these ideas in a series of pieces from The Infinite Conversation, where he describes the Levinasian ethical relation as a “relation of the third kind.”45 With this appellation, Blanchot is seeking to contrast Levinas’ approach to relationality with the two forms most commonly found within philosophy. The first of these understands relationality in dialectical terms, facilitating an objective identification between the same and the 42 Ibid., 25. 43 Ibid., 148–​149. 44 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being:  or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1981), 146. 45 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 68.

174 CHAPTER 5 other by means of mediation. The second approach demands immediate unity or fusion. Levinas, in contrast with both of these approaches, asserts man’s relation with the transcendence of the Other [Autrui] as a relation which allows neither for duality nor unity. Blanchot suggests that what founds this relation “is no longer proximity … but rather the strangeness between us.”46 It is a relation which “does not arise from possibility and does not declare itself in terms of power.”47 To speak of this relation at all, is perhaps only to speak of the pure interval which keeps the other from ever being reduced to the same, and which makes the self always already beholden to a demand which can neither be chosen nor relinquished. In Otherwise Than Being, published in 1974, Levinas further radicalizes his rhetoric, fleshing-​out his depiction of the ethical relation. It is with this text, whose primary thesis is “responsibility for the other to the point of substitution,”48 that Blanchot is directly engaging in The Writing of the Disaster. In increasingly hyperbolic terms, Levinas portrays the ethical relation, here, as a kind of hostage-​taking, or a form of involuntary substitution. “Substitution happens without my willing it,” Levinas writes, “I am held hostage by the other, before I am even a self.”49 The body is held hostage before even giving rise to a self. Such is the meaning of substitution: “I exist through the other and for the other.”50 As Levinas tell us, the notion of substitution fundamentally overturns the autocentric model upon which our conventional notions of selfhood are based. Substitution “reverses the position where the presence of the ego to itself appears as the beginning or as the conclusion of philosophy. This coinciding in the same, where I would be an origin, or, through memory, a covering over of the origin, this presence, is, from the start, undone by the other.”51 Whether construed in a philosophical or psychoanalytic sense, the ego is always already preempted, disrupted, and undone by the responsibility that makes it, from the very start, a hostage to the other person. I enter the scene of existence, so to speak, already beholden to the other’s plea for help. Before I have a chance to become a self, I have become a hostage. Before the installation of the ego, before any form of narcissism can assert itself, responsibility for the other has been imposed upon me from the outside. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 69. 48 Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 119. 49 Ibid., 117. 50 Ibid., 114. 51 Ibid., 127.

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Not unlike the language Laplanche employs in describing the implantation and intromission of enigmatic messages, the language with which Levinas describes the demand of responsibility is clearly imbued with a recurrent intonation of violence (which Blanchot, rather significantly, reinscribes). In lines that anticipate Blanchot’s own rhetoric in The Writing of the Disaster, Levinas writes of a trauma “that prevents its own representation, a deafening trauma, cutting the thread of consciousness which should have welcomed it in the present.”52 Elsewhere, he describes the ego as “stripped by the trauma of persecution.”53 Breathlessly seeking to evoke, in a language never hyperbolic enough, the passivity of an exposure that is radically beyond measure, Levinas turns to the words vulnerability, proximity, and contact in order to gesture his reader toward the state of sheer exposure with which responsibility is linked.54 Responsibility makes demands of me before I have any ability to conceptualize either its meaning or scope, accept or decline it, or even defend myself against it. It is obligatory, antecedent to my freedom. Not unlike the otherness, in Laplanche’s account, which lodges itself under the infant’s skin, responsibility here is fundamentally invasive. Perhaps unexpectedly, given this violent subversion of the self, the trauma of responsibility nevertheless allows Levinas to retain a certain notion of subjectivity, albeit one “irreducible to consciousness and thematization.”55 If the individual is, from the very start, a hostage –​as Levinas insists –​then subjectivity must be reformulated as utterly inseparable from responsibility. Subjectivity means substitution for the other person, compulsory bondage. It means being a hostage before ever being a self. It is not that I choose to be responsible, and thus acquire a sense of responsibility as a subject. The very meaning of subjectivity, rather, resides in responsibility itself, a responsibility which can neither be either accepted nor declined. The Levinasian subject is not conscious of this responsibility, it is this responsibility. Subjectivity means, from the very start, not only being owed to the other, but inhabited by the other, responsible for everything and everyone. Levinas, however, goes even further than this. He wants to suggest that the trauma of responsibility is not only foundational with respect to subjectivity, it is also foundational with respect to language as well. This is because initial contact with the other is what establishes all reference in the world, serving as the very origin of signification. Going back to Totality and Infinity, and his 52 Ibid., 111. 53 Ibid., 146. 54 Ibid., 76. 55 Ibid., 100.

176 CHAPTER 5 writings of the 1960s, Levinas already insists that it is the face of the other person that engenders the first signification.56 The face does not shine, it speaks. Language has its origin in the immediacy of proximate contact with the other person. This is likewise a point of recurrent emphasis in Otherwise Than Being, and his later writings. The original essence of language, for Levinas, is ethical. Contact with the other person opens language, opens the realm of worldly meaning, and gives ‘me’ my very subjectivity, on the condition that it is never truly mine, but owed in advance to the one for whom I am responsible. In an illuminating article, Arthur Cools glosses this point quite nicely. For Levinas, he writes, “all language presupposes the ethical relation.”57 One can immediately see how this account radically problematizes, say, the Heideggerian account of being-​in-​the-​world found in division one of Being and Time. The human being is not, according to Levinas, thrown into a world that is always already there, pre-​structured with meaning and reference. Instead, it is the individual’s encounter with the other person that establishes meaning and reference, opening a common world, and installing a subjectivity always already owed to the other person. Language, subjectivity, and responsibility are portrayed by Levinas as inseparably linked. It is the other person who opens all philosophy, all possibility of signification, all access to the world. Without the precedence of the other, there would be no story to be told, no language with which to tell it, and no subject to experience it. Simply put, everything begins with the other. 5

Le Moi sans Moi

Perhaps the most interesting subplot, in The Writing of the Disaster, involves the manner in which Blanchot, while clearly drawing upon Levinas’ text as point of inspiration and provocation, ceaselessly contests Levinas –​particularly with regard to the notion of subjectivity. “The use of the word ‘subjectivity’ is as enigmatic [énigmatique] as the use of the word ‘responsibility’ –​and more debatable,” Blanchot writes, “For it is a designation chosen, in a way, to preserve our portion of spirituality.”58 Despite acknowledging that the manner in which Levinas uses the term is completely unique, Blanchot sees this 56

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh:  Duquesne University Press, 1998), 207. 57 Arthur Cools, “Disastrous Responsibility:  Blanchot’s Criticism of Levinas’s Concept of Subjectivity in the Writing of the Disaster,” Levinas Studies 6 (2011): 119. 58 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 27.

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recourse to the notion of subjectivity as a needless, and perhaps even dangerous, reintroduction of an anachronistic trope all-​too-​redolent of metaphysics and classical psychology. Blanchot doesn’t feel that the term subjectivity does justice to the traumatic preclusion of selfhood which the foregoing account of responsibility entails. “If so-​called subjectivity is the other in place of me, it is no more subjective than objective.”59 If the blow of responsibility ruptures the self before it can ever be whole, then would this not make the installation of any kind of unified subjectivity impossible? In a manner clearly recalling his earlier emphasis on prolepsis, which I discussed in Chapter Two, Blanchot writes of “the crack [la fêlure] … which would be constitutive of the self, or would reconstitute itself as the self, but not as a cracked self [moi fêlé].”60 The self would be ruptured before ever being whole, lost before ever being found. Such would be the status of the subject, always already separated from himself by the traumatic blow of responsibility. In language that recalls Blanchot’s description of anti-​Narcissus, drawn into the pool of simulacra and dissolved before ever having begun to live, Blanchot suggests at one point that the trauma of responsibility draws the so-​called subject into an “infinite movement of service” where he becomes little more than a “simulacrum of unity.”61 The notions of unity, identity, and wholeness are nothing but illusions necessitated on account of one’s obligation to the other. It is the other person who “causes me to believe” in my own unity, “for I feel I must not fail him.”62 And yet, the very nature of this obligation, and the manner of its traumatic conveyance, has always already broken and ruined the very person who would seek to assume his duty. “The responsibility with which I  am charged is not mine and causes me not to be I  [je ne suis pas moi].”63 Far from inaugurating a subjectivity, as in Levinas’ account, the trauma of responsibility precludes any possibility of a real subjectivity. Rather than making recourse to any notion of the subject, Blanchot writes, one ought “to speak of a subjectivity without any subject: the wounded space, the hurt of the dying, the already dead body which no one could ever own, or ever say of it, I, my body.”64 It is not only the installation of a subject, centered or otherwise, which is rendered impossible on account of responsibility. Language, as well, is necessarily 59 Ibid., 28. 60 Ibid., 78. 61 Ibid., 21. 62 Ibid., 13. 63 Ibid., 18. 64 Ibid., 30.

178 CHAPTER 5 denied any stable foundation. This is the second, key point which Blanchot makes in his critique of Levinas. Blanchot sees Levinas’ insistence upon the foundational capacity of the ethical relation with respect to language as deeply problematic. Blanchot is suspicious, as we know, of any recourse to a determinate origin, for origins presuppose a point of absolute presence. With any such thinking, we risk falling back into mysticism, or worse yet, idealism. “When Levinas defines language as contact, he defines it as immediacy, and this has grave consequences,” Blanchot writes, “For immediacy is absolute presence.”65 Immediacy precludes mediation, which is to say that it ignores the play of difference and deferral which Blanchot associates with the neuter. In placing his emphasis upon responsibility as foundational with regard to language, Levinas cannot help but evoke, albeit unintentionally, the “ravishment of mystical fusion”66 characteristic of those myriad accounts, philosophical or theological, in which a point of primal origination is asserted. This draws his account into unexpected proximity with those etymological theories which embrace the notion of an original locus of meaning, a point of absolute reference in relation to which all signifiers derive their signification. In The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot is deeply critical of such accounts, seeing in them an unspoken, lingering theological bias in favor of rootedness, certainty, and the possibility of absolute coherence. Though Levinas’ account of the origin of language in responsibility is undeniably unique, appealing only to the face of the other, not to any etymological notion of a ‘root’ –​Blanchot believes that it nevertheless comes dangerously close to reinscribing the privilege of the origin. Indeed, Levinas’ account suggests that there resides, at the heart of responsibility, something like a primordial essence of language, or what Arthur Cools calls a “point of original entrance into language.”67 Such a belief comes close to approximating the stance taken by etymologists, and even by Heidegger himself, namely, that the oldest is the nearest to pure truth. For such thinkers, the arduous task of recovering all the hidden meanings buried within words might ultimately lead one to language’s absolute fulfillment or total disclosure. Blanchot’s point is not that Levinas and Heidegger are anything at all alike. Their views must be considered utterly distinct and irreconcilable. Blanchot’s point here is simply that they both neglect to see that meaning does not come from any original source, but is “generated through a play of interdependent little signs which are by themselves ill-​determined or of doubtful

65 Ibid., 24. 66 Ibid. 67 Cools, “Disastrous Responsibility,” 120.

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significance.”68 This play draws “what wants to be said into a general errant drift where there is no longer any term that as meaning would belong to itself and where, for a center, each has but the possibility of being decentered.”69 In contrast with Levinas’ claim that responsibility accords the subject an original point of entry into language, Blanchot maintains that there is no such point of entry, for it is not possible to leave language in order to name the original moment of its appearing. “It is only from within language that one may express what is beyond language.”70 Where, then, does all this leave us with respect to the notion of responsibility in Blanchot’s text? In a manner not unlike Laplanche, Blanchot insists that the other violently invades a passive body belonging to no one and takes up residency there before any self can gain a foothold. Before there can be a self, there is always already the other in the place of the self. The self is constituted as traumatized in advance by an exteriority which precedes, exceeds, and overwhelms it. In rather succinct terms, Blanchot writes that “responsibility is itself disastrous.”71 Responsibility is disastrous, for Blanchot, in the sense that it refers to a wounding older than the demarcation between consciousness and unconsciousness. It is disastrous in the sense that it refers to an invasion of the ­passive body that “cannot be forgotten because it has always already fallen outside memory.”72 Far from serving as a point of foundation, or origination, for either language or subjectivity –​this wounding is what both anticipates and ruptures every point of determinate origination. Of what does this incursion, this wounding, consist? It involves an exposure to the enigmatic message of responsibility which the passive body lacks any ability to translate in full, and which therefore buries itself beneath the skin, remaining encrypted: a secret under the flesh. 6

The Crypt

While there is no direct acknowledgement of Laplanche in Blanchot’s text, we do find allusions in The Writing of the Disaster to another psychoanalytic account in which the notions of both ‘the cryptic’ and encryption loom large. 68 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 93. 69 Ibid. 70 Cools, “Disastrous Responsibility,” 120. 71 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 27. 72 Ibid., 28.

180 CHAPTER 5 Near the end of The Writing of the Disaster, in a fragment immediately preceding his final, italicized gloss of the ‘boy at the window’ scene, Blanchot writes of a “language that is cryptic,”73 before going on to discuss Derrida’s commentary on the recently published work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Indeed, it is difficult to read Blanchot’s reference to cryptic language in The Writing of the Disaster, or his recurrent emphasis on the notion of the secret, without thinking of the work of Abraham and Torok, whose text, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, was published in 1976. This book, to which Derrida contributed a foreword, comprises along with the previously discussed works by Leclaire and Winnicott an indispensable point of reference for any consideration of Blanchot’s engagement with psychoanalysis during the mid-​1970s. A key focus in this text is the distinction between introjection and incorporation, so lucidly glossed by Derrida in the pages of his foreword. Derrida credits Maria Torok, in particular, with helping to disambiguate in her work these two closely related (but irreducibly distinct) psychoanalytic concepts. The notion of introjection (as derived from Ferenczi) refers to the process by which the self comes to be enlarged by assimilating a love-​object, absorbing it into itself. When the process of introjection fails, as in the case of certain traumas, the process of incorporation asserts itself. Unlike introjection, incorporation does not fully assimilate the object. Rather, it retains the foreign entity within itself as foreign, as ‘unmetabolized.’ If the self is defined as an aggregate of all introjections, then the process carried out by incorporation might be understood to mark the very limits of the self. It is in relation to the failure of introjection that Derrida follows Abraham and Torok in attempting to the think the notion of the crypt “as an extraneous or foreign area of incorporation.”74 Derived from the word kryptein, meaning ‘to hide,’ the crypt is typically understood as a place to hide or inter the dead. What the crypt commemorates in Abraham and Torok’s text, however, is neither a dead object, nor even the foreign entity which cannot be introjected. Rather, what the crypt commemorates is the failure of introjection itself, and the exclusion from the self that this failure entails. The crypt comprises a non-​lieu of interment at the heart of the self, where the processes of interjection and incorporation brush up against their respective limits, leaving behind something that is neither alive nor dead, neither subjective nor objective, neither internal nor external. 73 Ibid., 136. 74 Jacques Derrida, “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,” foreword to The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xvi.

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The construction of the crypt engenders a strange double-​bind in which the foreign entity is maintained in its exteriority precisely by means of its internality with respect to a self which cannot fully subdue or even approach it. “The more the self keeps the foreign element as a foreigner inside itself, the more it excludes it.”75 The self, meanwhile, remains utterly outside that which is inside it. Derrida likens the self, in this respect, to a cemetery guard who is not the proprietor of what he is guarding. “He makes the rounds … He turns around and around,” but cannot enter the crypt itself which is enclosed “within the self, but as a foreign place, prohibited, excluded.”76 Such is the dizzying topology of the crypt. It places, at the heart of the self, that which is most foreign, most excluded, while pushing the self to the very outside of this excluded element. “The inside is outside [le dedans dehors],” as Blanchot writes in his fragment on the cryptic.77 It is in relation to this discussion that I believe the encryption of the enigmatic message of responsibility should be considered. Based upon Blanchot’s foregoing account, we might propose that the demand of responsibility, incapable of being deciphered or assimilated in full by a body bereft of self, is inevitably encrypted, coming to comprise a radical exteriority lodged in the very place where the self should be. The self (which is always already a simulacrum, a proxy, le moi sans moi) is thus radically supplanted in both privilege and precedence by the otherness it houses within itself. These shards of untranslated messages, fragments and remainders, mark the ‘secret’ at the heart of the self –​a secret that keeps the self from ever cohering with itself. In lines that would not appear out of place in one of Laplanche’s texts, Blanchot pushes this point to the extreme, proposing that the trauma in question, leading to the encryption of the enigmatic message, is perhaps best understood as never having taken place, “not only because there is no ‘I’ to undergo the experience, but because … since the disaster always takes place after having taken place, there cannot possibly be any experience of it.”78 But how does one become aware of these enigmatic messages, if their implantation and encryption within the body precede any form of selfhood or consciousness? Blanchot wants to suggest that these messages can never be conveyed by any language in the immediacy of the present. Rather, the enigmatic message reaches us only in the form of return. We can only ever receive the message after the fact, as different from itself, as other. This configuration 75 Ibid., xvii. 76 Ibid., xxxv. 77 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 136. 78 Ibid., 28.

182 CHAPTER 5 resonates with Derrida’s evocation, in relation to Maria Torok’s work, of a “heterocryptic ghost that returns from the Unconscious of the other, according to what might be called the law of another generation.”79 Not only does the message come from the other, and concern an obligation to the other, but it only ever returns as other. The message of responsibility, returning from a past which has never been present, is radically heterocryptic. Lacking any determinate source, it consigns us without recourse to an exigency of infinite translation. Here, once more, we note a striking point of comparison between Blanchot’s text and Laplanche’s theory. Indeed, for Laplanche, trauma is not simply characterized by the invasive precedence of the other with respect to the self, or by the violent intromission of enigmatic messages, it is also characterized by a form of temporality in which something returns which has never been experienced, calling upon an exigency of unending translation and re-​translation. A closer consideration of this temporality, to which psychoanalysis gives the name Nachträglichkeit (usually translated into French as après-​coup), is crucial for our appreciation of Laplanche’s writings, no less than for those of Blanchot. It is toward a consideration of this temporality that I now turn. 7

Nachträglichkeit: a Short History of a Translation

Derived from the adverb nachtragend and the adjective nachträglich, suggesting the idea of ‘carrying afterwards’ –​the word Nachträglichkeit had very rarely, if ever, appeared as a substantive in the German language, prior to Freud. Given its widely-​acknowledged importance within contemporary discussions of Freud’s theory of sexuality and repression, it is interesting to note that the term is actually used rather sparingly within Freud’s own writings, not even appearing in the index of the Gesammelte Werke. It was not until Lacan’s 1953 Rome Discourse, and in particular, the work of Laplanche and Pontalis, during the 1960s, that the term Nachträglichkeit finally came to be accorded its due. The notion of Nachträglichkeit, one might say, was destined to exert its influence upon the history of psychoanalysis only in delayed form, and only in translation –​as if illustrating two of the central meanings of the term itself. Due to Strachey’s use of the phrase in his Standard Edition, it has been principally in the form of ‘deferred action’ that the term Nachträglichkeit has been thought in the Anglo-​American world. The phrase deferred action, however, proves to be highly-​suspect as a translation for Nachträglichkeit, for it levels-​out, 79

Derrida, “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,” xxxi.

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or even effaces, the complex range of meanings attached to Freud’s original term. As it turns out, there is no single word, in either French or English, that fully captures the various meanings conveyed by the word Nachträglichkeit.80 Exacerbating these difficulties is the fact that Freud himself makes little effort to arbitrate between the competing meanings contained within the term itself, deferring indefinitely any definitive theoretical statement on either its proper usage or scope.81 First elevated to the status of a psychoanalytic concept in the mid-​1890s, there are, in effect, two different (and seemingly contradictory) ways in which the notion of Nachträglichkeit is used by Freud. The first, which roughly coheres with Strachey’s phrase deferred action, suggests a psychic process in which the memory of an event generates its effect only after the fact, or with the passage of time. As House and Slotnick explain, “A memory is implanted, buried like a landmine that goes off when associations revive the memory and so trigger an explosion.”82 This interpretation of Nachträglichkeit involves a rather straightforward understanding of time as linear and unidirectional. A  cause must come before its effect, even if the cause is not immediately discernable as such. The phrase deferred action emphasizes this interval of latency, or incubation, in which the explosive potency of the pathogenic cause remains temporarily in abeyance, like a ‘ticking time bomb’ within the psyche, waiting to be triggered into action. We clearly see this interpretation of Nachträglichkeit in Freud’s analysis of Emma Eckstein, whose molestation in a store at a young age is not registered by her as a traumatic event at the time. Only later on, in her adverse reaction to the sound of people in stores laughing together, and in the unexplained phobia of stores which she develops as a young woman, is something of the trauma belatedly revealed. In addition to this, however, there is an entirely separate way in which Freud, at times, thinks about Nachträglichkeit –​a way which has nothing to do with deferred action. This other tendency is perhaps best evoked, in English, by the phrase ‘retrospective modification.’ Under this reading, Nachträglichkeit 80

81

82

For a discussion of the complexities associated with translating Nachträglichkeit into English, see Helmut Thomä and Neil Cheshire, “Freud’s Nachträglichkeit and Strachey’s ‘deferred action’:  Trauma, constructions and the direction of causality,”  International Review of Psycho-​Analysis 18, no. 3 (1991): 407–​427. The term Nachträglichkeit did not draw significant attention from either German or Anglophone psychoanalysis until the past two decades. For a general history of the term’s reception, see Jonathan House and Julie Slotnick, “Après-​Coup in French Psychoanalysis: The Long Afterlife of Nachträglichkeit: The First Hundred Years, 1893 to 1993,” Psychoanalytic Review 102, no. 5 (October 2015): 683–​708. House and Slotnick, “Après-​Coup in French Psychoanalysis,” 685.

184 CHAPTER 5 involves a reinterpretation of the past in which an event from one’s memory is radically reshaped on the basis of something that happens after it. Here, the arrow of time is reversed, and causality proceeds from the present backwards into the past. Viewed in retrospect, events from the past are given a radically new meaning and altered, either for better or for worse. For example, the affectionate caresses of doting uncle might initially register little to no impact upon a three-​year-​old boy. Some twenty years later, however, when the fully grown individual receives word of his uncle’s recent arrest for sex crimes against a juvenile, everything changes. The entire nature of his prior relationship with his uncle, imbued with a playful innocence, comes to be fundamentally modified, shaded in a darkened hue. Freud’s earliest usage of the adjective nachträglich dates from the period of his seduction theory, and indeed it is there, in the writings of the 1890s, that the dynamics of retrospective modification are most prominently emphasized in his work. With Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory, and his transition to a theory of infantile sexuality and endogenous psychosexual development, it is the deferred action aspect of Nachträglichkeit that comes to be increasingly emphasized by Freud. Most notable among Freud’s post-​1900 references to Nachträglichkeit is the one featured in the Wolf Man case. This reference to Nachträglichkeit was first noticed by Lacan, who makes a passing comment on it in the Rome Discourse. Though Lacan declines to accord the term anything resembling a detailed elaboration in his famous 1953 address, he does stress both the term’s significance within Freud’s account and its resistance to facile translation.83 In due course, Lacan will come to accord the notion of Nachträglichkeit a privileged importance in his own modelling of a temporality proper to analysis. In contrast to Strachey’s preference for the more deterministically-​oriented deferred action, Lacan will elect to think Nachträglichkeit almost exclusively in the opposite direction, as retroactivity. While Freud, from roughly 1900 onward, increasingly emphasizes the deferred action aspect of Nachträglichkeit, and Lacan, in keeping with his general critique of developmentalism and his emphasis upon the nature of psychoanalytic causality as a fundamentally retroactive phenomenon, mostly emphasizes its ‘backwards’ aspect –​there remained, until the mid-​1960s, seemingly no critical account of Nachträglichkeit interested in addressing or accommodating the genuinely bidirectional movement (from past to

83

The phrase après-​coup, which Lacan uses only once in the Rome Discourse, is deemed to be insufficient as a translation for Nachträglichkeit. In his translation into English, Bruce Fink uses the phrase “after the fact” as a rendering for après-​coup.

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present, and from present to past) actually implied by the term.84 It is not until “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” the seminal 1964 essay by Laplanche and Pontalis, that the tension between these two movements implied within notion of Nachträglichkeit first comes to be fully acknowledged as such. It is Laplanche, in particular, who explicates this tension in its full breadth and complexity in his subsequent writings. Key to Laplanche’s approach from the 1970s onward, is an emphasis on coming to think Nachträglichkeit in two directions at once, as a temporal movement that involves both deferred action and retrospective modification. In his later work, he proposes the term ‘afterwardsness’ as a neologism in English best suited for capturing this bidirectionality. How does Laplanche aim to think the notion of Nachträglichkeit in the context of his theory? How might his use of the term allow us to understand the temporality proper to trauma? Key to Laplanche’s account is the notion that there can be no single traumatic event, for trauma always involves at least two scenes. Trauma is neither in one of these scenes nor the other, but in what Laplanche calls a ‘play of deceit’ between them, a ‘see-​sawing.’85 In contrast to Freud, the focus is never on specifying the factuality of ‘real’ events, as in the Wolf Man case, but on the way in which various scenes trigger, reconfigure, and repeat one another –​always as different, always as other. In the simplest of terms, one can think of this dynamic in terms of a play between two moments, separated by interval. In the first moment, something from the outside invades a vulnerable body, breaching a boundary not yet fully formed, and taking up residence as an internal alien entity. This is the other in the place of the self. Crucially, the moment registers no immediate effect –​and how could it? Nothing about this moment is capable of being experienced by the infant, for the intromission of the enigmatic message precedes any notion of selfhood, any language. It is only in the second moment, the moment in which the memory of the imperceptible first event comes to be revivified through a new experience, that trauma announces itself. Hence the strange paradox of trauma. Where trauma is, it has no impact. Where it has impact, it is not. Trauma enjoys, one might say, a Heisenberg-​like status of indeterminacy, oscillating between two moments, two scenes, all the while remaining utterly irreducible to either. Not only is trauma irreducible to any single moment, but it is also remains a phenomenon which cannot, strictly 84 85

John Forrester, The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 205–​206. See Cathy Caruth, “Traumatic Temporality:  An Interview with Jean Laplanche,” in Listening to Trauma.

186 CHAPTER 5 speaking, be considered personal in nature. Rather, it is always interpersonal. It always involves the other person. In a text from 2006, Laplanche explains the traumatic après-​coup in the following manner: Après-​coup is a phenomenon that is not played out within the individual, within the intrapersonal, but rather within the interpersonal domain. Its specificity and its ability to reverse the ‘arrow of time’ depends on this idea and this idea alone. In an individual, après-​coup does not principally depend on the successive stages of the person’s life. It depends, first of all, on the simultaneous presence of an adult and an infans (a pre-​verbal child). The adult’s enigmatic message (which itself is inhabited by the adult’s own unconscious) constitutes the avant-​coup of this process that introduces, within the receiver of the message, the infans, an initial disequilibrium. Then, in a second moment, in the après-​coup, the enigmatic message drives the infans to translate, a translation which is necessarily imperfect.86 Because the child’s translation of the enigmatic message is necessarily imperfect (for reasons we have already discussed), each attempt at translation serves as a provocation to further translation. “Neither the child nor the adult possesses the code that would make it possible to give a complete interpretation of the messages … there is always a remainder,”87 writes Philippe Van Haute. Though the adult, not to mention culture, will provide the child with various stories and myths (such as the tale of Oedipus) to aid in the process of interpretation, these stories and myths can never fully recuperate the absence of the origin. Every attempt at definitive interpretation, or exhaustive translation, comes up short. Yet the incessant demand to keep trying, to keep translating, never wanes. Indeed, this demand comprises for Laplanche something akin to the very crux of the human condition. One is compelled to continue translating, in keeping with the bidirectional movement implied by the term Nachträglichkeit, both forwards and backwards in time. It is this bidirectional movement which Laplanche attempts to evoke with the neologism afterwardness. To think the après-​coup in terms of afterwardsness is to think the enigmatic message as being translated in a temporal direction that is, in alternating fashion, retrogressive (detranslation) and progressive (retranslation). With every 86

Jean Laplanche, Problématiques VI: L’après-​coup (Paris: puf, 2006), 171. Cited in House and Slotnick, “Après-​Coup in French Psychoanalysis,” 701. 87 Haute, Confusion of Tongues: The Primacy of Sexuality in Freud, Ferenczi and Laplanche, 128.

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new return of the traumatic message, the message comes to be incompletely translated in a manner which modifies it, making it return in yet another form. The process can never be fully completed, not only because something is always ‘lost’ in translation, but also (thinking back to the story of the Portuguese nun) because there is no ‘original’ source. The enigma engendered by the asymmetrical relation between the parent and the infans comprises a secret unknown to itself, a secret encrypted within a secret. Coming from the other and implanted by the other, Laplanche writes, the enigmatic message sets into motion a movement of perpetual translation “which is that of human temporality.”88 To be human is to be traumatized before being a self. It is to carry within oneself the remnants of failed translations, and to hold in place of a self an internal foreign body –​which is nothing but radical exteriority itself, returning again and again, demanding each time to be retranslated anew. 8

Blanchot and the Après-​coup

The prominence of such temporality in Blanchot’s writings is difficult to dispute. In fact, as early as 1956, Blanchot had already made implicit reference to the notion of Nachträglichkeit in writing of the demand to live “the episode … as other and as though lived by another, consequently never ever living it but reliving it again, unable to live it.”89 The significance of the après-​coup was therefore by no means unfamiliar to Blanchot. As Lacoue-​Labarthe claims, “[Blanchot] had read Lacan, he had read the work done on Freud in the wake of Derrida, he knew very well that the après-​coup had become the dominating category in readings of Freud.”90 In 1983, when two pieces of Blanchot’s early short fiction from the 1930s, a time “from before Auschwitz,”91 came to be republished together under the title Le Ressassement éternel (translated as Vicious Circles), Blanchot appended a newly-​written postface to the volume. His title for this postface was “Après coup.”92 The temporality of Nachträglichkeit plays an important role in The Writing of the Disaster. Indeed, virtually all of Blanchot’s most lucid commentators –​ 88 Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 259. 89 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 232. 90 Lacoue-​Labarthe, Ending and Unending Agony: On Maurice Blanchot, 105. 91 Ibid. 92 Maurice Blanchot, “After the Fact,” in Vicious Circles: Two Fictions & “After the Fact,” trans. Paul Auster (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1985), 69.

188 CHAPTER 5 among them, Bident, Lacoue-​Labrthe, Hill, Fynsk, and Iyer –​have not failed to acknowledge the central psychoanalytic trope to which the ‘boy at the window’ scene alludes. Nachträglichkeit “could help us understand” Blanchot’s scene, Fynsk tells us.93 It is under the influence of the logic of Nachträglichkeit, writes Hill, that the scene in question might be found “to repeat itself without end as always other than what it was.”94 The scene “can only be interpreted as an experience long after it occurred,” claims Iyer, “It is ruled, to this extent, by the logic of … Nachträglichkeit.”95 Likewise, Lacoue-​Labarthe remarks, in relation to Blanchot’s scene, “I’m entirely convinced by the logic of the après coup.”96 What I want to propose is that the ‘boy at the window’ scene is perhaps most usefully read not only with reference to Laplanche’s bidirectional notion of afterwardsness, but also in direct connection with Blanchot’s ‘cryptic’ account of the trauma of responsibility. This is the key, I believe, to appreciating the fragment’s multivalent significance. In considering the window scene, it is striking that the age of the child (Blanchot tells us that the boy is “seven years old –​or eight perhaps”) has thus far elicited so little attention from scholars. This age is significant, though admittedly not in the eyes of a standard, psychoanalytic reading. For a seven-​year boy, by most standard accounts of psychosexual development, would be nestled at the very heart of latency –​situated roughly at the midway point between his resolution of the Oedipal conflict and the onset of puberty. Given that there is no reason to believe that the ‘boy at the window’ scene is a depiction of a castration drama, the trauma in question must be of a different variety. What, then, might be significant about a child’s seventh or eighth year? Why would the detail of the child’s age be worthy of mention by Blanchot? It is at the age of seven, or thereabouts, that the child attains what has been traditionally called the age of reason. This is the age at which the child becomes, for the first time, morally responsible. Moving beyond a strictly egoistic comportment in which the child understands the notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as pertaining solely to personal outcomes, the child now begins to recognize the existence of demands and obligations which may supersede his own wishes. The other person and society-​at-​large become worthy of consideration. This 93 Fynsk, Infant Figures, 70. 94 Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 334–​335. 95 Lars Iyer, “The Unbearable Trauma and Witnessing in Blanchot and Levinas,” Janus Head 6, no. 1 (2003): 45. 96 Lacoue-​Labarthe, Ending and Unending Agony: On Maurice Blanchot, 100.

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moment is also roughly commensurate with Lawrence Kohlberg’s ‘conventional stage’ of psychosocial development in which the child begins to acknowledge the existence of fixed moral rules which apply not only to interpersonal relations, but which can be expanded to include an entire society. To attain the age of reason is to take the first step out of childhood. It is to move outside oneself and towards an initial, albeit primitive, consideration of the wishes and needs of the other person. We notice how Blanchot’s scene begins with the boy gazing at his childhood play-​space, evidently lost in reverie. Something then strikes him unexpectedly. The critical consensus, as I have just shown, is that this ‘something’ is the secondary event in an après-​coup pairing, a revivification of some traumatic message from the past outside memory. Indeed, what Blanchot’s scene depicts, I believe, is the very moment when a young boy, on the cusp of leaving childhood, is suddenly overwhelmed by the traumatic irruption of the enigmatic message of responsibility which had remained encrypted inside him throughout the years of his ‘moral latency.’ About to step into moral awareness, he is confronted by the return of this enigmatic message which is far older than him, and impossible to translate without remainder. The boy is exposed, by means of the après-​coup, to the radical otherness of the other which inhabits him. He discovers that he has been invaded, supplanted, and claimed by the other before having ever become a self. The demand of this responsibility both infinitely exceeds and violently interrupts the conventional moral reason whose discovery around age seven merely comprises its aleatory ‘trigger.’ Conventional responsibility is radically interrupted and ruptured at the very moment it first announces itself, barred in the course of its inscription. The responsibility proper to the child’s developmental history, one might say, is ruptured by the imposition of a radically other responsibility, a heterocryptic responsibility which belongs to a history outside both chronological and dialectical development. It is the demand of this other responsibility, returning from a past which has never been present, which announces itself in Blanchot’s scene. Such a reading goes a long way toward accounting for the interwoven psychoanalytic, philosophical, and poetic tropes which pervade Blanchot’s ‘(A primal scene?)’ and its associated fragments. The question, of course, is to what extent such a leap, from Laplanche’s general theory of primal seduction to an account of the implantation of the enigmatic message of responsibility, is actually warranted. To what extent can the mother’s transmission of the enigmatic message, in Laplanche’s account, be compared in anything but the loosest, or most metaphorical, sense to the manner in which the enigmatic demand of responsibility imposes itself in Blanchot’s text?

190 CHAPTER 5 9

Mothering and the Asymmetries of Responsibility

The possibility of a more intimate link might be inferred from the recent work of Viviane Chetrit-​Vatine. Published in 2014, Chetrit-​Vatine’s book, The Ethical Seduction of the Analytic Situation: The Feminine-​Maternal Origins of Responsibility for the Other, is a work which provides a rigorous, clinical grounding for the potential extension of Laplanche’s theory into the domain of the ethical (and the political). Chetrit-​Vatine proposes that the general theory of primal seduction can indeed be extended in its reach to include an account of the implantation of the enigma of responsibility within the infant. Building upon Laplanche’s argument that acts of parental care serve as a vehicle for the transmission of unconscious sexual messages, Chetrit-​Vatine provocatively suggests that such acts of care might likewise transmit to the neonate enigmatic messages about the meaning of responsibility. These messages of responsibility are partially untranslatable due to the insufficient neurological means available to the infant, and are thus made subject to the same process of encryption as the sexual messages with which they are incongruously linked –​resurfacing only later, après-​coup. The great importance of Chetrit-​Vatine’s intervention resides in her insistence that the relational asymmetry between the nurturer and infant, so essential to Laplanche’s account (as it was to Ferenczi before him), need not be thought solely in terms of a disparity in sexual knowledge or sexual development. It might also be thought in terms of the absolute disparity in responsibility exemplified by the nurturer’s ‘one-​sided’ obligation to care for the helpless child, the one who (as Lacan repeatedly emphasizes) is always born prematurely.97 It was Hans Jonas, in his seminal 1979 text, The Imperative of Responsibility, who defines the meaning of responsibility in terms of an unequivocal and choiceless obligation to aid whomever is most threatened, most vulnerable, in one’s midst. Responsibility, according to Jonas, implies a relationship of asymmetry in which one party has an obligation to aid another party without any expectation of this aid being reciprocated or even acknowledged. In this regard, Jonas claims, the relationship between the adult and the infant is exemplary. Jonas writes, “The radical insufficiency of the begotten as such carries with it the mandate of the begetters to avert its sinking back into nothing and to tend to its further becoming.”98 So profound, so acute, is the 97 98

For a general overview, see Jacki Watts, Kate Cockcroft, and Norman Duncan, eds., Developmental Psychology (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2009), 265. Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1984), 134.

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demand imposed upon the adult by the newborn child, that Jonas refers to it as a responsibility “beyond comparison.”99 It is here that the role of the mother, in particular, assumes a paramount importance in Chetrit-​Vatine’s work.100 With every act of care, every touch, every soothing sound –​what is transmitted to the infant is the mother’s own ambivalence, vulnerability, and distress coupled with a message of her overwhelming responsibility for the child.101 Like the enigmatic messages in Laplanche’s account, these messages of responsibility contain untranslatable elements which preclude ‘metabolization’ by an infant still lacking either a self or a language. As a result, the ‘germ’ of

99 Ibid. 100 There can be no question that it is the mother who has traditionally borne the bulk of this asymmetrical responsibility. The literature exploring the connection between gender and care, with special emphasis upon the role of mothering, is extensive –​and I can only acknowledge it here in the most cursory manner. Nancy Chodorow, for example, has deployed significant ethnographic and sociological data in order to show that women, as a matter of practice, are almost universally entrusted with primary caregiving responsibilities in relation to newborn children. Ofra Mayseless, in a more recent study, cites ethnographic research covering more than a thousand different cultures and a variety of historic periods in order to suggest that the mother is the predominant caring figure during the first year of the infant’s life. The philosopher Sarah Ruddick has likewise emphasized women’s disproportionate responsibility for childcare, focusing more on the socially-​constructed aspect of this responsibility. For a general overview of the philosophical approaches to mothering and care see: Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New  York:  W.W. Norton, 1976); Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1978); Ofra Mayseless, The Caring Motivation:  An Integrated Theory (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2016); Wendy Wood and Alice H. Eagly, “A cross-​cultural analysis of the behavior of women and men: implications for the origins of sex differences,” Psychological Bulletin 128, no. 5 (2002): 699–​727; Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). 101 Though Laplanche’s account is rigorously ‘non-​biological,’ there may be a way of reconciling aspects of this theory with recent findings in neuroscience. Well-​before the baby’s acquisition of language, neural mechanisms already facilitate interpersonal exchange between the mother and the infant. Neonatal imitation, facilitated by mirror neuron activation, plays an important role in forging a bond between the mother and the infant. As Christine Anzieu-​Premmereur writes: “There is…a neural basis of empathic communication between mother and infant, the outcome of which also is the transmission of this essential social skill.” It may be, therefore, that something of the meaning of responsibility is likewise conveyed here in pre-​verbal form. If so, then, would not at least part of this meaning remain, as Laplanche would have it, ‘untranslated’? Christine Anzieu-​ Premmereur, “The Skin-​Ego: Dyadic Sensuality, Trauma in Infancy, and Adult Narcissistic Issues,” 667.

192 CHAPTER 5 responsibility transmitted through these messages assumes the status of an internal foreign body lodged within the infant.102 In fact, for Chetrit-​Vatine, the two processes in question are not merely parallel, but indissolubly linked. For the unconscious sexual messages coming from the mother are interlaced with enigmatic messages pertaining to the nature of responsibility, effectively doubling the untranslatable enigma. This interlacing is due to the fact that the messages of seduction and the messages of responsibility, in a manner reminiscent of the Freudian Anlehnung, are each implicated in the same essential acts of maternal care, such as stroking, stimulating, soothing, cleaning, feeding, holding, etc. Each act of maternal care transmits more information, more ambiguity, more expectation, more of everything, than the infant can possibly process. As a result, the meaning of maternal responsibility, not unlike the meaning of seduction, remains largely untranslated, unthought, by the infant. “It is because this capacity for responsibility for the other will be combined with originary seduction that the enigmatic messages proffered to the child will be [only] partially translated by the infant’s psyche. The residues will result from repression owing to the incapacity of the infant’s psyche to metabolize the felicitous affective excess of maternal passion.”103 Chetrit-​Vatine describes these untranslated residues as including, among other things, the “traces of partial perceptions of positive quality, sparks of light, sounds, colors, and smells:  the contact of a caress, a sense of well-​being, the light of an illuminating smile, the sound of a soothing voice, or, later, the malaise of words that have never been heard and that are still waiting to be heard, an expectation that has itself remained ‘unknown.’ ”104 They mark, in other words, the limits of the infant’s ability to comprehend, to master, or even to fully experience its environment. The same relational asymmetry that makes the mother responsible for the helpless infant, also makes it impossible for the infant to grasp the overwhelming significance and scope of these messages of responsibility.105 The infant cannot possibly know that this person 102 It is also perhaps worth noting that there is now research suggesting that fetal life is capable of receiving “vibroacoustic stimulation” while in the womb. Research suggests that the memory of these stimulations may be retained into neonatal life. The transmission of pre-​linguistic messages may precede birth. See Gonzalez-​Gonzalez, N. L., Suarez, M. N., Perez-​Pinero, B., Armas, H., Domenech, E., & Bartha, J. L. (2006). Persistence of fetal memory into neonatal life. Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica, 85, 1160–​1164. 103 Viviane Chetrit-​Vatine. The Ethical Seduction of the Analytic Situation:  The Feminine-​ Maternal Origins of Responsibility for the Other (London: Routledge, 2014), 139. 104 Ibid., 140. 105 In recent decades, much important research has been conducted on the question of how the pressures and challenges of this asymmetrical relation affect the mother, and

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upon whom it is utterly dependent for its survival is akin to a hostage who is responsible for everything, including her hostage-​taker’s well-​being. Not only is Chetrit-​Vatine’s argumentation as rigorous as it is provocative, but it is particularly relevant to our discussion. For it allows us to consider the possibility that the role of the mother may be every bit as important to the discourse on responsibility as it is within Laplanche’s account. Such a view receives implicit support from Levinas’ recurring insistence that maternity can be understood to comprise a prime example of the unbearable ordeal of responsibility. “Maternity, which is bearing par excellence,” Levinas writes, “bears even responsibility for the persecuting by the persecutor.”106 By involving the literal inhabitation of the other inside the body of the subject, maternity exemplifies, in the most visceral way, a living responsibility for the other, all the way to the point of substitution. The other is literally under one’s skin, making maternity “the ultimate sense of … vulnerability.”107 As Levinas writes, in maternity the prenatal maternal body is not only a host, it is also a hostage. Bound to the other by a proverbial ‘Gordian Knot’ exemplified by the umbilical cord itself, a mother’s responsibility for the other person supersedes all other obligations. Pain, wounding, and discomfort are but a few of the manifestations of the mother’s ‘persecution’ at the hands of the intrusive other for whom she is unremittingly responsible. “Is not the restlessness of someone persecuted but a modification of maternity,” Levinas asks, “the groaning of the wounded entrails by those it will bear or has borne?”108 Citing a Biblical formulation found in the Book of Numbers, Levinas further suggests that responsibility is not only exemplified through the experience of bearing a child, but also in the burden of caring for a child after birth. The responsible subject can be likened to a wet-​nurse who must care for a stranger that she has “neither conceived nor given birth to,” as if that stranger were her very own infant.109 Lisa Guenther points out the numerous ambiguities ultimately influence the type of care that the infant receives. Chetrit-​Vatine, for instance, suggests that the mother’s world is initially destabilized and violated by the arrival of the infant. Lisa Baraitser, in an illuminating text, likewise writes of the interruptive, or suspensive, effect that accompanies the mother’s initial awakening to the nature of her responsibility for the infant. It is in the midst of this disruptive ‘stop-​time,’ Baraitser argues, that the conditions are created for the construction of a discontinuous, maternal subjectivity grounded in responsibility for the child. See Lisa Baraitser, Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (London: Routledge, 2009), 8. 106 Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 75. 107 Ibid., 108. 108 Ibid., 75. 109 Numbers, 11:12. See Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 91.

194 CHAPTER 5 generated by this formulation. For one thing, Guenther notes, the ‘wet-​nurse’ to whom the Biblical passage in question actually refers is not a mother or even a woman at all, but Moses. As Guenther writes, “the sex of Moses, and the obfuscation of this sex by Levinas’ manner of citation, raises questions about the relation between maternity, embodiment, and sexual difference.”110 But there are further concerns to be raised.111 To what extent, Guenther asks, is it desirable or even viable to think of ethics in terms of an infinite, unwavering command to assume the role of a mother or a wet-​nurse? Do we not risk romanticizing (not to mention essentializing) the role of the mother by portraying her as a martyr or a saint? Moreover, by construing responsibility in such hyperbolic, ‘impossible’ terms, Guenther asks, do we not risk making “more concrete ethical and political obligations disappear from view?”112 How are we to reconcile, for example, the Levinasian emphasis on an ethics predicated upon radical asymmetry –​with the demands of a broader, social and political justice that seem to call for symmetry or equality among individuals? Guenther writes, “If the ethical asymmetry of my responsibility for Others is to be rigorously distinguished from the asymmetry of injustice, in which one group of people is made to bear an unequal and nonreciprocal burden based on their sex, race, class, or any other form of identity, then a defense of social and political symmetry or equality is also necessary.”113 These are crucial questions. But might there be another way of thinking through them? One of the things that I want to suggest, in the final chapter, is that the importance of Blanchot’s response to Levinas, in The Writing of the Disaster, may reside precisely in the manner in which he seeks to push the Levinasian account of responsibility in an even more radical direction than Levinas himself. Rather than seeking to ‘balance-​out’ the radical asymmetry of the Levinasian ethical relation by making recourse to some notion of a higher-​ level symmetry or reciprocity, Blanchot wants to push this relation toward a point where asymmetry is doubled into dissymmetry. It is in relation to dissymmetry that Blanchot wants to think the notion of responsibility as it pertains to the realm of the socio-​political. 110 Lisa Guenther, “ ‘Like a Maternal Body’:  Emmanuel Levinas and the Motherhood of Moses,” Hypatia 21, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 120. 111 The past several decades have seen a wide-​range of feminist responses to Levinas’ work. For an overview, see Tina Chanter, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas (University Park:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). For a feminist critique of his philosophy, see Stella Sandford, The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas (London: Athlone Press, 2000). 112 Guenther, “Like a Maternal Body,” 120. 113 Ibid., 128.

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If the après coup, according to Laplanche, demands to be thought in two directions at once, then so does responsibility, in Blanchot’s text, demand to be thought in at least two directions at once, ramifying the obligation in question beyond the bounds of the intersubjective sphere. What begins with the maternal implantation of the enigmatic message is never reducible to maternal responsibility alone, for this message of responsibility incessantly returns as other, as different from itself. This suggests that responsibility may involve a demand that multiplies and translates itself infinitely, making each person always already responsible not only for the other –​but for all others. This is the impossible burden that I  believe announces itself to the child in Blanchot’s ‘window scene,’ and which leads to the epiphanic outpouring of joyful tears whose precise significance remains to be addressed. But all of this cannot help but raise an unavoidable question. If the maternal role is indeed so crucial to the account of traumatic responsibility which we have been elaborating, then where exactly is the mother located in Blanchot’s text? Is she even there? And to what extent can we relate responsibility back to the mother if her role is never directly acknowledged by Blanchot himself?

­c hapter 6

Maternal Rhythms 1

Blanchot’s Mother

In contrast to Levinas, whose Otherwise Than Being fixates upon maternity as a paradigmatic exemplification of responsibility, Blanchot eschews any similar move in The Writing of the Disaster. Even in passages where Blanchot appropriates the precise rhetoric of Levinas’ text (hostage-​taking, vulnerability, persecution, passivity), there is not so much as a passing reference to the maternal. Given the amount of space that Blanchot devotes to discussing Levinas’ account of responsibility, taking time to reinscribe and carefully critique Levinas’ argument, the suppression of any reference to the mother’s role cannot help but appear conspicuous. At times, Blanchot seems ever so close to evoking the maternal –​for instance, when he glosses the notion of responsibility with the words, “It is the trauma of creation or of birth … I am created responsible.”1 But no sooner does Blanchot hint at a connection between maternity and the implantation of the enigmatic message of responsibility, than he seems to backtrack by specifying, “My responsibility is anterior to my birth just as it is exterior to my consent, to my liberty.”2 Why is Blanchot so reticent about giving the mother her due? Might this apparent suppression of the maternal role mark a limit to the comparison we are seeking to draw between Blanchot and Laplanche? Might it suggest, moreover, a further point of divergence between Blanchot and Levinas himself?3

1 The Writing of the Disaster. 22. 2 Ibid. 22. 3 The notion of the ‘trauma of birth’ clearly calls to mind the title of Otto Rank’s 1924 book, in which it is argued that the infant’s violent and asphyxiating emergence from the tranquility of intrauterine enclosure is traumatic. Freud responds critically to Rank’s work in his 1926 text Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety. Later, the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion will similarly propose a theory of birth trauma, arguing that an infant’s earliest ‘feeling states’ are unbearable and overwhelming sensations which completely inundate the neonate, threatening it with impending death. It is only through the subsequent containment and safety provided by the mother, that the experience of birth can be made to seem sensible. In the course of attachment, the mother takes the infant’s chaotic, terrifying emotional states and prescribes limits and names for them, helping the child to gain control over what had previously seemed to threaten him with destruction. See Wilfred R. Bion, Two papers: The grid and caesura (London: Karnac, 1989).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004401334_​0 08

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With regard to Blanchot’s texts, the question of the status of the maternal –​ and that of the feminine, more generally  –​offers no easy answers. There is a line of criticism, exemplified by Lynne Huffer’s article, “Blanchot’s Mother,” that seeks to identify within Blanchot’s suppression of the maternal, ample evidence of a regressive or nostalgic tendency within his thinking. Focusing upon Blanchot’s interpretation of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, from the early 1950s, Huffer sees an implicit coupling of Eurydice and the figure of the mother. Transformed into a void, the figure of the mother (qua Eurydice) becomes the absence, the lack, on the basis of which the masculine, Orphic voice speaks. The mother, in Blanchot’s text, is turned into as an inaccessible origin that “can only exist as a fictional construct.”4 It is in nostalgic pursuit of this absent origin, a pursuit aiming at the impossible retrieval of the lost maternal object, that literature perpetually occupies itself. Without attempting to address Huffer’s reading in toto, let us entertain the possibility that she may be right about one thing:  perhaps the maternal, in Blanchot’s writings, does indeed appear in the form of disappearance. Such a configuration, of course, would hardly make Blanchot’s text unique. For it is anything but unusual, as Lisa Baraitser has observed, to find the mother, within both philosophical and critical texts, presented as “a shadowy figure who seems to disappear from the very discourses that try to account for her.”5 To apply Baraitser’s insight to Blanchot’s text, however, would be to suggest that Blanchot is in fact trying to account for her. It would be to imply, moreover, that Blanchot has not jettisoned Levinas’ emphasis upon the maternal after all, but has merely transposed this emphasis into a register which, under the proverbial cloak of a palpable absence, evades all representation. Surely, this would make for an intriguing reading. But where, then, might one encounter a trace of this palpable absence? One such place might be in Blanchot’s ‘(A primal scene?)’ fragments. Particularly in the depiction of the boy at the window, exposed to a sky that is “absolutely black and absolutely empty,”6 one cannot help but wonder if something of the absent maternal is being evoked. On the most basic level, as we have seen, the trope of the child at the window is clearly a play upon the Wolf Man’s dream. In contrast to the young Pankejeff, however, Blanchot’s child does not perceive an image suggestive of parental copulation. In fact, when the emptiness breaks through, Blanchot’s child does not perceive anything at all. In place of the ordinary order of the sky illuminated by daylight, there is substituted an 4 Lynne Huffer, “Blanchot’s Mother,” Yale French Studies 93, no. 93 (1998): 185. 5 Baraitser, Maternal Encounters, 4. 6 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 72.

198 CHAPTER 6 absence within which is “affirmed and dissolved the vertiginous knowledge that nothing is what there is, and first of all nothing beyond [rien est ce qu’il y a, et d’abord rien au-​delà].”7 Gazing out the window, the child sees nothing but blackness and void, which give themselves unalloyed, announcing the revelation of the outside by means of “absence, loss and the lack of any beyond.”8 In the second of three ‘(A primal scene?)’ fragments, Blanchot’s two, nameless interlocutors seek to explain the nature of the child’s experience. One of the interlocutors suggests that there passes through the sentence rien est ce qu’il y a something which the sentence “can contain only by bursting.”9 The other interlocutor responds: “For my part, I hear the inevitability of the il y a, which being and nothing roll like a great wave, unfurling it and folding it back under, inscribing and effacing it, to the rhythm of the nameless rustling [le rythme de l’anonyme bruissement].”10 Of particular significance is the final clause of the interlocutor’s response, namely, his reference to “the rhythm of the nameless rustling.” These words are significant, because they are some of the only words used to describe the void, in Blanchot’s text, which are not wholly privative in their connotation. We read in multiple places of blackness, void, absence, loss, nothing, and the deserted outside. Yet here we find that, perhaps surprisingly, there is also a rhythm to this void. It is a rhythm, moreover, which through its connection to the il y a, operates outside the economy of being, outside the dialectical work of the negative, and which therefore perhaps even bears some relation to the movement of the neuter itself.11 The question is what, if anything, Blanchot’s 7 Ibid., 72. 8 Ibid., 115. 9 Ibid., 116. 10 Ibid., 116. 11 The notion of the il y a comprises one of the most direct links between Blanchot’s writings and those of early Levinas. The trope of the il y a can be found in Blanchot’s literary writings dating back to the mid-​1930s (“The Last Word”), however its most important early usage is found in Blanchot’s first novel Thomas the Obscure, which Levinas explicitly references in his 1947 text, Existence and Existents. Developed in tandem with Levinas, during the 1930s and 1940s, the il y a is a notion well-​ known to readers of Blanchot. Literally meaning ‘there is,’ it suggests, on one hand, the presence of the absence of being –​and on the other hand, the sheer inescapability of being. As contradictory as such a formulation may sound, the il y a eludes all contradiction on account of its anteriority with respect to both logic and language. It plays a role akin to that of an excluded middle, remaining strictly irreducible to being or non-​being, while serving as a condition of possibility for both. Before one can say either ‘there is something,’ or ‘there is nothing’  –​one must simply say ‘there is.’ In speaking of the il y a, Blanchot is evoking something even more fundamental than Heidegger’s being-​in-​ the-​world, more archaic than the ontological difference between being (Sein) and beings

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characterization of the void in relation to rhythm might tell us about the status of the mother. Could this be a way of indicating that the perceived nothingness is anything but a pure vacuum, and that something of the maternal might be embedded there? Without by any means exhausting the fragment’s vast range of the potential meanings, many of which I have previously discussed, I want to propose, in the concluding chapter of this book, three different psychoanalytic registers in which we might think about the void encountered by the child, as it pertains to the question of the mother. These three perspectives are Green’s account of negative hallucination, Lacan’s discourse on the Real, and Kristeva’s theory of the maternal chora. My aim, in introducing these registers, is to draw-​out the various psychoanalytic resonances inherent within Blanchot’s scene in hopes of elucidating something further about the connection between trauma and responsibility, particularly as it relates to the mother. It will be in Kristeva’s writings, especially, that I believe the resources might be encountered for reading Blanchot’s ‘(A primal scene?)’ in its full socio-​political dimension, not only as a statement on the importance of the maternal, but also as a broader statement on the trauma of responsibility and the exigencies of infinite translation and re-​translation unto which this responsibility consigns us. 2

Negative Hallucination

On the most basic level, the sudden interruption of experiential continuity, coupled with the interposition of a perceptual void, cannot help but call to mind the notion of negative hallucination. Indeed, this is the first register in which the boy’s exposure to the void outside the window might be read. (das Seiende). Always already in play, the notion of the il y a hints at a world bereft of things, emptied of all existents, which nevertheless cannot be annihilated. It hints, in other words, at the absence of the world and the impossibility of putting an end to this absence. When everything else has been negated, the il y a remains untouched. Before all beginnings, and after all endings, there abides the murmur of the objectless void, the indestructible il y a. Particularly after his ‘discovery’ of the neuter, in the early 1960s, Blanchot grows suspicious of the ontological residue seemingly contained within the notion of the il y a, and he uses the term far more sparingly than before. If he insists upon retaining a certain conception of the il y a, and selectively deploying it up through The Writing of the Disaster, then it must be understood in very strictest of terms as something entirely outside the economy of being and non-​being. It must be understood, in other words, specifically in relation to the notions of the outside and the neuter, which it redoubles in the voice of its inexhaustible murmur.

200 CHAPTER 6 The notion of negative hallucination has a rich, clinical history pre-​dating even the advent of psychoanalysis. Going back to the early 1890s, Freud had already insisted that it was possible for an individual under hypnosis to be coaxed into ‘not seeing’ things. By the turn of the century, Freud had come to think the notion of negative hallucination in more specific terms as a form of repression –​not of thought, but of perception. Engaging with Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva, in a famous study from 1907, Freud draws a link between the protagonist’s wholesale repression of his love life, and the negative hallucinations that he comes to experience as a result. Negative hallucination, here, is characterized as an erasure of a perception that involves “not seeing and not recognizing people who [are] actually present.”12 Interestingly, for Freud, such negative hallucinations actually enjoy a position of logical anteriority with respect to positive ones. As Freud asserts, in a text from 1917, any attempt “to explain hallucination would have to start out from the negative rather than positive hallucination.”13 His rationale is that positive hallucinations can only arise where there is a space for their appearance. Before there can be a positive hallucination, in other words, there must be a perceptual gap in the fabric of reality demanding to be filled. By erasing a live impression, negative hallucination produces precisely such a gap. Opening a breach in perception, negative hallucination invites the emergence of a psychotic delusion whose role it is to close the gap and restore a semblance of continuity to experience. Building upon Freud’s account, Ferenczi specifically emphasizes the connection between negative hallucination and trauma. According to Ferenczi, negative hallucinations are an important way for the psyche to protect itself in the face of a potentially catastrophic experience. Rather than exposing itself to the full brunt of traumatic excitation, the psyche actively erases a perception, either in part or in whole, in order to defend itself against something that might radically compromise it. Negative hallucination thus assumes the role of a narcissistic protection mechanism against a reality that has become, in the words of Raluca Soreanu, too terrifying to experience.14 By excising the traumatic perception from consciousness, the psyche can then restore, through the work of positive hallucination, a fantasized version of the pre-​traumatic state, ‘the situation of tenderness’ before the confusion of tongues.15

12 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 9, 67. 13 Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 14, 232. 14 Raluca Soreanu, Working-​Through Collective Wounds (London:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 138. 15 Ibid.

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In the late 1970s, around the same time that Blanchot was composing The Writing of the Disaster, the French psychoanalyst André Green had begun to revisit the notion of negative hallucination in an even more radical light, reformulating it, and expanding it into a foundational concept within his own theory and practice. Green seeks to make negative hallucination far more than just a mechanism of denial, or an expression of foreclosure [Verwerfung]. For Green, negative hallucination is not just a way for the psyche to protect itself. Expanding the notion’s reach quite dramatically, Green argues that negative hallucination serves as a prerequisite for all normal processes of infantile development whatsoever. Not simply a pathological phenomenon related to the psyche’s need to avoid traumatic perceptions, Green sees negative hallucination as constantly operating in daily life as a framing structure without which representational thought would be impossible. What makes Green’s account particularly intriguing is the special emphasis that it assigns to the role of mother. Drawing upon the work of Winnicott, whom he considered a major influence, Green’s account of negative hallucination begins by focusing upon the way in which the mother holds the infant against her body in the days and weeks immediately following birth.16 While holding her infant, the mother’s arms encase a space ‘filled-​in’ by the mother’s body. The infant internalizes this structure, finding care and comfort in the immersive physical contact with its nurturer. At some point, however, the mother lets go of her infant. This moment of parting is crucial, Green writes. For when the mother goes away, she leaves behind the imprint of her arms upon the infant’s body –​only now, the maternal object within the frame has vanished. “When contact with the mother’s body is broken, what remains of this experience is the trace of bodily contact –​as a rule the mother’s arms –​which constitutes a framing structure sheltering the loss of the perception of the maternal object, in the form of a negative hallucination of it.”17 While holding the infant, in other words, the impression of the mother’s body against the infant’s body creates a framing structure which is suddenly emptied the moment that she goes away. The internalized impression of the mother’s arms nevertheless persists, encasing this emptiness, this blankness, that fills the space from which the mother has vanished. 16

17

Green met Winnicott in 1961 at the ipa Congress in London. For Green’s own reflections on the importance of Winnicott’s thought, see Rosine Jozef Perelberg and Gregorio Kohon, eds., The Greening of Psychoanalysis: André Green’s New Paradigm in Contemporary Theory and Practice (London: Karnac, 2017), 117. André Green, Key Ideas for a Contemporary Psychoanalysis, trans. Andrew Weller (London: Routledge and the New Library of Psychoanalysis, 2005), 161.

202 CHAPTER 6 Acknowledging his debt to Hegelian thought, a debt which he shares with both Leclaire (his intellectual rival in the 1960s) and Lacan himself, Green argues that this negativity should be understood as nothing short of foundational with respect to the development of the child’s psychic life. As Green remarks, in an interview with Fernando Urribarri, this initial negative hallucination “constitutes –​like a negative in photography –​a necessary stage for the becoming of the positive, of the representation.”18 The negative hallucination of the mother creates an emptiness bounded within a frame, which then waits to be filled by the various ideational and linguistic productions of the psyche. All representation and symbolization throughout the course of one’s life takes place on the blank screen, the canvas, framed by the child’s negative hallucination of its mother. It is against the background of the mother’s absence that all psychic life occurs. Rosine Jozef Perelberg writes that, for Green, this negative hallucination “creates a potential space for the representation and investment of new objects” as well as providing the conditions in which “the activities of thinking and symbolization can take place.”19 The infant’s negative hallucination of the mother serves as a precondition, for instance, for hallucinatory wish-​fulfilment, for phantasy, and for thinking in general. It comprises, in the words of Charis Kontou, “a box of blankness, full of thin air”20 within which representations might arise on the very basis of the absence of all representation. It is certainly tempting to note the various points of overlap between Green’s account and Blanchot’s window scene. The notion of the frame, the nothingness, the absent mother, the allusion to trauma –​all of this seems to draw the two into close relation with one another. Though Blanchot’s earliest versions of the window scene slightly pre-​date Green’s first published account of the negative hallucination, which appeared in 1977, it is certainly possible that Blanchot had become acquainted with Green’s theory during the time he was composing The Writing of the Disaster. It is also possible, however, that Blanchot had encountered similar ideas through his readings of Winnicott, Leclaire, and various other thinkers over the course of 1960s and 1970s.21 Indeed, despite the 18 19 20 21

Fernando Urribarri, “An Interview with André Green: on a psychoanalytic journey from 1960 to 2011,” in The Greening of Psychoanalysis, 122. Perelberg and Kohon, eds., The Greening of Psychoanalysis, 51. Chris Kontou, “Negative Hallucination as the Representation of the Unrepresentable,” EC Psychology and Psychiatry 5, no. 5 (2017): 144. Green, in fact, had been actively courted to join the Lacanian movement in the years immediately following the 1960 Bonneval Colloquium. Despite remaining a member of the spp, Green was a regular attendee of Lacan’s seminar from roughly 1960 until 1967 –​at which point, taking issue with Lacan’s neglect of the notion of affect, he made a decisive break. For an overview of Green’s view of Lacan, and some commentary on his

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ingenuity of his approach, Green’s theory was by no means unique in seeking to establish a link between the lost, maternal body and an inexpressible state preceding all representation. Such thinking is already evident in Lacan’s account of the Real. While keeping Green’s account in play, this is the second register in relation to which I would like to consider Blanchot’s fragment. 3

The Real, the Outside

Though a comprehensive excavation of Lacan’s various formulations of the Real would lead us far beyond the scope of our present discussion, some background may be useful. Alongside the Symbolic and the Imaginary, the Real is one of three registers in relation to which, from the early 1950s onward, ­Lacan seeks to elucidate the structure of human existence, and account for all psychic phenomena.22 Lacan theorizes the Real as remaining irreducible to both the Symbolic and the Imaginary orders, while nevertheless interpenetrating with them in a manner that suggests mutual interdependence. In c­ ontrast to the Symbolic order, which includes the field of language, law, and culture which constitutes the subject –​the Real exists entirely outside language and symbolization. In contrast to the Imaginary, which encompasses all the processes of illusory identification by means of which the ego is constituted through p ­ rimary narcissism –​the Real involves nothing of a representational or imaginary nature. Understandably, this makes it rather difficult, even impossible, for Lacan to speak of the Real without according it, whether intentionally or not, a sense of mystery and indeterminacy. Not unlike the manner in which Blanchot ceaselessly grapples with the question of how to bear witness to a movement of writing that infinitely exceeds language, Lacan is drawn into the paradox of attempting to describe, with words, the very nature of something wordless and imageless. In spite of these challenges, or perhaps even because of them, the

22

broader relation to the ‘post-​Lacanians’ (Laplanche, Pontalis, Anzieu, and Aulagnier, and others), see Urribarri, “An Interview with André Green,” 116–​117. Does Lacan privilege any of these three orders over the other two? While the three registers are understood to be mutually interdependent, some scholars have suggested that there is a historical ordering to the manner in which Lacan comes to privilege them. In such historical accounts, which are inevitably reductive and subject to much debate, it is the Imaginary order which is understood to be Lacan’s primary interest during the writings of the 1930s and 1940s, the Symbolic order which gains the ascendency during Lacan’s ‘return to Freud’ of the 1950s, and the Real which becomes his growing area of focus throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

204 CHAPTER 6 importance of the Real within Lacan’s metapsychology, particularly from the early 1960s onward, is beyond dispute. Without the Real, as Tom Eyers writes, Lacan’s theory “would succumb to one of two fates:  either the temptations of linguistic idealism, whereby psychoanalysis would risk being reduced to a form of hermeneutics; or a theoretical and clinical overinvestment in the narcissistic projections of the ego, rendered as the properly curative object of analysis.”23 What, then, is the Real? In one of his more famous elaborations, Lacan tells us in Seminar ii that the Real “is without fissure.”24 This statement suggests that what defines the Real, at least in part, is its anteriority with respect to all forms of differentiation. At the level of the Real, for instance, “there is no difference between internality and externality,”25 Lacan claims. Because the very notions of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are symbolic constructions, oppositional pairings such as these have no bearing upon the Real, which is irreducible to any system of signification. The Real is radically outside the very distinction between inside and outside. Therefore, one cannot speak here of presence or absence, lack or plenitude, being or non-​being, self or other, for all such notions only acquire meaning in the Symbolic order which, through the process of signification, establishes a ‘cut’ in the Real. As long as this ‘cut’ has not yet occurred, there is no fissure, no lack. “The lack of the lack makes the real.”26 writes Lacan. Nothing is missing in the Real. Nor is anything given. The Real is “an inexpressible, ineffable and undifferentiated space,”27 an unimaginable ‘something’ beyond the reach of language and symbolization. At times, Lacan tries to describe this ‘something,’ with a nod to both Freud and Kant, as the Thing [das Ding]. Unlike things in the mundane sense (die Sache), the Thing is not a product of symbolic or imaginary processes. It is radically unassimilable to such processes, all the while remaining indispensable to their articulation, as Tom Eyers notes.28 At the risk of terminological confusion, one might say that the Thing is not only distinct from all ‘things,’ but also from ‘reality’ itself –​at least in the way it has traditionally been construed. For 23 24

Tom Eyers, Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real’ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–​1955, ed. Jacques-​Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), 97. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Fred Botting, “Relations of the Real in Lacan, Bataille and Blanchot,” SubStance 23, no. 1 (1994): 24. 28 For a discussion of the connection between the Lacanian Real and the Kantian noumena, see Eyers, Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real,’ 64.

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‘reality’ (which Freud calls ‘psychical reality’) is produced precisely at the intersection of the Symbolic and Imaginary orders. The Thing, by contrast, exists beyond both language and the unconscious, in a domain where all direct access to knowledge, thematization, and even imagination, is forestalled. It thus shares a striking similarity with Kant’s thing-​in-​itself, existing as a necessary yet ungraspable x, beyond the reach of any epistemological grasping. For Lacan, however, the Thing of the Real is anything but a dry and formulaic placeholder for the limits necessarily imposed upon metaphysical knowledge. It assumes, rather, the status of a lost, archaic object which calls-​out for pursuit and rediscovery. This is because it is none other than the forbidden maternal body, the object cause of incestuous desire.29 Considered in these terms, the Real cannot help but bear a distinct connection to trauma, as well as transgression. It comprises something utterly forbidden, impossible to attain, which threatens to irrupt within a Symbolic order ill-​equipped to accommodate its arrival. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan discusses this so-​called ‘missed encounter’ with the Real specifically in terms of trauma.30 The ‘missed encounter’ marks the moment at which the Real irrupts into the subject’s discourse “without being determinable or identifiable in symbolic terms.”31 This impossibility of integrating the irruptive Real leads to the persistence of the symptom, which repeats itself in relation to “the blanked-​out scene of the trauma.”32 What remains impossible for the subject to grasp, or experience, is the forbidden maternal body. As Fred Botting notes, “It is this character of impossibility and of resistance to symbolization, which lends the Real its essentially traumatic quality.”33 In an essay on Blanchot and Lacan, Botting notes a number of similarities between the Lacanian Real and the notion of the outside [le dehors], as it appears in The Writing of the Disaster. When the void breaks through in the ‘boy at the window’ scene, it exposes the boy to the vertigo of the “deserted outside [dehors déserté].”34 Blanchot describes the outside as an “area of dislocation,”35 29

Despite largely abandoning the notion of das Ding after the conclusion of his 1959–​60 seminar, and proceeding to supplant it, from 1963 onward, with the objet petit a [“the object cause of desire”], Lacan leaves little doubt about how he envisions either its meaning or its importance. See Lacan’s remarks on the objet petit a in Seminar XI, trans. Alan Sheridan, 168. 30   31 Botting, “Relations of the Real in Lacan, Bataille and Blanchot,” 28. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 24. 34 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 115. 35 Ibid., 57.

206 CHAPTER 6 a sort of non-​place whose “frontier is nowhere indicated.”36 Elsewhere he writes of it, “We have no access to the outside, but the outside has always already touched us in the head, for it is precipitous.”37 In yet a further passage, Blanchot lists the outside –​alongside the neuter, the disaster, and the return –​ as one of the “four winds of spirit’s absence.”38 If spirit, as Blanchot tells us, “is always active,”39 then the winds of the spirit’s absence demand to be thought, by contrast, in direct relation to the radical passivity, the agony of le subissement, endured by the body of no one. The four winds demand to be thought, in other words, in relation to the radical passivity which marks the very status of the subject emptied of all subjectivity, always already turned outside himself, on account of the traumatic blow of responsibility. The interruption engendered by the four winds thus bears a striking resemblance to the traumatic ‘missed encounter’ with the Real in Lacan’s account. For in both cases, the order of discourse and the primacy of law are shot-​through, pierced, by the irruption of something they can neither control nor even adequately name. But there are key differences as well. Whereas the Real, in Lacan, is completely devoid of language, Blanchot insists that the four winds may be “remainders, each one, of an other language [un langage autre], both disappeared and never yet pronounced …”40 He describes this as a language which “we cannot even attempt to restore without reintroducing the names back into the world, or exalting them to some higher world of which, in their external, clandestine solitude, they could only be the irregular interruption, the invisible retreat.”41 Utterly alien to any form of discursive or communicative language, this would be not so much a language marked by inscriptions, as a language of ‘pre-​inscriptions.’ It is perhaps this very language, infinitely interruptive, which Blanchot has in mind when he writes of “a pre-​inscription which ever effaces itself as a production of meaning without thereby becoming meaningless, and which is suffered ‘in us’ only as the death of others. Not as death itself, but as a death that is always other, with which we do not communicate, but for which we bear the unbearable responsibility.”42 To speak of ‘wind,’ moreover, is inevitably to allude to the notion of rhythm. Indeed, by expressly linking this interruptive, other language to the notion of les quatre vents, Blanchot may perhaps be suggesting that this other language 36 Ibid., 58. 37 Ibid., 6. 38 Ibid., 57. 39 Ibid., 40. 40 Ibid., 58. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 118.

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is commensurate, above all, with a kind of rhythm that exceeds and precedes all symbolization, all discourse. Might this rhythm, then, somehow pertain to a pre-​symbolic language linked to the forbidden maternal body? Certainly, such a possibility would make for a provocative reading of Blanchot’s window scene. It would allow us to read, in the rhythm of nameless rustling encountered in the midst of the void, a clear intimation of this other language, always already effaced and always yet to come. What the boy at the window encounters would be nothing less than the traumatic irruption of this other language, a language more ancient than all discourse and all law, which gives itself neither in words nor in symbols, but only in the rhythm of the void. Could it be that the enigmatic message of responsibility, discussed in the previous chapter, is perhaps transmitted from mother to child by means of rhythm? And might it be precisely these rhythms which ceaselessly return in the wake of the mother’s absence? It is in the work of Julia Kristeva that the connection between the mother and the notion of a pre-​symbolic language of rhythm is offered arguably its most robust elaboration. Kristeva’s theory thus comprises the third and final register in relation to which I want to consider Blanchot’s scene. 4

Chora and Rhythm

Published in 1974, Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language offers a provocative and highly-​influential account of the pre-​symbolic and pre-​ representational ground of formal language. Exploring the relationship between mother and infant, Kristeva suggests that the child’s eventual subjectification at the hands of language, law, and culture (in essence, Lacan’s Symbolic), entails prior exposure to a pre-​symbolic realm pervaded not by words, but by rhythms. It is on the basis of these rhythms, Kristeva argues, that the emergence of language and the installation of selfhood first become possible. An area of major focus for Kristeva, in the opening sections of her book, is the notion of the chora. Borrowed from Plato’s Timaeus, the notion comes to be modified significantly by Kristeva and employed to great effect within her text. Usually translated into English as ‘receptacle,’ Plato describes the chora as a place of non-​being out of which being develops. Richard Kearney glosses Plato’s notion of the chora as “a placeless place from which everything that is derives.”43 In the Timaeus, Plato is notoriously cagey about the precise status and 43

Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (London: Routledge, 2003), 193.

208 CHAPTER 6 contours of the chora, with his reticence already presaging the increasingly apophatic and paradoxical configurations of the term which will be proposed by both the church fathers and the neoplatonists. Referring to it at one point as “invisible and formless,” Plato describes the chora as uniquely capable of accommodating all bodies and forms that pass through it, while never modifying itself in the process.44 In a series of famous lines, he compares the source of all being to a father and that which passes through the receptacle to a child –​ while likening the chora itself to a mother.45 In her text, Kristeva seeks to exploit this familial analogy by intensifying the link between the chora and the maternal, while also modifying Plato’s account in several important respects. In contrast to Plato, who envisions the maternal quality of the receptacle as characterless or featureless, Kristeva offers a rich and multifaceted account of the chora which makes it central not only the development of language, but much else besides. She attempts to differentiate her theory from other accounts by telling us what the chora is not. The chora “precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality,”46 Kristeva writes. “The chora is not yet a position that represents something for someone (i.e. it is not a sign); nor is it a position that represents ­someone for another position (i.e. it is not yet a signifier either),” she adds. “Neither model nor copy, the chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization.”47 With these words, she effectively distinguishes the chora from Lacan’s Symbolic and Imaginary orders. Is it, then, perhaps then but another name for the Lacanian Real, whose connection to the forbidden, maternal body we have already noted? Certainly, its connection to the Real seems closer than its relation to Lacan’s other two orders. Yet Kristeva’s chora remains nevertheless irreducible to it. The chora ultimately poses a challenge to Lacanian theory that is as provocative as the challenge it poses to Plato. For the chora is neither a characterless receptacle, nor an unknowable x. It bears no connection to the Kantian noumena. It is rather a maternal nexus  –​an extremely provisional articulation, Kristeva writes –​“formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated.”48 The notion of regulation is key here. For 44 Plato, Timaeus, trans. Donald J. Zeyl (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2000), 50b-​50c. 45 Ibid., 50d. 46 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 26. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 25.

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what this regulation entails, according to Kristeva, is a process entirely different from symbolic law, yet which “nevertheless effectuates discontinuities by temporarily articulating them and then starting over, again and again.”49 This regulation, in other words, entails rhythm. The chora is a maternal nexus, one might say, formed and sustained by the rhythms, both recursive and discontinuous, which regulate the “discrete quantities of energy [that] move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such.”50 Embedded here, amongst these rhythms that comprise the maternal chora, the infant is already involved in a process that precedes its earliest acquisition of natural language. It is exposed here to a language without words which Kristeva calls the semiotic. The semiotic is comprised of the rhythms of the drives, involving energy charges as well as psychic etchings irreducible to symbolization. “The kinetic functional stage of the semiotic,” Kristeva writes, “precedes the establishment of the sign; it is not, therefore, cognitive in the sense of being assumed by a knowing, already constituted subject.”51 Rather, it might be likened a kind of pre-​language, or to use Blanchot’s phrase, a ‘pre-​inscription,’ basing itself upon the alternating rhythms of bodily contact and the play of the drives. As Deborah Caslav Covino writes, “Though the child hears words spoken around her, she has not yet been initiated into formal language, but experiences the world mainly in terms of rhythmic or sporadic movements, sounds without prescribed sense, feelings of pleasure or pain whose origin or cause is indefinite.”52 Covino continues: “The child’s early intimacy with the mother’s body is not only itself a kind of language, defined as it is by patterns of sound and movement, but it is the ground of all symbolic, or social language; it is what makes language acquisition possible.”53 While Kristeva is quick to concede that no signifying system can ever be ­exclusively semiotic or symbolic, it is clearly the rhythms of the semiotic, the pre-​representational language of the maternal chora, that she seeks to prioritize in her text. Kristeva’s point, against Lacan, is that the infant’s ‘first’ language is not a language predicated upon lack, or symbolic castration. Rather, it is the language of the semiotic, based almost entirely upon the nurturing contact facilitated by the maternal chora, a contact both intermittent and finely articulated, “analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm.”54 49 Ibid., 26. 50 Ibid., 25. 51 Ibid., 27. 52 Deborah C.  Covino, Amending the Abject Body:  Aesthetic Makeovers in Medicine and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 18. 53 Ibid., 19. 54 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 26.

210 CHAPTER 6 5

The Danger of Rhythm’s Enigma

In The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot develops an account of rhythm that I believe resonates with Kristeva in multiple respects. Tracing the term back to the archaic word rhutmos, meaning “changing, fluid configuration,” Blanchot insists that rhythm is not “the simple alternation of Yes and No, of ‘giving-​ withholding,’ of presence-​absence or of living-​dying, producing-​destroying.”55 For this would mean that rhythm is merely a name for what regulates the functioning of a pre-​existing whole, allowing this whole to show itself in its totality. Like Kristeva, Blanchot wants to think rhythm in radically different terms, as both preceding and exceeding these symbolic, binary pairings. Rhythm is not simply a name for describing the way in which, little by little, through a series of alternations, the totality of the whole will reveal itself in its vast, multifaceted completeness. Rhythm rather contests every totality. It is rhythm, in its sheer multiplicity and difference, that comes first –​with the concept of a unified natural order following in its wake. Less a measure of the alternation between being and nothingness, or between presence and absence, than the condition of possibility for this alternation, rhythm is a way of naming the pure difference that precedes every unity, every totality. This, incidentally, is where Blanchot discerns the great importance of Heraclitus, to whom he had earlier devoted an important essay in 1960. In Heraclitus, Blanchot sees the thinker of rhythm par excellence whose focus is neither upon privileging one side of the alternating pair, nor the other. Heraclitus seeks instead to privilege, above all, the mysterious difference which precedes and conditions the alternation itself. Heraclitus understands that life and death, things and names, presence and absence, are each coupled together in “a state of unceasing reciprocity”56 through which one side of the pairing continually gives way to the other in a ceaseless movement of becoming. It is not so much this unceasing reciprocity that interests Heraclitus, however, as it is the difference which makes this movement possible in the first place. “What speaks essentially in things, in words, and in the crossed or harmonious passage from the one to the other, and, finally, in everything that shows itself and everything that hides, is Difference itself.”57 In speaking, we seek to make the pure difference of rhythm, the basis for all speech, perceptible and meaningful. But the pure difference of rhythm cannot help but slip away in our attempts to articulate it, remaining ultimately unsayable as such. Rhythm is thus portrayed by 55 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 112. 56 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 90. 57 Ibid., 91.

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Blanchot as irreducible to any form of symbolic, or representational, discourse. “Rhythm does not belong to the order of nature or language,” Blanchot maintains, “or even ‘art,’ where it seems to predominate.”58 It is portrayed, rather, as bearing the traits of the neuter, the outside. To think of rhythm, in Blanchot’s text, is to think of the four winds through which it ceaselessly rustles. In two separate fragments from The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot goes on to stress “rhythm’s enigma,”59 as well as its danger. Why is rhythm dangerous? Because despite the fact that rhythm seems to govern according to rules, imposing the law of regularity upon all things, it actually places these rules, this regularity, subversively under threat. At the same time that it gives order and measure to all things, rhythm holds itself outside all measure, necessarily exceeding its own rules. If rhythm serves as a basis for alternation, for order and measure, then who or what gives order and measure to rhythm? Utterly anarchic, rhythm must be understood as a law unto itself. It governs without being governed, remaining unbound by any law. Perhaps this might allow us to understand why Blanchot hints, in the second ‘(A primal scene?)’ fragment, that there passes through the void something it “can contain only by bursting.”60 The rhythm of the void is surely dangerous, interruptive. But where does this leave us with Kristeva? And what might it suggest about the status of the missing mother in Blanchot’s text? At some point, Kristeva tells us, the infant’s immersive contact with the chora is broken. The mother’s body is left behind, or abjected. This happens over the course of two phases –​each of which corresponds to a particular moment in the Lacanian developmental itinerary. First, by means of imaginary identification, and next, by means of castration, the child is lifted out of a realm pervaded by the rhythms of the semiotic, and placed into a realm dominated by language, law, and culture. The first blow against the primacy of the maternal chora occurs during the mirror stage, where the Imaginary order, the ego, and narcissism all assert their dominance. The positing of the ego inevitably leads to the positing of objects which are similarly separate and signifiable. This is because the specular image with which the infant identifies serves as the prototype, not only for its own ego, but also for all ostensibly unified and discrete objects whatsoever. The possibility of detaching objects from the semiotic chora is established by means of the same process which leads the infant into the arms of its naively self-​sufficient narcissism.

58 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 112. 59 Ibid., 5 & 113. 60 Ibid., 116.

212 CHAPTER 6 Yet, if the mirror stage begins the process of detachment from the maternal nexus, Kristeva writes, then “castration puts the finishing touches on the process of separation.”61 To the extent that she understands her identity now in conformity with the Law of the Father, and accepts being a subject constituted in accordance with prescribed rules, behaviors, and expectations –​the child decisively “separates from [her] fusion with the mother … and transfers semiotic motility onto the symbolic order.”62 Individuation is gained, but something is lost in the process. In a now all-​too-​familiar story, the mother is left behind, or abjected –​and with her, “all elements of the self that threaten or violate codes of behavior and discursive expression.”63 Not only is the mother suppressed, but so are the rhythms of the semiotic. The reason for this abjection, this suppression (or repression) of the maternal chora and its semiotic rhythms, is clear. The Symbolic order rejects everything that does not conform with its clean boundaries, laws, and rules. As Kelly Oliver writes, in her classic study on Kristeva’s work, “The Symbolic can maintain itself only by maintaining its borders.”64 And to the extent that the abject mother, the mother of the chora, precedes and threatens the distinction between subject and object, identity and non-​identity, she cannot help but point “to the fragility of those borders.”65 She is thus banished from the Symbolic, which nevertheless continues to fear the irruption and resurfacing of her unruly, anarchic, devouring body. The question I  want to pose, here, is whether the traumatic non-​ phenomenon to which the boy in Blanchot’s window scene is exposed might be none other than the resurfacing of the abject maternal body, enshrouded in void? I want to ask whether we might encounter, in the rhythm of the nameless rustling which passes through this very void, the remainders of a pre-​symbolic, pre-​representational language, perhaps akin to Kristeva’s semiotic? Might we discern, in the blackened sky, and in that infamous sentence, rien est ce qu’il y a –​through which passes something that the sentence can contain only by bursting –​the irruption of the rhythms of the maternal chora? If so, then might these rhythm perhaps be understood as encoding none other than the enigmatic messages of responsibility, transmitted from mother to infant, whose traces we have been searching for in Blanchot’s text? 61 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 47. 62 Ibid. 63 Covino, Amending the Abject Body, 21. 64 Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva:  Unraveling the Double-​ Bind (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1993), 56. 65 Ibid.

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Such possibilities would open a path toward the thesis that Blanchot has neither forgotten the mother, nor suppressed her role in the transmission of the enigmatic message of responsibility, but encrypted her, not unlike the messages she herself transmits, beyond representation, beyond figuration, at the heart of his text’s most famous fragment. In all of this, the question of whether Blanchot had actually read Kristeva or not matters less to me than does the profound resonance which might be discerned across their respective texts, and above all the socio-​political exigency toward which these texts might, each in their own ways, gesture us. I want to suggest that if Kristeva’s account comprises such an intriguing supplement to Blanchot’s writings, then it is because of how its helps us to read Blanchot’s emphasis on rhythm not only in relation to the role of the maternal, but also in its profound connection to the question of responsibility. If Blanchot does not refer to the mother, as Levinas does, in terms that explicitly define her as the paradigm of responsibility, it is neither to silence her nor to suppress her role. Rather, as I want to argue in the final stages of this book, it may well be in order to tell us something specific about the demand of infinite translation which he understands to be inseparable from the meaning of responsibility itself. 6

Double Dissymmetry

If responsibility, considered in Levinasian terms, involves a relation of asymmetry in which the Other can never be reduced to any version of the Same, and in which the demand to assist this Other all the way to the point of substitution, is non-​reciprocal and absolute –​then what Blanchot wants to propose, in The Writing of the Disaster, is a configuration more radical still. There are, in essence, two moves that Blanchot wants to make with respect to the question of responsibility here. The first is to propose a reorientation of the standard Levinasian account away from its implicit privileging of the vertical or theological, and toward an emphasis on the secular. This is coupled with a second, closely-​related move in which Blanchot proposes that responsibility be considered not in terms of an asymmetrical relation with a Transcendent Other, but in terms of a dissymmetrical relation, in which the obligation characteristic of responsibility is redoubled, and ‘translated,’ in at least two directions at once. Already in The Infinite Conversation we find Blanchot, with utmost subtlety and discretion, beginning to make these moves with respect to Levinas’ philosophy. Blanchot wonders whether there might be a way of thinking the so-​ called ‘relation of the third kind’ no longer in strictly theological terms, as a relation with Autrui, who is always closer to God than I am, but rather, as a

214 CHAPTER 6 quintessentially human relation, in which the notion of an infinite demand is nevertheless still emphasized. Blanchot’s aim here is not to refute Levinas, or find fault in his theory. It is instead to produce a reading of Levinas that responds, as Leslie Hill maintains, “to the radical namelessness of the Other more readily than it does to the Other’s proximity to God.”66 This move, from the theological to the secular realm, is further glossed by Christopher Fynk, who puts the matter rather succinctly in the following lines: “Where Levinas would ultimately assert, after the Psalmist, that there is no escaping the presence of God, Blanchot insists that there is no escaping the human.”67 Blanchot thus proposes to replace the question “who is autrui?” with the question of what “the implications for ‘human community’ might be when it is compelled to respond to the relation of strangeness between each man and the next.”68 The key to making this pivot, from the strictly theological to the socio-​ political realm, lies in rethinking the irreciprocal obligation endured by the Same with respect to the Other in such a manner that this infinite demand runs in two directions at once, without ever balancing-​out or resolving in dialectical equalization. Blanchot writes: this redoubling of irreciprocity … [cannot] be taken over by the dialectic, for it does not tend to reestablish any equality whatsoever; on the contrary, it signifies a double dissymmetry, a double discontinuity, as though the empty space between the one and the other were not homogenous but polarized:  as though this space constituted a non-​isomorphic field bearing a double distortion, at once infinitely negative and infinitely positive, and such that one should call it neutral if it is well understood that the neutral does not annul … this double-​signed infinity, but bears in it the way of an enigma.69 Blanchot’s appeal to the notion of dissymmetry, in contrast to the Levinasian asymmetry, is significant. As Hill notes, while the privative prefix ‘a—​,’ suggests the absence of something, the prefix ‘dis—​,’ connotes doubleness.70 Blanchot’s point seems to be that the non-​hierarchical relation of non-​relation between the Same and the Other must be understood as redoubled by a relation of non-​ relation between the Other and the Same. Far from creating a higher-​order 66 Hill, Blanchot: extreme contemporary, 178. 67 Fynsk, Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot’s Exilic Writing, 46. 68 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 71. 69 Ibid., 70–​71. 70 Hill, Blanchot: extreme contemporary, 176.

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equivalence or symmetry, this redoubling actually exacerbates the irreciprocity entailed by the relation, engendering what Blanchot calls a ‘double distortion’ in non-​homogenous space, or an interruption of its topographical continuity. This move toward double dissymmetry does not so much dilute the radicalness of the Levinasian account, as it does render the demand of responsibility all the more urgent and unremitting, not to mention burdensome, by infinitely multiplying it. By proposing to think the demand of responsibility as running in more than one direction, Blanchot is introducing the possibility that this demand might be ramified still further, in numerous directions at once, impacting a multiplicity of other human beings. By secularizing Levinas’ account, redoubling it, and proposing that we think the demand of responsibility in terms of a fundamental dissymmetry, Blanchot is attempting to open nothing less than a space for rethinking the notion of community itself. It is specifically in relation to this latter move, that I believe our foregoing discussion of the après-​coup becomes so important. We recall, for instance, how Laplanche had sought to develop a reading of Nachträglichkeit that would hold together the bi-​directional temporality implied by Freud’s thought. Laplanche’s name for this particular interpretation of Nachträglichkeit, which thinks both deferred action and retroactivity alongside one another, was afterwardsness. To think the après-​coup in terms of afterwardsness is to think the return of an event which has never been present, and which gives itself only in the form of a translation of a translation (Laplanche refers to this aspect of afterwardsness as retranslation). Laplanche’s provocative suggestion is that this retranslation must also be thought, at the same time, in the opposite direction as retroactively modifying the past through a process he calls detranslation. Laplanche’s argument is that we inevitably modify the enigmatic message in the very process of attempting to decipher, or translate, it. And this, in turn, means that when it inevitably returns yet again, at some point in the future, it will be different still from how we encountered it the previous time. The very process of translating the enigmatic message, a process which inevitably leaves behind an undecipherable remainder, ensures that it will always return yet again, as other, demanding further translations and re-​translations, without end. We remind ourselves of Blanchot’s line, from his fragment on the crypt: “The translation is infinite.”71 What does this mean in terms of double dissymmetry, or in terms of the pivot toward the socio-​political? If responsibility in Blanchot’s text is construed in terms of trauma, and this trauma partakes in the temporality of 71 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 136.

216 CHAPTER 6 afterwardsness, then I want to propose that the same demand of infinite retranslation and detranslation which Laplanche associates with the enigmatic message of seduction might be applied with respect to the enigmatic message of responsibility for the other. As illustrated by the case of the boy at the window, the message arrives only ‘after the fact,’ meaning that it arrives already in the form of a translation of a translation whose full significance cannot be grasped either by the child, or by the maternal figure responsible for its implantation. In coming to decrypt this enigmatic message, the asymmetry of responsibility gives way to double dissymmetry. For what the child comes to discover, in a necessarily imprecise and incomplete way, is that the demand of responsibility which has always already been implanted within him, prior to his earliest experience, prior to all thought, makes him responsible not only for the one who transmitted this enigmatic message to him, but also for all others. Each time the message returns, it returns as other, demanding always to be translated anew both in relation to the others from the past, and the others always yet to come. Likewise, the responsibility to which this message refers ceaselessly imposes itself upon him in a manner that is never identical to itself. What it means to be responsible is never a meaning identical to itself, just as it is never commensurable with any self. Responsibility never balances-​out, or generates any form of reciprocity or symmetry. The take-​away, here, is that responsibility, by virtue of its never-​ending, traumatic return, demands an infinite translation which presses one into service for all others. It is on the basis of the doubly dissymmetrical demand of responsibility, and the traumatic temporality of après-​coup, that we might perhaps come to rethink the very notion of community outside all representation, identity, or integration. 7

Conclusion: the Impossibility of Narcissism?

In closing, I  want to return to a consideration of Lacoue-​Labarthe’s statement: “I’m convinced that what [Blanchot] wanted to destroy is, quite simply, the conventional conception of narcissism.”72 Over the course of the preceding chapters, we have grappled with how to respond to this provocative assertion. What would it mean to destroy a conception of narcissism? Would not any such attempt itself be a narcissistic endeavor? 72

Lacoue-​Labarthe, Ending and Unending Agony: On Maurice Blanchot, 106.

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What about Blanchot’s suggestion that all the positions or being and non-​ being are narcissistic? Does not every action, we might ask, ultimately bear some relation to narcissism, or betray an underlying narcissistic motivation? Self-​preservation and self-​annihilation, as Blanchot notes, both suggest narcissistic motives. Asceticism and altruism are no exception. If the realm of narcissism is indeed coextensive with the realm of the possible, then narcissism’s hold over the psyche, over culture itself, must truly be understood as inescapable, insurmountable, and utterly suffocating. Such was the provocation that led us into the heart of Blanchot’s text. Yet what we discovered, over the course of the preceding account, was that every structure that aspires to totality, omnipotence, or enclosure, always presupposes a point of origination, or a foundational principle, that remains partly unassimilable within the system itself. This is the system’s dark secret, namely, that it draws its resources from something beyond itself, something it can hope, but never fully manage, to control. It is this very outside which serves as the silent, hidden condition of possibility for the inside, allowing the latter to assert itself –​on the condition that it be ruptured in advance of being whole. The very thing that makes the inside possible, in other words, has always already rendered it impossible as a coherent, self-​identical totality. This is what Blanchot calls “the generous effect of the disaster [L’effet généreux du désastre].”73 The disaster ruins, in advance, the very totalities (be they textual, political, egoic, or philosophical) which it conditions. But if this is indeed the case, we had asked, then what is narcissism’s outside? What is the conditioning element without which narcissism is unthinkable, yet in relation to which it has always been preempted and destabilized? If the realm of narcissism is coextensive with the realm of the possible –​and possibility, in turn, is defined in terms of power –​then might this outside mark, in some strange sense, the very point at which power (without being negated) ceases to be power? It now becomes clearer how Blanhcot, in The Writing of the Disaster, conceives of all this. Increasingly, we have found that the outside of narcissism is marked in Blanchot’s text by the recurrence of a certain kind of trauma radically anterior to the installation of any ego or any self. In the same fragment where Blanchot writes of the generous effect of the disaster, one also finds the words: “The trauma of poetry and of philosophy, indistinct one from the ­other.”74 The word ‘trauma’ here is actually an interpolation on the part of the

73 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 116. 74 Ibid., 116.

218 CHAPTER 6 translator, but not an improper one. For the exact phrase Blanchot employs, ‘L’insulte majeure,’ carries a clinical connotation which its author would surely have recognized, given his early medical training. An ‘insult,’ in medical terminology, is the cause of any kind of physical or mental injury. A ‘major insult’ is thus the cause of an injury that can only be understood as severely traumatic in nature. Blanchot’s point is that poetry and philosophy haunted by an ongoing trauma, a recurrent violence, without which they would not have meaning, yet in whose wake they are irreparably ruined. Indeed, I think that something similar might be said with respect to narcissism itself. In a key passage, Blanchot draws a direct parallel between the manner in which the murder of the infans recursively lacerates the lived-​experience that it conditions –​and the way in which le Dire incessantly interrupts the totalizing discourse of le dit. The notion of le Dire, or ‘Saying,’ refers to the act of glorious heralding through which the other is addressed in his singularity, beyond the static conceptuality of the said [le dit]. Blanchot tells us in this passage that the temporality of the child’s murder, a temporality characterized by the return of an anarchic event which has never been present, is a temporality which “destroys (effaces) time.”75 And this effacement of time, this interruption of temporal continuity, is the very effacement or destruction “which has always already been exposed in the precession of Saying [Dire] outside of anything spoken [dit], the sheer saying of writing whereby this effacement, far from effacing itself in its turn, perpetuates itself without end, even in the interruption that is its mark.”76 Just as the impossible yet necessary death of the infans remains outside both the temporality and the language that it inaugurates, haunting and endlessly interrupting the work of narcissistic recuperation –​so, too, does Saying cut-​across the time of dialectical progress, suspending it, and opening discourse to that which remains outside all possibility, all power. Saying marks the limits of every totality, every enclosure. It marks the recurrence of the disaster that forestalls any identification (imaginary or otherwise) between the two Narcissi, keeping Narcissus and anti-​Narcissus from ever merging together or coinciding. The fact that this comparison, which engenders a slippage between the psychoanalytic and the socio-​political dimensions of the text, appears immediately before Blanchot’s ‘(A primal scene?)’ fragment, makes it doubly significant. For what we see here is that the otherness of dying, exemplified by the unaccomplished death of the infans and the vertiginous swoon of anti-​Narcissus,

75 Ibid., 71. 76 Ibid., 71 [trans. modified].

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comes to be subtly transposed by Blanchot into the “death of others … for which we bear the unbearable responsibility.”77 This is the crucial pivot. It suggests that the consolidation of the narcissistic ego has been always already interrupted not only by a fall into the ‘other’ imaginary (à la Ovid), or by an impersonal, archaic dying which cannot be completed (à la Leclaire) –​but also by the manner in which the death of the other person is suffered ‘in us’ before we have even become ourselves. Before I am ever ‘me,’ I bear in advance an impossible burden of responsibility for others. It is responsibility that makes narcissism possible, on the condition that this narcissism be construed from the start as always already interrupted by the impossible. If responsibility makes narcissism possible, it is because it confronts me with an obligation, a demand, so overwhelming and urgent that it conscripts my ‘self’ into service, demanding of me that I act efficaciously to bring aid to the other person. On the other hand, if responsibility has always already rendered narcissism impossible, it is because the ‘self’ which it installs for the sole purpose of giving aid, is ultimately little more than le moi sans moi, a proxy, a simulacrum, a hostage, ‘the other in place of the self.’ Narcissism is impossible to extent that it has been preempted by an invasive demand to which no self can possibly respond, yet to which it must respond. It is the trauma of responsibility, in short, that makes total narcissistic integration, total nationalistic integration, total discursive integration, impossible. This is not a trauma that would afflict, for example, an already-​established ego, wounding a self already constituted; rather, the trauma of responsibility is a trauma that precedes any installation of selfhood, any consolidation of a unified whole, whatsoever. It is utterly disastrous, ruining in advance what has never yet been given. The trauma of responsibility returns ceaselessly from a past which has never been present, shattering the continuity of time, and contesting every form of totality, omnipotence, enclosure, and integration. Moreover, by virtue of the après coup, this traumatic event returns always as different from itself. This means that the nature of our responsibility to the other person  –​a responsibility that is unchosen, pre-​original, impossible to bear –​demands to be translated and retranslated without end, always in relation to the nameless one still to come. I have argued, over the preceding pages, that Blanchot’s account of traumatic responsibility, in The Writing of the Disaster, marks a unique point in his writings where psychoanalysis and philosophy might be seen to contest one another. In light of this, one might read Blanchot’s ‘(A primal scene?)’ as 77 Ibid., 118.

220 CHAPTER 6 a text in which the traumatic irruption of maternal rhythms, long-​since encrypted within a child incapable of deciphering their enigmatic meaning, finally makes the young boy (entering the age of moral maturity) aware of an impossible, yet necessary demand. It is a demand which not only involves a doubly dissymmetrical responsibility which makes him responsible for all others –​but which has also thereby denied him any possibility of death. Occupied by the other from before the very start, he cannot lose what he has never called his own. This is his ‘secret’ which he must continue henceforth to live. To find oneself confronted with the infinite demand of responsibility is to find oneself confronted by the sheer impossibility of dying. If the boy at the window thus smiles through his stream of tears, it is because he senses that the task of infinite translation to which he is consigned by the trauma of responsibility has always already deprived him the gift of real life, much as it will deny him the finality of real death.

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Index Abraham, Nicolas 180–​182 Adler, Alfred 43, 140 Althusser, Louis 5, 11, 17, 26, 59 Antelme, Robert 8, 126, 157 Anzieu, Didier 42, 165–​166 Après-​coup 162, 182–​189, 215, 219 Aristotle 42 Artaud, Antonin 57, 78 Aulagnier, Piera 166n16 Auto-​eroticism 112–​115, 122, 138, 162 Baraitser, Lisa 197 Barthes, Roland 110–​111 Bataille, Georges 2n6, 57 Bergson, Henri 68–​70 Bernheim, Hippolyte 31 Bident, Christophe 1, 132 Bion, Wilfred 196n3 Blanchot, Maurice  Biography 1–​3, 7–​13, 25–​26 Death/​dying 105, 107, 111, 118–​123, 125–​128, 148–​159, 177, 206, 210, 218–​220 Fragmentary 82, 99–​100 Neuter 37–​41, 55–​56, 80, 82, 97, 198 Outside 18–​20, 34, 36–​39, 41, 55–​57, 82, 86–​92, 96, 98–​100, 104, 109–​110, 116, 117, 126–​127, 135, 146, 152, 156–​157, 159, 171–​172, 181, 189, 198, 203–​206, 211, 216–​218 Politics 4–​17, 19, 57–​60, 123–​127, 194–​195, 213, 215–​220 Bleuler, Eugen 66–​67 Body 113–​116, 169–​173, 177, 193, 201, 205–​209, 212 Bostrom, Nick 16 Bowlby, John 163 Breuer, Josef 31 Butler, Judith 170n28 Caillois, Roger 82 Caruth, Cathy 166n17 Char, René 57 Chetrit-​Vatine, Viv. 190–​193 Chodorow, Nancy 191n100 Cixous, Hélène 132

Charcot, Jean-​Martin 31 Claude, Henri 2 Clinical psychiatry 62, 65–​73, 81–​85 Communist Party 5, 7, 9, 11, 14n35, 26 Copernicus 17–​18, 41–​42, 162, 166, 167 Crypt 179–​182, 188–​189, 213, 216 Cyr, Myriam 130 Death drive 1, 29, 100, 120, 128, 131, 146, 154–​158 Delay, Jean 70 Deleuze, Gilles 42–​43, 99, 169n24 Derrida, Jacques 5, 25, 37, 64, 76–​80, 86, 125, 135, 145, 171, 180–​182, 187 Desire 50, 51–​55, 57, 88, 106–​107, 116, 119, 120, 121, 150, 152, 153, 155, 157, 205 Descartes, René 16, 83 Dialectic 4, 54–​55, 98–​99, 189, 218 Dionysus 91–​93, 95, 99 Duras, Marguerite 8, 57 Ego psychology 43–​45, 48 Ellis, Havelock 111 Eternal return 93–​98 Ey, Henri 2, 70 Ferenczi, Sándor 42, 121, 164–​165, 180, 190, 200 Fliess, Wilhelm 27, 28, 138–​139 Foucault, Michel 5, 19, 26, 61, 82–​89, 126, 145–​146, 170 Freud, Anna 43 Freud, Sigmund 5, 6, 16–​19, 25–​29, 31–​33, 36, 43, 49, 52, 55, 57, 69, 85–​87, 111–​114, 116–​119, 122–​123, 127, 130–​131, 136–​146, 155, 158, 162–​163, 182–​185, 187, 200, 204–​205, 215 Gaulle, Charles de 7, 8, 13, 25, 124 Goethe, J.W. von 106 Green, André 20, 120, 137, 201–​203 Grunberger, Béla 111 Guenther, Lisa 193–​194 Hallucination 199–​203 Hartmann, Heinz 43–​45, 116

230 Index Hegel, G.W.F. 34, 42, 54, 103, 105, 117, 124–​125, 127, 150, 155, 173, 202 Heidegger, Martin 87n66, 173, 178 Heraclitus 210–​211 Hilflösigkeit 113, 115, 138, 147, 163, 190–​191 Hölderlin, Friedrich 62–​63, 67, 73–​78, 92–​93, 94, 96, 134 Huffer, Lynne 197 Jackson, J.H. 70 Janet, Pierre 69–​70 Jaspers, Karl 63, 71–​79 Jonas, Hans 190 Jouve, Pierre Jean 63 Jung, Carl 42, 43, 66, 69–​70, 140–​141 Kafka, Franz 57 Kant, Immanuel 135, 204–​205, 208 Klein, Melanie 43n, 122 Klossowski, Pierre 19, 26, 63, 94–​96 Kojève, Alexandre 54–​55, 150 Kolk, Besel van der 168–​169 Kraepelin, Emil 65–​67, 71 Kristeva, Julia 20, 199, 207–​213 Lacan, Jacques 1, 9n20, 19, 26–​28, 44–​60, 115–​118, 122, 132, 153, 170, 182, 184, 187, 190, 199, 202–​209 Lacoue-​Labarthe, Ph. 2, 103, 132–​133, 135, 154, 157, 187 Legendre, Pierre 105 Lange, Wilhelm 73n25 Language 48–​50, 56, 90–​91, 96, 99, 154, 168–​169, 175–​180, 191–​192, 203–​204, 206–​207, 209, 211–​212 Laplanche, Jean 18, 42, 64, 76–​79, 118, 122, 143, 162–​168, 171, 179, 181–​182, 185–​191, 193, 195–​196, 215–​216 Laporte, Roger 134 Leclaire, Serge 20, 128, 131, 146, 149–​154, 158, 202, 219 Levinas, Emmanuel 20, 25, 57, 162, 173–​179, 193–​194, 196–​197, 198n11, 213–​215 Lévi-​Strauss, Claude 48 Lombroso, Cesare 68 Madness 61–​100, 109, 114 Magnan, Valentin 67n12 Mannoni, Maud 9n20

Marx, Karl 12, 16, 17, 19 Marxism 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 26, 59–​60 Mascolo, Dionys 8, 9, 11 Mauss, Marcel 48 Miller, Jacques-​Alain 58 Mirror stage 115–​118 Moses 193–​194 Mother 112n25, 147, 163–​167, 187, 190–​197, 199, 201, 203, 205, 207–​209, 211–​213, 216, 220 Nacht, Sacha 45–​46 Narcissism 17, 20, 50, 100, 103–​128, 136, 211, 216–​220 Art and 108–​109 Primary 112–​123, 150, 151, 203 Secondary 112, 114 Politics and 123–​127, 219 Nietzsche, Friedrich 26, 63–​64, 93, 95–​96, 134 Nirvana principle 119–​120, 122n52 Novalis 121 Object relations 43n62 Oedipus complex 42, 138, 186, 188 Ontogenesis 137, 143–​144 Orpheus 88, 197 Ovid 20, 104, 107, 109–​110, 117–​118, 123, 127, 136, 153, 219 Pankejeff, Sergei 139–​140, 144–​145, 197 Pavlov, Ivan 5 Phantasy 140–​144 Phylogenesis 142–​144 Pinel, Philippe 84–​85 Plato 207–​208 Poe, Edgar Allan 153 Poetics 73–​81, 106–​107, 110–​111 Pontalis, J.B. 9n20, 115, 143, 182, 185 Possoz, Pascal 1, 103, 154 Primal scenes 20, 100, 128, 131–​137, 139–​146, 154, 158–​159, 180, 188–​189, 195, 197–​199, 207, 211, 212, 218–​220 Psychoanalysis 1, 3, 4, 6–​7, 15, 19, 25, 28, 33, 48, 57–​60, 64, 80, 82, 85–​86, 97, 99, 103, 131, 137, 162, 180, 182, 200, 204, 219 Authority 28, 30–​33, 46–​47, 59–​60, 62, 81, 98–​99 Culture and 44–​45

231

Index History 26–​28, 41–​47, 138, 183n81 Hypnotism 29–​32 Marxism and 5, 17–​19, 57–​58 Formalism 45–​47 Science and 46, 58–​59 Skepticism 17 Ptolemy 41–​42, 44, 166 Rank, Otto 196n3 Relationality 14–​15, 19, 36, 55–​56, 173–​179, 186–​195, 213–​216 Responsibility 160–​162, 172–​179, 188–​196, 206, 213, 216, 219–​220 Rhythm 198–​199, 207 Rich, Adrienne 191n100 Rilke, Rainer Maria 129, 156 Rolland, Romain 120 Rollin, Denise 2n6 Rousseau, J.J. 112n24 Ruddick, Sara 191n100 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 9n20, 10n22, 26 Saussure, Ferdinand 49

Schlegel, Wilhelm 106–​107, 110 Schopenhauer, A. 121 Seduction theory 28, 42, 138, 162–​168, 189 Simulacra 95, 108–​110, 117, 181, 219 Speech 31–​41, 47, 49–​53, 56, 59 Temporality 36, 57, 82, 92–​99, 109–​110, 136, 151–​152, 182–​189, 215–​216, 218 Torok, Maria 180–​182 Transference 31–​33, 44, 116, 131, 140, 147, 149 Trauma 100, 137–​139, 159, 162–​169, 172, 175, 177, 182–​189, 196, 200, 202, 205–​206, 212, 215, 217–​220 Tuke, William 84 Unconscious 18, 26, 49–​56, 58, 166–​167, 170, 182, 190, 192 Wallon, Henri 115 Weber, Max 161n6 Winnicott, D.W. 20, 128, 131, 146–​149, 201–​202