blanchot and heidegger on death

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/156916408X389640

Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 6998 www.brill.nl/rp

R e s e a r c hi n

P h e n o m e n o l o g y

Dead Transcendence: Blanchot, Heidegger, and the Reverse of Language

William S. AllenUniversity of Leeds

AbstractIn this essay I will examine the development of the notion of transcendence in Blanchots early critical writings. Doing so indicates the radical way that Blanchot recon gures this central onto-logical and theological term by way of his readings of the literary use of language. In turn this exposes the essential relation between nitude and literature, something which the second part of the essay will examine by way of Heideggers study of the myth of Er.

KeywordsBlanchot, Heidegger, anguish, ambiguity, transdescendence

Th e central intuition that guides this work is that there is in Maurice Blan-chots earliest critical works evidence of all the major literary and philosophical issues that he will study across his career. Th e signi cance of this point is that it demonstrates that Blanchots work is guided from the very beginning by a set of concerns that he develops persistently and autonomously and that, as a result, despite the considerable overlap that his thinking has with that of Bataille and, to a much lesser extent, Levinas, his writings must be considered as an independent and original development in French thought. Th e evidence for this intuition lies in the pages of his rst critical collection, Faux pas, which was published in 1943 and largely consists of articles written over the previous two years. Th e climate of French philosophy at this time was heavily in u-enced by Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger, but what is interesting is the manner in which Blanchots writings develop within the pur-view of these in uences without directly following any of them. Signi cantly, this independence arises because Blanchot approaches philosophy by way of literature, with which he has a profoundly singular relation, rather than treating philosophical problems directly, and so issues that he may nd in the

70 W. S. Allen / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 6998

works of these philosophers are refracted through the lens of literature, which in turn then casts a strange light back upon those philosophical problems. To pinpoint this idiosyncratic transformation, I will focus on the issue of the nature of transcendence, which was much discussed at the time when Faux pas was being written and which draws out the relation between philosophy and theology, and also politics. What is compelling about Blanchots response to this problem is the way that he transforms it by reading it in terms of litera-ture, but doing so does not reduce its philosophical or theological complexity; instead, literature seems to make the issue of transcendence more profound by problematizing the nature of the limit that is seemingly being overstepped.

I will begin by tracing the development of Blanchots earliest thoughts on this issue through three major essays from the years 194145; at each stage in this development Blanchots writings draw out di erent aspects of the relation of language to its limits that demonstrate the peculiarity of this relation. What repeatedly arises from these examinations is the evasive nature of the limits of language, which persist and yet remain intangible, creating a pressure that destabilizes any establishment of meaning, thereby propelling language into an ambivalence without end. It becomes helpful in this regard to take up a term that Jean Wahl coined and that was later used by Levinas, that is, trans-descendence, which begins to concretize some of the disturbing implications of a step beyond nitude that recoils on itself, leading to an inner descent into the enigma of what there is. Th e anguish that arises from this experience, which was so central to Batailles work of the same period, becomes pivotal for how Blanchot understands the particular demands that take e ect for the writer involved in such a descent of language, which focus on the necessity and yet impossibility of trying to respond to this enigma.

Th e problem of how to respond is also the problem that Bataille studied under the name of communication, and as I will show, Blanchots analysis of the transdescendence of the word in the literary indicates that its communica-tion occurs through its reversal, as the word of transdescendence; and to pursue this aporetic chance further, in the second part of this paper I will turn to Heidegger. In the winter of 194243, which is to say, contemporaneous with Blanchots writing of Faux pas, Heidegger taught a course on Parmenides poem to the goddess in which he attempted to clarify some aspects of the ancient Greek experience of . Th is enquiry therefore focused on what Heidegger thought would be the originary experience of concealment and unconcealment for the ancient Greeks and on how this dyad would manifest itself. At the center of this exploration, he placed a reading of the myth of Er from the , in which the tale of one who has passed beyond the limits

W. S. Allen / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 6998 71

of human experience is somehow imparted within the limits of human lan-guage. In this way Heidegger comes to a signi cant understanding of how the nature of in its manifoldness is expressed through the word of , which as Er demonstrates is the word of transdescendence. Th is then entails a renewed understanding of the speci c role that the literary plays in relation to the limits of philosophy and ontology, and thus the manner in which it calls into question the nature of nitude and transcendence.

I. Th e Terror in Literature

Blanchots rst major piece of criticism, his review of Jean Paulhans Les Fleurs de Tarbes, ou la terreur dans les lettres, initially appeared as a series of three arti-cles in the Journal des dbats in October, November, and December of 1941. Th e following year these articles were gathered into a single volume and pub-lished under the title of Comment la littrature est-elle possible? Blanchot then went on to include a reduced version of this text in Faux pas in 1943. Th e focus of this key work is signalled by Blanchot in the rst sentence of the review: We read the book that Jean Paulhan has just devoted to literature and language, Les Fleurs de Tarbes, with a strange feeling. Strange is an odd word to associate with reading, for ordinarily reading is the most straightforward and unprob-lematic activity, but as Blanchot has indicated, the origin of this strange feeling comes from the ambiguity of reading a book devoted to literature and lan-guage. Th is is the crux of Paulhans argument: that there is an uncanny and undecidable ambiguity in language that prevents us from being able to de ni-tively determine a text as either literary or non-literary, something that is echoed in the doubling of his title, which holds both the rhetorical trope of using a parable as an example and the apparently explicit mode of direct presentation.

Much has been written about the turbid atmosphere of French cultural and political thinking in the 1930s, and Paulhans book is a powerful, if indirect, commentary on these debates. But the signi cance it held for Blanchot arises from his own ambiguous pursuit of language in the same period, a point he remarked upon some thirty years later in noting the di erence between his practice of writing ction at night and political journalism during the day, with the certainty that in writing he was putting precisely this certainty between parentheses, including the certainty of himself as a subject of writing.1 If it is

1) Maurice Blanchot, Le Pas au-del (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 9. For non-English texts in this article, all translations are mine, except where stated otherwise.


possible to see this suspension of certainty as a comment not only on the self-relation of the literary but also on its relation to the politicalhow writing might suspend the meaning of language, and perhaps pre-eminently the mean-ing of political language, and the e ects that this might havethen it is just as signi cant to consider the necessity behind Blanchots way of writing in this manner: why and how he was able to conduct himself, at least up to a certain point, along two fronts with seemingly opposing aims. Whether indeed his nationalist polemics and literary investigations arose out of a concerted e ort to pursue the nature and relation of language, which only becomes more involved as he turns to criticism.

For if his critical writings were in part an attempt to understand what was under way within his own literary works, then they must also take into account the relation of the literary to the political, which his writing was increasingly placing between parentheses. In doing so it becomes possible to see that the development of Blanchots writings in the 1930s is less divided than it may appear and that his early critical works draw together the demands of the political and the poetic, not to sublate them in criticism, but to persistently interrogate their possibility as aspects of the demands that language places on our relations to the world. Th is is evidence of the indirection of Blanchots writing, for although he abandoned direct political engagement after 1937 and devoted himself wholly to the literary (until the late 1950s), it is not pos-sible to see his writings from then on as abstracted from worldly concerns, since the nature of the literary bears ambiguously on the relation of language, something Les Fleurs de Tarbes directly addresses.

Paulhans text seeks to settle a point about the development of French literature since the Revolution, whose history he feels to have been divided between two camps: that of the classical and the revolutionary, or as he describes it: Rhetoric and Terror. Taking his cue partly from Kojves reading of Hegel and applying it to the development of literature from the Romantics to the Surrealists, Paulhan understands Terror as that mode of rigorous cre-ative purity that seeks to eradicate all conventional modes of literary expres-sion because of their counter-revolutionary in uence.2 Hence the opposition of Terror to Rhetoric, which is that school of literature that remains shackled to clichs and traditional styles; but Paulhans aim is not only to isolate this

2) Michael Syrotinski, Defying Gravity: Jean Paulhans Interventions in Twentieth-Century French Intellectual History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 77104, and Kevin Newmark, Practically Impossible: Jean Paulhan and Post-Romantic Irony, Parallax 4 (1998): 6578, o er invaluable guides to Blanchots readings of Paulhan.


terrorist strand but also to expose its contradictions and shortcomings. How-ever, as Blanchot remarks, it is precisely here that our reading becomes trou-bled. I will quote the passage at length to indicate how Blanchots reading and writing negotiate this strangeness:

We enter unwarily into the analyses he formulates, not really sensing the perils towards which the charming, precise sentences, their tight construction a guarantee of safety and order, are precipitated. Everything about it is clear, ingenious, straightforward. Just as the words follow on e ortlessly from one another, so a series of sound reasons is elaborated, which seems intended to dispel equivocations and to ensure that any writer is able to pro-ceed with his writing. We calmly witness the disempowering of a certain critical concep-tion, whose defeat, it seems, we can scarcely regret, since it was by nature hostile to conventions and rules. However, an initial feeling of uneasiness begins to emerge. Th e movement of the thought we would like to follow, all the while remaining marvellously coherent and regular, reveals at the same time a number of discontinuities and allusions, whose meaning is somewhat threatening. Where is this author, who appeared to be quietly carrying out his police duty with exquisite artfulness, taking us? Is he not talking about something other than what he was supposed to be saying? Could there be, hidden within his refutations and arguments, a kind of infernal machine which, invisible today, will one day explode, overwhelming literature and rendering its use impossible? Th is is the anxiety that Jean Paulhan is able to produce. We read his book unsuspectingly, but when we reach the end, we suddenly see that he has put into question not only a certain critical concep-tion, not only all of literature, but also the mind, its powers and means, and we look back in horror at the abyss we have just crossedbut have we really gone over it?and which a succession of veils had skilfully hidden from us as we crossed over.3

Blanchot begins by pointing out the unremarkable nature of Paulhans writ-ing: the sentences proceed in a clear and precise manner and in doing so the argument develops soundly, dispelling equivocations. Th ere is a sense of order and security to the work, but in describing it a sense of unease arises; a wari-ness that was not initially present becomes more apparent as Blanchot starts to generalize the point of Paulhans argument. Th en, as Kafka would say, the disaster (Unglck) happens, for attendant upon this rising unease we start to see gaps in the argument, and in describing them they appear to become abyssal; the order and security we had rst observed dissolves and instead we nd ourselves before an alien and forbidding uncertainty.4 It is not that we

3) Blanchot, Comment la littrature est-elle possible? (Paris: Jos Corti, 1942), 910; translated by Michael Syrotinski as How is Literature Possible? in Th e Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 49. Hereafter cited as CLP, followed by French/English pagination. 4) Th e citation from Kafkas story on the hunter Gracchus is of critical importance for Blanchot as it highlights the role of chance in the faux pas of dying, see La lecture de Kafka, in La Part


have been launched into an incoherent and eccentric text, for as Blanchot insists, the careful ordering of sentences is still present but now we nd this disturbing, for we are aware of its lack of foundation and so we become plagued by doubts: are we being deceived? Are we being led to a point of insta-bility? What prevents this disruption a ecting everything? Once the radical groundlessness of the argument has been exposed, it is uncontainable and the illusion of security that had obscured it cannot be replaced. And this is still the rst paragraph of the review; without holding back Blanchot has propelled us directly into the heart of the anxiety that literature carries with it.

Th is double-sided strategy of generalization and radicalization is character-istic of many of Blanchots critical writings, but as this paragraph has shown, it is conducted in the most inconspicuous manner.5 Blanchots language could hardly be simpler, and yet the e ect of its seeming transparency is all the more startling as a result, such that when we are told of this anxiety that haunts lit-erature we already have before us an instance of its disclosure. But Blanchots aim is not to be sensational, for this issue has arisen out of Paulhans attempt to say something profound about the nature of literature and its relation to ordinary language. And in turning from political journalism to ction himself, there could hardly be a more pressing concern for Blanchot, so what is at stake in this unsettling ambiguity?

For Paulhan, the struggle of Terror in literature is the struggle for purity, originality, and control: a writer should not follow received styles and conven-tions but should rigorously oppose them so as to impose the pure voice of his own thoughts. But this struggle would appear doomed, for conventional

du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 15; translated by Charlotte Mandell as Reading Kafka, in Th e Work of Fire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 7; translations modi ed. Hereafter cited as PF. However, the line in question appears not to be Kafkas but Max Brods: When Der Jger Gracchus rst appeared in the collection of posthumous fragments edited by Brod in 1931, the story contained the following line spoken by Gracchus: Dann geschah das Unglck. But the critical edition of Kafkas writings indicates that not only was this story itself a construction of Brods, it being an amalgamation of four separate and untitled fragments, but also that the line spoken by Gracchus was in fact left incomplete, so that it only reads, Dann geschah . . .. Th is only emphasizes the point made by Blanchot that the disaster is an aporia of language. See Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente I, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1993), 313; see Th e Hunter Gracchus, in Kafka, Th e Great Wall of China and Other Short Works, trans. Malcolm Pasley (London: Penguin, 1991), 51.5) Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997), 74: As with the work of other writers, Blanchots strategy is twofold: it is rst to generalise the essential proposi-tion of the text to its fullest possible extent; and second to radicalise that argument to the point where it becomes consumed by its own impossibility.


or commonplace language cannot be removed so easily, as it is inherently ambiguous, since in encountering a text that uses commonplaces (and all nec-essarily do), it is not possible to know whether they are being used critically or uncritically, and so the problem for the terrorist writer lies in the issue of how, and how far, he should attempt to control the text. But for the reader these attempts only increase the ambiguity of language, for he now stumbles over every word, unsure if it is meant to be a clich or an innovation and, conse-quently, nds himself anxious and uncertain about the nature of the text as a whole. But if the writer attempts to respond to this problem by reducing the ambiguity of commonplaces, by agreeing to designate them in advance and thereby making them more common, then, as Paulhan concludes, we are faced with a further ambiguity, for is the text then a reinvented Rhetoric or perfected Terror? But if this is the conclusion, then how is literature possible? If the pure expression of literary revolution inevitably leads to reinvented clich, then what are the conditions upon which literature is possible? As Blanchot makes clear, this Kantian turn that Paulhan has uncovered opens the question of literature up to the most extreme human darkness, for the ambiguity of language touches upon the nature and limits of our existence, which is what confronts any attempt to understand the nature of writing (CLP 15/53).

Th is, however, is only the rst book, as Blanchot calls it, the apparent book, for beneath what we have read, is there not another reading that our unease has remarked? Indeed it is through this anxiety that we are able to attest to a hidden element to Paulhans work, since the initial development of the argument, as we have seen, leaves nothing remarkable apart from a certain unease as to the status of Paulhans own position: what kind of text is Les Fleurs de Tarbes, which appears to end by disavowing itself? So, as Blanchot now writes, we return to the beginning and this time attempt to read more criti-cally, and in doing so we nd that Terror is not so easily discussed for it con-ceals an apparently unbridgeable division between those writers who want to eradicate commonplaces and thereby assert themselves over language, making of it the transparent expression of thought, and those who wish instead to remove themselves from common language entirely and discover the mode in which language communicates itself. Despite this profound division both of these methods lead the terrorist writer to become more concerned with language rather than less; whereas he may have begun by espousing the goal of asserting the pure creativity of thought over language, he ends up becoming evermore strongly governed by language the more he tries to extricate himself from it. What began as a distrust or even hatred of language quickly becomes an obsession, leading the writer to the point of being unable to say anything


without coming up against an unavoidable ambiguity where any attempt to control the use of language seems perpetually at risk of undermining itself: this is the terror in literature (from the Latin terrere meaning to tremble).

Six years later, in his politically-charged essay on the possibility of literature as action, this Terror will return as Blanchot nds its undermining of meaning at the source of the two slopes of literature, for each approachexpression or communication, prose or poetryinevitably drifts towards its other because each is divided within itself, and so each tends towards an impasse (PF 334/332). Hence, within his review of Paulhan, Blanchot can conclude by noting how this oscillating or trembling ambiguity opens onto an impossibil-ity that is the basic characteristic of literature as such, but if this is the case, the central question again arises: how is literature possible if all modes lead to its ruin?

Blanchots answer is, in short, that it is out of this ruin that there is litera-ture; the illusory point of departure that leads literature either by eradication or avoidance of commonplaces to an aporia is precisely the faux pas by which literature occurs. Th is is not a reassuring conclusion, for it severely curtails the writers activities by grounding his work in the failure of his intentions, something that has hovered on the edge of Paulhans own text. But to say that the possibility of literature lies in its impossibilityinsofar as the genuinely original text only arises from its lack of originality, the purity of its creativity from impurity and impotencemeans that this terrible ambiguity within lit-erature is the mark not only of its paradoxical essence but also the undecidable response of the reader, who is never able to ascertain the status of what he is reading. Th e di culties of reading that Blanchot has introduced us to have led to the di culties of writing as Paulhan has described, in which the essential ambiguity of language leads to a fundamental anxiety in both the writer, who now does not know how to write, and the reader, who now does not know how to read. But what does this relation between ambiguity and anxiety reveal?

II. Th e Transdescendence of the Word

According to Kevin Hart, taking up a line from Lcriture du dsastre, tran-scendence persists for Blanchot only in a negative form, that is, as transde-scendence.6 Th is would seem to be con rmed by an earlier line that Hart does

6) Kevin Hart, From the Star to the Disaster, Paragraph 30, no. 3 (2007): 93. Th e passage Hart


not mention where transcendence is glossed as transdescendence: according to Levinas designation, the other [autre] replaces the Same, as the Same sub-stitutes itself for the Other [Autre], it is henceforth in mea me without me [un moi sans moi]that the traits of transcendence (of a transdescendence) mark themselves, a point unfortunately lost in Ann Smocks translation that reads transdescendence simply as transcendence (ED 37/19). Moreover, the transition from the rst version of this fragment in Discours sur la patience to its later inclusion in Lcriture du dsastre involves the notable omission of a question mark placed after transdescendence, (of a transdescendence?), suggesting that it has become a more certain point of paraphrase: transcen-dence, that is, transdescendence.7 However, this would seem to be the only occasion when Blanchot uses Wahls terminology; and the fact that it is in the context of a discussion of Levinas, who had adopted Wahls terms, would appear to explain this.

Indeed, Blanchot reiterates this point more explicitly a few years later by stating that in Levinas understanding of transcendence, there is a reference to Wahls ideas about the transcendence of transcendence, which Wahl had thought was the only way for there to be a transcendence that was not reduced to either abstraction or vacuity and which would entail transcendence tran-scending itself by turning back to immanence, which, as Blanchot notes, is the basis for Levinas ideas about transcendence within immanence.8 It is this reversion that Wahl called transdescendence, which is a chthonic rather than an ethereal transcendence (which Wahl termed transascendence, by way of contrast); that is, it returns to immanence rather than departing from it and, in doing so, hollows it out from within, opening up an abyssal transcendence that descends in nitely inside it.9 Blanchot himself makes use of many phrases

is referring to is in Blanchot, Lcriture du dsastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 143; translated by Ann Smock as Th e Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 91; translations modi ed. Hereafter cited as ED, giving rst French then English page numbers.7) Blanchot, Discours sur la patience (en marges des livres dEmmanuel Levinas), Le Nouveau Commerce 3031 (1975): 31.8) Blanchot, Notre compagne clandestine, in Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Franois Laruelle (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1980), 85.9) Jean Wahl, Sur lide de transcendance, in Existence humaine et transcendance (Neuchtel: ditions de la Baconnire, 1944), 3456. It should be pointed out that Wahls ideas concerning a transformation of transcendence were not thought through particularly well, and that the respondents to his 1937 lecture, who included Heidegger and Levinas, as well as Jaspers, Lwith, and Marcel, were especially critical of this. Nevertheless, Levinas continued to use the terms transascendence and transdescendence, most signi cantly in Totalit et in ni, which was dedi-cated to Wahl, where he makes clear his view that transcendence is necessarily transascendence


to indicate a similar transformation of transcendence, most pointedly perhaps with his use of dead transcendence in 1945 in his rst discussion of Kafka, but Harts point would seem to hold because of the consistently atheistic read-ing of transcendence that Blanchot pursues; however, what is intriguing is the possible relation of Blanchots ideas to Wahls more speci c rendering of the problem.

Wahls ideas on transcendence arose from a lecture he gave in 1937 in which he was concerned with the possibility of adapting Kierkegaards thinking to a non-religious context, thus converting the step beyond of transcendence into something that returned it to the world. Th is problem is quite evident in Blanchots early writings, as Faux pas begins with several essays on the nature and limits of mystical language, albeit ones that are ltered through the lens of his discussions with Bataille. Th is suggests that Blanchot was focusing on these issues before and without Levinas in uenceLevinas rst uses trans-descendence in 1948 in La ralit et son ombre and was imprisoned in a Nazi labour camp between 1940 and 1945. Not only does this show an inde-pendent philosophical perspective developing in Blanchots earliest works, which will remain consistent over the rest of his career, but also it indicates the centrality of certain Kierkegaardian themes to his thinking, speci cally his insistence that the writer has a privileged relation to anxiety or anguish (angoisse), which is the stepping stone to a recon gured transcendence.10 It is anguish that leads to the transformation of transcendence, as Wahl had claimed, but as Blanchot then adds, in a formulation on which the philo-sophical signi cance of his work stands, it is by way of writing that there is anguish, thereby exposing the fact that it is by way of writing that the borders of the nite become ambiguous, something that Derridas more extensive studies will pursue later on.

since it only occurs by way of the in nite demands of the other, which calls me outwards and upwards from myself. Th is follows from the point made earlier in La ralit et son ombre where transdescendence is understood solely in terms of the degradation of the truth of being in art. Th is division of transcendence along ethical and aesthetic lines is a characteristically Levinasian point, which the current discussion of Blanchot will begin to put in question. While it is true that Levinas does suggest in his later works that the call of illeity generates an abyssal recoil into the il y a (supporting Blanchots remark about transdescendence), such that the two movements are reciprocally tied, the issue remains as to the role of language in this relation and how it a ects the nature of transcendence.10) In a series of letters written to Mark C. Taylor, Blanchot con rmed the importance of Kierke-gaard for the development of his thinking; see Taylor, Withdrawal, in Nowhere Without No: In Memory of Maurice Blanchot, ed. Kevin Hart (Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2003), 2526.


To explore the development of this philosophical innovation, I will read through the opening essay of Faux pas, which indicates how the problems of transcendence are focused to an extraordinary degree by the study of writing, while also drawing out the manner in which transcendence itself is reformed and the essential role that writing plays in this. When Faux pas was published in November 1943, Blanchot grouped his essays into separate digressions on poetry, the novel, and other topics, but the rst section that preceded these digressions consisted of more theoretical or philosophical articles thematically joined under the title of De langoisse au langage.11 Th e essay that opened this section, and thus introduced the collection, was left untitled but has become known by its somewhat programmatic title, and in it Blanchot took up the aporetic relation of the writer to language that was left hanging at the end of his reading of Paulhan and situated it within the major critical debates of the time. Consequently, there is in Blanchots opening essay of Faux pas a decisive rejection of the Sartrean reading of existence in favor of a version much closer to Batailles, but one that also carries on his own concerns with the nature of literature that had surfaced in his reading of Paulhan. In doing so, Blanchot returns directly to the problem at the end of Comment la littra-ture est-elle possible? by addressing the traditional and parodic image of the writer driven to anguish by the failure of language who yet writes I am alone.

Retrospectively, the distance from Levinas thought could hardly be more marked than it is in this opening, for it is not only with a concern with soli-tude that Blanchot begins, but also with the solitude of the writer, the one whose concern with language only makes this solitude more inescapable. While this starting place indicates Blanchots engagement with the contempo-rary Kierkegaardian vogue, it also shows the singular way in which his own interests have transformed the notion of anguish into something peculiarly

11) Christophe Bident points out that Blanchots initial title for Faux pas was Digressions, see Maurice Blanchot: Partenaire invisible (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1998), 225. Blanchot later recalled how the volume was produced by accident rather than intention, since he had no copies of his articles himselfthey had however been gathered up by Dionys Mascolo, something Blanchot had discovered with shock and some annoyanceand that consequently he felt that the collection was truly a faux pas, which in French has the more literal meaning of a mis-step, rather than the English usage of it for a social mistake; see Pour lamiti (Paris: Fourbis, 1996), 912. In saying as much he would seem to be limiting the extent to which he may be held responsible for the existence of the book and for the selection of the pieces it contains, which includes a rather mismatched array of articles on gures from the extremes of French politics. However, this also means that the opening essay assumes a much stronger position, as it is seem-ingly the only piece written explicitly with the book in mind.


linguistic, which carries profound ontological implications. For the point at which Blanchot begins is that of the impossibility of locating the writers pres-ence: in writing I am alone, the writer appears to be claiming a position out-side the world that his words seem to tacitly deny. But this expression does not simply remove him from his isolation, since by way of his writing he is placed in contact with that which only intensi es his solitude while decreasing its meaning, hence he remains outside, but the site of this outside is now indeterminable, for although he is not here, neither is he there. Th is might seem absurdly comical were it not for the fact that it is the writers existence as a human and as a user of language that is caught in this double bind, which is why it is the site of anguish. To be alone would be to be extracted from society, but the writer who writes I am alone cannot be so easily de ned, as language inevitably places him back within the borders of the cultural while at the same time rendering those borders indeterminate. It is this dislocation that the writers anguish re ects, for if he is within the borders of the social at the same time as being without, then he is neither, and so he nds himself without a rm loca-tion or relation. Th us the solitude that he feels is of this singular dislocation, which only becomes more unbearable the more he seeks to shake it o .

Th is is no longer the angst of Kierkegaard or Heidegger, but something altogether stranger and more profound, something Blanchot had begun to explore in his discussions with Bataille about the possibilities of an a-theological mysticism, an experience of non-experience, which Bataille sought in many areas of non-knowledge, but particularly for Blanchot in the occurrence of certain slipping words like alone that appear to contest themselves.12 Th at is, they appear and contest that appearance in the same moment thereby slip-ping between meaning and nonsense, presence and absence, and as Blanchot notes in the rst paragraph of Faux pas these aporias of language are rarely taken seriously.13 Blanchots interest in the possibility of a mystical atheism is an important aspect of his thought, as is shown in a number of pieces in Faux pas and in his later writings, but it di ers from Batailles thinking over the implications of certain mystical writings for the nature and status of a lan-guage that takes place neither here nor beyond, neither within nor without. Equally, this dislocation begins to resemble Wahls idea of a secularized tran-

12) Georges Bataille, LExprience intrieure (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 28; translated by Leslie Anne Boldt as Inner Experience (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 16. Hereafter cited as EI, giving French then English page numbers.13) Blanchot, Faux pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 9; translated by Charlotte Mandell as Faux Pas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 1; translations modi ed. Hereafter cited as FP, fol-lowed by French then English page numbers.


scendence that would transcend itself in immanence, a movement that Blan-chot explicitly refers to in an article on Meister Eckhart that follows the two opening pieces on Kierkegaard (FP 38/27).14

Returning to the problem of the solitary writer, one of the reasons that the aporias of his language are disregarded is that their depth is ignored, for if we believe that the ambivalence of his language is simply part of his more or less respected craft, then it becomes easy to dismiss either his experience or his writing: If we admire the artistry of his language, then its ambivalence is just part of its capacity to transform misery into beauty, or alternatively, if we regard the elusiveness of his language as evidence of its distance from truth, then his attempted expressions of solitude are merely further con rmations of this falsehood. If the apparent contradiction between experience and expression is even noticed, then too often it is displaced into one of these two responses as a direct result of the inability to appreciate how a writer relates to their lan-guage. Language does not simply allow a writer to describe or express his ideas and experiences, as it is not a tool that is separable from his life; rather, language is the writers experience. In emphasizing this point Blanchot is demonstrat-ing how intimately language is tied to existence and, consequently, how di -cult it is to explicate its anguish either philosophically or ontologically. Th is is indicated by the fact that whether the writer writes well or poorly, the statement concerning his solitude is still inadequate, and this only increases his isolation, because the writer is not free to be alone without expressing that he is (FP 10/2). Th is deceptively simple phrase conveys an enormous amount, for it suggests that the writer raises to an acute degree the instability of an exis-tence that is always accompanied by its expression; as it never is without also saying as much, it never speaks without also being. Th e correlation of language and being, which is ontology, is never given, let alone perfect, as it is always contesting itself by way of the disjunction and di erence between language and being. Th is is the freedom without freedom of the writers existence, the play of its disconnection that uncovers the straits of its anguish and its chance.

Th is is the point that appears to complicate the possibility of Levinas thought, since solitude is that which can never be excluded even if it can also never arise as such, for writing conveys its own isolation just as it places this under extraordinary conditions of uncertainty, which means that the relation

14) Th e correlation between Blanchots writings and Wahls ideas was su ciently clear for Sartre to have pointed it out in his dismissive review of Aminadab in 1943: the wisdom of Blanchot seems to belong to those transdescendences of which Jean Wahl has spoken in relation to Heidegger, see, J.-P. Sartre, Situations 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 138.


to the other is always complicated to an impossible degree by this uncertainty. For while the writer is in thrall to writing, he is subject to an extreme onto-theological destitution, which means that although he is not free to be alone this does not mean that there is an other that can guarantee his writing instead, and so the expression that is drawn from him is pronounced under an emphat-ically starless sky. Indeed, for Blanchot, it is solely by way of this dis-astrous writing that the writer can respond to his anguish, for in doing so he coin-cides best with the nothingness without expression that he has become (ibid.). Th at is, it is only in its failure to transcend its situation that writing converges on the impossible isolation that the writer has entered, an isolation that pro-vokes and inhibits writing by way of the silence that overwhelms it.

In lines that directly recall Samuel Becketts conversations with Georges Duthuit, which appeared six years later, but which also suggest an awareness of Eckhartian apophasis, Blanchot summarizes this opening section by stating that the writer nds himself in this more and more comical condition of hav-ing nothing to write, of having no means to write it and of being constrained by an extreme necessity of always writing it.15 Th is also resonates with Mal-larms desire for a poetry of Nothingness, but crucially the necessity of having to write nothing does not sublate it into a concept, since as Blanchot insists in a manner closer to Bataille, nothing must be taken in the simplest way as that which annihilates the will (FP 11/3). Th at writing can lead to this extraordinary situation seems hard to accept, as being a writer appears to indicate an occupation rather than a fundamental aspect of human existence, and so the anguish that arises in writing seems out of place. But any attempt to shrug o the nothing that assails the writer in his solitude will fail, as it can-not be removed, since what writing is concerned with is not something that can be separated from his life, instead in its annihilation it subjects him to a death without end [terme], that is, a nitude without nitude (FP 12/3). Moreover, attempting to detach the anguish from its source only increases it, which only leads the writer to become even more profoundly riveted (riv) to his writing, as Blanchot writes, borrowing a word from Levinas (FP 12/4).16

15) Samuel Beckett, Th ree Dialogues, in Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983), 139: Th e expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.16) See, Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, ed. Jacques Rolland, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stan-ford University Press, 2003), 13, 30, 64, 66, 71. In his introduction Rolland draws together the rst instances in which this verb is used.


Being riveted was the term Levinas used to explicate Heideggers theme of Geworfenheitthe facticity of always nding ourselves thrown into a situa-tion that constitutes, but exceeds, our existence, which for Levinas meant that we are bound to existence, that we cannot escape it. Blanchot is less concerned with trying to evade this essential bond, as Levinas was, than with examining what we are riveted to, which for him is the death without end that is the writers relation to writing, and this would seem to be one of the earliest of the many paradoxical and apophatic formulations to thread through his critical writings. Th is endless death was already developed in Th omas lObscur, but here it is explicitly rendered as an aspect of the writers relation to language, which suggests that what takes place in this relation is profoundly disturbing not just to the ontological approaches of Hegel and Heidegger (as it reveals a death without end, a nitude without nitude) but also to Levinas thought, for even if the meaning of ontology is radically altered as its nature and limits are recon gured, it can never be evaded. For what writing exposes is that human existence has an end that does not end, we can never be done with it, nor it with us; it can never be appropriated or sublated, nor is it subject to any relation to the other, divine or otherwise; writing simply reveals an ending without end, a dead end that never fully appears or disappears but permeates language with a never-ending destabilization of meaning. Th e place of language thus becomes uncertain, for it appears to be neither within ontol-ogy nor withoutsince we cannot speak of it as it is as it avoids nite deter-minationand it is to this disruption of being and language that the writers anguish opens him.

It is this strange convergence of anguish and writing that focuses Blanchots interest, for not only does the writer who is concerned with language inevita-bly nd himself drawn to anguish, as Paulhan had discovered, but anguish itself appears to exist in some way for the writer. So the writer would seem to exist because of anguish just as anguish would seem to exist because of the writer, as if each arose from the same tear in the universe, or each converged on the other in its tearing of the universe. Th is strange correlation, which was earlier found between innovation and convention, also arises between poetry and mysticism where language and experience nd themselves turning to each other. For Blanchot this ontological reversal is the mark of the primal scene of writing in which the gaze outside reveals only the sky, the same sky, suddenly open, absolutely black and absolutely empty, thus exposing its unworkable groundlessness (ED 117/72). Th is disaster is pre gured in the introduction to Faux pas where he writes that anguish, which opens and closes the sky, needs the activity of a man sitting at his table and tracing letters on a piece of paper


in order to manifest itself (FP 12/4). Th e signi cance of this is that in the earlier work Blanchot makes it much clearer what he considers to be the essen-tial relation: Th e case of the writer is privileged because he/it [il ] represents the paradox of anguish in a privileged way (FP 1213/4).

As a result, each side is tied to its other in a relation whose ambivalence can never be resolved, which is writing, which is anguish, and so on. It is for this reason that the nothing that the writer seeks to say can never be attained, for as a writer there can never be pure silence; and so, as Blanchot remarks recalling a prominent theme of Batailles thought, he works towards a di erent aim: to write towards a consumption without goal [but] or result; and for Bataille (and later for Blanchot) this leads towards worklessness (dsuvrement) (FP 14/5; EI 6162/4849). Hence, as Blanchot continues, making plain the mystical implications of this thinking, the writer is led by way of this consumption to a real sacri ce of himself. But while this understanding of writing carries the kenosis of conventional models of inspiration, no voice speaks through the writer, other than the incessant murmuring of the nothing in its nitude with-out end. So if there is any hint of mysticism in Blanchot, it is only by way of the atheistic resonances of someone as radical as Eckhart or Kafka, for such a disastrous writing will only be found in a work that contests itself to an extreme so that the work that is made signi es that there is no work made, a work in which perfect success and complete failure must appear at the same time, which exists only as long as that existence is cast into nothingness (FP 14/5).

Th e writing of such a work is an almost impossible burden, for it requires the writer to exclude his writing from any system of exchange where the e ort required to produce the work is recouped in some form by the results that the work produces. Even if the writer attempts to reduce his writing to no more than an empty gesture, this always risks being turned into a gesture of empti-ness: a pure product of art in its purity. For any attempt by the writer is haunted by the horizon of possibility that can determine his meager attempts as a project of meagerness. Th us Blanchot talks of writing only ever being provisionally possible in the impossibility that weighs it down. And this con-tinues to be the case until this possibility gives itself as real in destroying the share of impossibility that was its condition (FP 17/8). If it is by way of this window of impossibility that any writing that would respond to anguish arises, then such writing reveals itself to be that which occupies the non-place of death and nothingness in a manner irreducible to the ontological determina-tions of Heidegger and Hegel. For this non-place is absolute to such an extent that we cannot even term it an exteriority or an alterity, for it is simply not to an in nite degree. Th is dislocation that anguish has exposed comes from


the demands that it places on language to speak from it without speaking of it. So the power of language remains inescapable, for as soon as the writer seeks to reduce the expressibility of language to allow the inexpressibility of anguish to appear, he nds this inexpressibility itself becoming an expression.

Language appears incapable of not signifying, since it never is without also announcing this fact (which only dissimulates its appearance), and a few years later in La littrature et le droit la mort Blanchot will pursue this double bind more fully and will go even further in showing the non-dialectical nature of its movement. But this point is hinted at in the introduction to Faux pas, as Blanchot indicates that it is not necessary to seek bold solutions to the prob-lems of expression and production, for the destabilizing e ects of ambiguity haunt the most rigorous expositions of reason. Th us it is not simply the case that emptiness continually nds itself being transformed into a gesture, for every purposeful gesture is also open to being transformed into emptiness. Th is is the ambiguity of ambiguity, which means that we are not at liberty to decide, and thereby resolve, this ambiguous situation in one way or the other, for the presence of ambiguity in the text is itself ambiguous, as Blanchots reading of Paulhan had shown, and so any decision taken is contaminated by undecidability. But this is no idle confusion, for it bears upon the anguished writer as a torment, since it holds out the possibility of meaning under condi-tions of impossibility, conditions that, as we will see in the next section, bear on his very existence.

Hence, our attempts to devise methods to approach this ruination of the work fail by necessity, but the reason for this is also the mark of a more pro-found discovery: while Blanchot had found through Paulhan that language can reverse its meaning within even the most simple sentences, this ambiguity is now to be viewed as the essential mode of worklessness in language. Th us, rather than trying to develop a project in which anguish can come to lan-guage, we instead nd that anguish is already within language in the form of ambiguity, but this does not make ambiguity into a solution, because as ambi-guity it no more reveals anything than conceals it. It is a case not of a simple oscillation between di erent meanings but of a much more profound uncer-tainty about the very presence of meaning as such, which cannot be assuaged by indicating the absence or concealment of meaning, for this indication is itself concealed in uncertainty. Th e ambiguity of anguish does not refer to a secret whose revelation we are only temporarily unable to apprehend, as this would presuppose that there is something to be revealed; rather and much more radically, anguish has nothing to reveal and is itself indi erent to its own revelation (FP 21/11).


Again the question of possibility arises, since the pressure of this demand to respond to such an all-consuming but ever-vanishing anguish leads the writer into the most complex of negotiations with language, negotiations that lead back to the problem of literary innovation. At the end of his introduction to Faux pas Blanchot returns to the argument of the Paulhan review by restating the relation between common and revolutionary language and concludes that no form of literary invention can accede to the ambiguity of language unless it realizes the necessity of chance within the falling cadence of words. Th at is, the relation between innovation and rules, in which innovation is the move-ment from familiar to novel rules, carries with it the chance that gives each new rule the same arbitrary outcome as a retrieval of old rules, and thus the necessary choice of rules is itself under the rule of chance, which places it beyond the nave randomness that might appear in such practices as auto-matic writing: It is then that one can say that everything that is written has for the one who writes it the greatest possible meaning, but also this meaning that it is a meaning bound to chance, that it is non-meaning (FP 26/16). From this point of imperfection, writing nds itself lled with anguish because it cannot accede to the demands of anguish; and out of this ruin there is, in Batailles terms that Blanchot takes up, communication, since anguish has led writing to bearing its own (anguishs) expression as the meaning of solitude, which remains after writing has been unable to receive any other meaning.

III. Th e Disaster

Th e cadence that I have just mentioned is a very speci c notion that refers to that movement in which there is a falling of words towards the end of a phrase or sentence, and it comes from the Latin cadere, to fall, which is also the root of accident, chance, decay, and cadaver. Th e aspect of this range of meanings that I want to focus on here is the relation between falling and the end, for there seems to be an ambiguity between the occurrence of falling as a consequence of reaching a limit, or as the means of reaching that limit: Does the sentence end because the falling of words has taken place, or do the words fall because the end has been reached? Th e relation is essentially ambiguous, and this indicates something peculiar about the nature of limits, which has been noted above in terms of the failing of words. For when language turns upon itself, it comes up against a limit that leads words to fail, but in this failing the limits of language themselves come to speak of language in its failing. Equally,


this reversal itself befalls language by accident; there is an imperceptible change of course, a chance event, and suddenly words are failing us.

Th e pressure that this cadence brings to the relation of language and exis-tence has only tentatively arisen within Blanchots essay introducing Faux pas, but we can see something of what is indicated when the curious gure of the writer stricken by language, isolated in anguish, comes to resemble the very image of the prematurely interred or the unquiet dead: Alone in his room, buried and silent, beset with the feverish demands of responding to the noth-ingness that surrounds and permeates language, he has fallen along with lan-guage. Th e aporetic relation of language that provoked this failing now reveals itself as that which precipitates an encounter with the limits of our existence; just as the anguish at the basis of existence called forth the ambiguity of lan-guage, so too does this ambiguity now expose our mortality, in its nitude without nitude, as the disastrous failure of the end. Writing occurs at this limit, as the very turning of its ambiguity upon itself, which is the basis of its relation beyond (mystical, political, or otherwise).

In Blanchots rst article on Kafka from November 1945, which was later used as the opening essay for his second collection, La Part du feu, he focuses on this relation that writing has to its outside by looking at the nature of Kafkas stories and the problem of how we are to read them when their status is so uncertain: Are they parables, commentaries, or re ections? How and of what are they attempting to speak? For Blanchot this uncertainty comes from the essentially fragmentary nature of Kafkas writings, which seem to inhibit interpretation by appearing both incomplete and excessive, as if they were both saying too much and too little. Th is fragmentation itself arises from a negativity or lack of positive meaning that persistently destabilizes the writing, for at any moment the story can appear either meaningful or meaningless as its negativity either completes or undermines the narrative, thus it is not pos-sible to de ne the writing or its meaning, as its determination is neither inside nor outside the work. Th is ambiguity leads to anguish, for the writing at each stage appears, undecidably, as a step (pas) or as an obstacle (pas) to meaning, and that this reversibility hangs over it is the strongest evidence that this writ-ing is involved in some form of transcendence, which as Wahl noted can never be a rmed without negating itself, and vice versa.

Th e signi cance of this ambiguity lies in its implications, for the reversibil-ity of transcendence cannot be avoided or defeated, which, as Blanchot dis-covers, has a disastrous impact on our ability to relate to the ambiguity of death; and in Kafkas fragments on the hunter Gracchus, this ambiguity


becomes acute. As Blanchot recalls, although Gracchus fell to his death, his passage to the far side was subject to an accidental deviation, the disaster, so that even now he has not succeeded in reaching the beyond. Instead he is stranded in the impossibility of death in which he is neither dead nor not dead, but suspended in a death without end in which he is dying, in the intransitive, which becomes the word of the tale as we shall see in the next sec-tion. Blanchot calls this a dead transcendence, that is, a transcendence that is not, that is dead, and a death that is not, that is transcendent: a step/not beyond (pas au-del) (PF 15/7, 89/83). Th is step has the double issue that death is impossible even as it is unavoidable, that is to say, death does not end our possibility of dying; it is real as an end to life and illusory as an end to death.

As Blanchot insists, contra Sartre, it is through literature that we are exposed to this double ambiguity that is the origin of our anguish: It does not come only from this nothingness above which, we are told, human reality would emerge to fall back there, it comes from the fear that even this refuge might be taken away from us, that there might not be nothing, that nothing might be more being (PF 16/8). Th e ambiguity of literature, in which each meaning can reverse itself, is the mark of dead transcendence, which indicates that exis-tence cannot be nished, it is interminable, indeterminate; we do not know if we are excluded from it (and this is why we search vainly in it for something solid to hold onto) or forever imprisoned in it (and we turn ourselves desper-ately toward the outside). Th is existence is an exile in the strongest sense: we are not there, we are elsewhere and we will never stop being there (PF 17/9).

As noted, Blanchots readings have not only put in question the nature of negativity as conceived by Hegel, and the nature of death as conceived by Heidegger, but they have also cast doubt upon Levinas thoughts on the pos-sibility of an escape from ontology. In all these cases the outside that is being posited is shown to be far less easy to assert, as its a rmation inevitably slips into negation, due to the ambiguity that it never loses. Of equal signi cance is the manner in which Blanchot has begun to articulate the relation between the ambiguity of language, which was present in the earlier reading of Paul-han, and the ontico-ontological ambiguity of death, insofar as each ambiguity uncovers the unstable nature of nitude, which in turn puts in question our understanding of transcendence. As a result, the transcendence of this faux pas is only quasi-transcendent, that is, it only appears as if it were transcendent, as an image, and so any transdescendence that occurs is only as an image of descent towards the underside of being. Th us the encounter with nitude reveals this passage l-bas to be an endlessly repeated experience of groundless-


ness, an experience of non-experience that appears as an image in the inscrip-tion of writing (as Blanchot has shown), which develops no work as it con gures no beyond that persists outside its image, but only recurs as an end-less series of singular inscriptions of transdescendence.

With this reading the major aspects of Blanchots thought have emerged, and its most compelling point is that it has arisen from research on and in literature. But although the philosophical sophistication of Blanchots read-ings is profound, the basis of this sophistication, its literary articulation, places its philosophical designation in doubt. Th is suggests something critical about the relation of literature and ontology, for literature contests the basis of what we call ontology by way of the particular attention that it pays to the nature of the word, which is not conceived in any traditional sense. What Blanchot has uncovered is the fact that the language of ontological artic-ulation can never rid itself of its literary ambiguity; that it both presents and represents itself, that it is both present and not present, positing and negating, which inevitably a ects the nature of the articulation that it o ers to being and language.

IV. Th e Word of Transdescendence

If Blanchot has revealed something of the transdescendence of the word through his readings of literature, then it is to the same source that we should turn to attempt to locate the word of this transdescendence, that which is its communication insofar as it conveys the endlessly singular images of its descent. For Heidegger this image of descent is to be understood by way of the ancient Greek experience of ; and in the myth of Er that is told in the conclusion of Platos he nds what he considers to be the last word of the Greeks that names in its essence.17 In turning to myth to under-stand concealment Heidegger is tracing the connection between a certain kind of word and the event of being, which arises from the fact that it is impossible to discuss myth without considering its relations to the appearing of and , to which it is ordinarily opposed. It is because of this opposition that myth reveals the limits of words and existence, but what the myth of Er con-cerns is the ambiguous nature of such limits, which allow the other side of

17) Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, ed. Manfred S. Frings (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Kloster-mann, 1982), 140; trans. Andr Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz as Parmenides (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 95; translations modi ed. Hereafter cited as P, followed by German then English page numbers.


nitude to be heard, and thus communicate itself, within language, which in turn has implications for how we are to think about the limits of and .

Th e concerns the , which as Heidegger insists should not be understood in any modern sense of politics as relating to the city or state, but instead designates the abode of the essence of the human. Consequently, the is the site of the unconcealment of the human in its historical and strife-like (Streithafte) emergence, which means that our dwelling in this abode is bounded by that which lies beyond it. Th e is here but there is also a there, which lies beyond, and so our sojourn in this abode is a course tra-versing to the end, and then stepping beyond. While this course of life () is understood as ; it bears death in itself and thereby leads to death, this does not mean the end of being but simply the end of our dwell-ing here, so the question naturally arises: what is there, what lies beyond, where does the human pass into when it leaves the (P 138/93, 143/96)?

Er, the son of Armenius, fell in battle, Socrates relates, and when the people came to the battle eld ten days later to retrieve the bodies of the warriors, the body of Er was uniquely undecomposed.18 Nevertheless, he was placed on the funeral pyre with the other warriors whereupon he awoke and told a remark-able story of where he had been. Along with the souls of the other warriors, Er had left this place and gone on a journey before arriving in a place that he called . Th ere he saw two great chasms in the earth and in the sky, and the inhabitants of this place, the judgeswho determined the fate of the dead by deciding who should go upwards to the pleasures of the sky and who should go downwards to the torments of the earthtold him that he should instead return to the world so that he could tell of what he had seen there. According to Heidegger the key word here is the description of this place as , which he says is not to be read as demonic, thus ful lling the impression that Er has passed through the underworld of Hades, but instead should be understood as referring to the nature of this place as un-geheuer. Again, the ordinary translation of this word is misleading, for the place to which Er has come is not monstrous. Instead un-geheuer, as Heidegger makes clear by hyphenating it, refers to what is un-familiar or extra-ordinary, in the extreme sense of being without the normal order of words and things:

18) Mention should be made here of Claudia Baracchis Of Myth, Life, and War in Platos Republic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), which provides the most extensive examination to date of the myth of Er.


inordinate.19 But to return to the , Heidegger cautions that while un-geheuer provides some clue to the nature of the place Er has come to, it must be understood that the cannot be explained by way of the Un-geheure, for it is the that is the essential ground or that grants the Un-geheure in the rst place.

Referring to its root sense of , meaning to point or to show (oneself ), Heidegger suggests that the is what indicates or points towards the ordinary (P 150151/101102). In this, is faithfully translated by monstrare, for the is a monstration of the ordinary by virtue of the fact that it is its inordinate ground. It is as if there is not understood by contrast with here, but rather that here is what arises from there, as with the relation of heimlich and unheimlich; the former is the delimited and de ned version of the latter. However the ground, as Heidegger had shown the previ-ous year, is not just but also , the unlimited or in- nite, and in order to understand the inordinate essence of the , Heidegger explic-itly refers us back to this 1941 discussion where is read as Verfgung (enjoinment) and as Verwehrung (repelling). Th e notion of being as ground is thus understood as that which holds open the domain of pervasive transition between coming to be and passing away by way of its enjoinment, but which in itself is that which repels all limits or measures.20 Th us the is not ; it only comes to be in the form of what is, that is, it comes to be in being, otherwise it simply is not, as Er nds at the most extreme point of his journey before he turns back to the place from which he came, for the is the eld of .

Th e way to this most extreme point passes through an all-consuming re and a su ocating air, indicating that the eld of is completely bare of life, for as the it has no place for that which could arise from it, that is, for . It is as such that it is the eld of , for it is withdrawing con-cealment itself, without disclosure, which is why it is commonly discussed as oblivion or forgetting. But as it is the most extreme limit of forgetting, it grants no recall, only an utter void, the measureless expanse of vastness (die Wste), and it is as such that it takes place; it is the place in which this extreme and complete withdrawal occurs, leaving it as the place of the void as the presencing

19) Unfortunately, the translators of the English version of this lecture course have chosen to translate un-geheuer as uncanny, which misses the essential contrast between ungeheuer and unheimlich.20) Heidegger, Grundbegri e, ed. Petra Jaeger, vol. 51 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1981), 10713. For Blanchots thoughts on the border of nitude as , see LAmiti (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 20813.


of withdrawal (there there is, il y a, only there, without being). It is thus that the eld of is the place of the Un-geheure in itself, for it is the place in which there is nothing ordinary or familiar; there is only the monstrous excess of the inordinate. In this place Er and his companions come to the river (Careless, Ohnesorge), the only thing that this place of withdrawal lets appear; and in appearing it follows the essence of the place, for its waters are always passing away; they are never here for they can never be held in any place. Th e river is thus marked as that which is without care; it is, as Blanchot remarked in reference to the revelation of anguish, indi erent or neutral, for it has no concern with unconcealment, since care is that key disposition that lets unconcealment occur; instead the river simply disappears (P 175177/118119).

Having come to this river the travellers must drink a certain measure of its waters of forgetting if they are to return to where they have come from. But if they drink too much they will not be able to return, so a sense of insight (Einsicht, ) is required to ascertain the right measure, and so by this drink, taken in measure, the human returning to earth carries an essential belongingness to the domain of the essence of concealment (P 178/120). In this way the essence of withdrawal is given harbor within our bodies, whereby its essential comportment to unconcealment is also preserved. Th e name for this preserving attention is , which, as Heidegger urges, must be understood not by its later meanings as recollection or remembering, but only from out of this understanding of the insistence of withdrawal in the heart of unconcealment, by which it is preserved as unconcealment. At this point Er concludes his story: along with the others, he had lain down to rest when suddenly there was a thunderstorm and an earthquake, and he had found himself awake on the funeral pyre; uniquely he had not drunk from the river, which is how, as Socrates reminds us, concluding his narrative, his has been passed down to us.

While Er himself did not carry the waters of back with him, his has safely preserved the essence of in its telling, for it is through this that is recalled as the essence of and thereby pre-served. But there is a sense of impossibility to this for it carries within it that which cannot be experienced by any mortal and so it seems to exist in counterpoint to the essence of the human, who ordinarily cannot return to here without partaking of the waters of . Th is in turn seems to be marked by the sudden and explosive transition that concludes the myth of Er, as he is thrown out of into without any mediation (P 185/125). In a rupture that opens and closes the earth and the sky (the same sky), he awakes,


and there also is the word, utterly distinct and yet held within each other as the withdrawal of each unconcealment. But, given this provenance, what kind of word is this?

Heideggers argument is that this indicates the essence of as such, which thus not only tells us how the manifold of comes to pass but also indicates the limits of as the word of unconcealment. So although this has exposed the essence of by revealing the con-cealment at its heart, to fully understand the manner in which concealment is related to as word Heidegger insists that we need to try and under-stand the originary experience of this concealment by examining the ancient Greek words for it such as (to shelter), (to veil), and above all, (to conceal). In doing so he suggests that the essential ground of this experience lies in the fundamental fact that the earth shelters the dead. But, as he goes on to say, it is from the experience of concealment that the ancient Greeks understood the earth as sheltering, rather than vice versa, and thereby understood birth and death as emerging from and passing away into concealment. Th e earth is thus that which lies in between the concealing of the subterranean and the disclosing of the supraterranean, although he reminds us that the Latin terra is not the earth as has just been described, but the dry land of construction, the territory of settlement as a realm of com-mand and installation.

So to understand the sheltering and concealment of the earth we must turn to the word , which applies above all to , the night, as day and night indicate the events of disclosure and concealment. Here Heidegger makes the move that will direct the rest of this lecture course:

Since to the Greeks, most basically, everything that essences arises out of the essence of concealment and unconcealment, they therefore speak of and , the night and the lighting day, when they say the inception [Anfngnis] of the whole. What is said in that way is what is inceptually to be said. It is the proper legend [Sage], the inceptual word. Th e Greek word for the word, which says what is to be said before all else, is . Th e essence of is itself determined from . is that which opens, discloses, lets be seen: namely, that which shows itself in advance and in everything as that which presences in all presence. (P 89/60)

is thus the inceptual word that reveals the concealment in which the presencing of presence is sheltered. Th is is quite an extraordinary claim, but it enables us to see how Heidegger will later turn to Sage as the essential dimen-sion of saying in which language itself comes to speak. However, it must be understood, as Heidegger has made clear by relating to the earth and


the night, that in coming to speak through , there is no sense in which this is an appearance of what is concealed; is not the word in which the inapparent is made apparent. Rather is the wordand it is primarily a word, in the sense that it is not the earth and the night as such that are being referred to, but their inceptual essence as the earth and the night, that is, as words that are forever pronounced in the absence of that which they markthat makes apparent the concealment in which the presencing of what is pres-ent is sheltered. Th e relation between concealing and the earth, the night, and death is thus also marked as a relation with the word. But Heidegger inserts a note of caution, for is a word that can only be found and experienced if it is grounded in the experience of , that is, in the experience of the Greeks themselves. Th us it is not possible for us to understand without following the demands of translation; that it is necessary rst of all to trans-pose ourselves into the experience of the word before we can come to under-stand it and thereby translate it. As a result, Heidegger goes on to make his point more de nitely:

is legend, this word literally taken in the sense of essential inceptual saying. Night and light and earth are a , not images for concealing and unveiling, images which a pre-philosophical thinking does not come out from. Rather, concealment and uncon-cealment are in advance so essentially experienced that just the simple change of night and day su ces to raise the essencing of all essence into the preserving word, . (P 90/61)

Hence this simple change does not in itself grant the speech of , unless it is understood not as a mere distinction between light and dark but out of the essence of concealment and disclosure, which is in itself the essence of this change. Th us the meaning of can then only be understood if the words we use to speak of it re ect the original concealment that lies hidden within it, and these mythic words can themselves only be appreciated in this depth if they are spoken out of an understanding of . Th is circularity is characteristic of Heideggers attempts to move us away from the over-familiar use of words, and certainly it is a recon gured sense of that we are now presented with, one that is no longer opposed to since they now share a relation to as unconcealment. But what is most intriguing here is the step taken through the night.

, we are told, grants the essential experience of concealment that is to be found in the sheltering that the earth provides for the dead, that is, both death and the earth are to be understood by way of the more originary concealment of the night. So while the essence of lies in the manner in which its


words resonate from out of the unconcealment of , this resonance is to be found most profoundly in words like , which reveal the fundamental concealment of the night. But the night (like anguish) cannot reveal itself on its own, so it is only through that this obscurest aspect of our experience can be indicated, an aspect apparently more basic than our experience of death. What does this say about the relation of to , to the non-mythical experience of concealment, except that it is foreshortened, and what does this then imply about the relation of language to death, to its attestation? While the terms of Heideggers discussion restrict this point to the experience of the Presocratics, the night and its relation to thought are a persistent if tacit concern for him.21 Although this is unsurprising given the essential relation of phenomenology to the Lichtung, and the conventional rhetoric of philosophy as an awakening, there is an implication here that something essential is being missed if we do not take into account the mythic experience of the night, something perhaps even more essential than our relation to death.

To return: understanding how this sense of relates to - involves recalling that the basic sense of for the ancient Greeks was for-getting (), and moreover, a forgetting that is itself forgotten, leading to the most complete concealment that not only a ects what is forgot-ten but also the one who forgets, who in forgetting that he has forgotten, as well as what he has forgotten, falls into the deepest oblivion (P 105/71). Although this gives some hint as to what the Greeks meant by , their experience of it remains distant to us because of the way that it passes into language, for the fact of its occurrence in words does not always aid our under-standing, as Heidegger remarks in reference to some lines from Hesiod: we often encounter especially in the poets, although not in the same deci-sive way that is in the thinkers. Perhaps it rather corresponds to the essence of that it becomes silenced (P 108/73, 130/88). While this divi-sion of labor over - is a striking admission, it would seem to arise from

21) In particular, I would point to the letter Heidegger wrote to his close friend Elisabeth Bloch-mann on 12 September 1929, shortly after his meditations on the nothing in Was ist Meta-physik? where he wrote with great passion of the mythical and metaphysical primeval force of the night, which we must constantly break through in order to exist truthfully. See, Heidegger to Blochmann, in Briefwechsel 19181969, ed. Joachim W. Storck (Marbach am Neckar: Deut-sche Schillergesellschaft, 1989), 32. Later, in the Feldweggesprch, which was written in the nal days of the war, the night appears as the very facilitator of thinking in that it is the inconspicu-ous [unscheinbaren] guide of words, see, : Ein Gesprch selbstdritt auf einem Feld-weg zwischen einem Forscher, einem Gelehrten und einem Weisen, in Feldweg-Gesprche, ed. Ingrid Schuler (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), 107 and 157.


Heideggers claim that the that we encounter in the poets is one in which it becomes silenced, as this suggests that the e ect of the occurrence of in words, in , is one of silencing. Th us in coming to language, only speaks in a silent voice, but as Heidegger notes, this does not mean saying nothing at all, for on the few occasions when is discussed, it seems to have no less than an epochal signi cance, and here he directs us to the myth of Er, which bears by indicating that it is the essence of , the word, thus revealing the pall of night that is cast over the word of .

As we have come to see, Heideggers understanding of is of a mani-fold of concealment and unconcealment in which unconcealment is grounded in a double concealment, for its ground not only withdraws but this with-drawal is also obscured. As such, truth as unconcealment is grounded in nitude, as its origin and essence have not only withdrawn, but this with-drawal has itself been obscured. Th is understanding of truth is developed his-torically by Heidegger by stating that this grounding in nitude is the manner in which history itself occurs, which is to say that our age is grounded in an origin that is not just forgotten, but this forgetting is itself forgotten. It is this forgetting of forgetting (of being) that is silently announced in the inceptual word of that characterizes our age, which Heidegger has attempted to redress by way of a new mode of thinking as remembrance (Andenken) or retrieval (Wiederholung), which following his reading of aims to bring us back before the primal fact of concealment and nitude. Th at is, this remembrance does not reverse the oblivion of being by recovering what was forgotten, in the sense of retrieving being from its essential withdrawal, but instead remembers that being is in withdrawal, that is, remembrance only remembers that there is forgetting.

It is thus unsurprising that Heideggers most extensive examination of the intertwining of concealment and unconcealment in should culmi-nate with a retelling of the myth of Er, who remarkably and uniquely returns intact from the eld of , that is, he returns with an intact memory of that which is essentially forgotten. Th us, like Plato, Heideggers reading of the con-cealment at the heart of truth concludes with a tale about the retrieval of this concealment from out of its obscurity. But in following the structural empha-sis of the , he is also recapitulating that philosophical approach that uses tales about turning from the darkness of unknowing to the light of know-ing to show how this passage can be successfully e ected. While this approach demonstrates that without there is no pathway to understand the man-ifold of , it overlooks the fact that with there is no certain pathway at all, as is shown by the disastrous turning of Gracchus ship on its


journey through the , which revealed that the passage through lit-erature carries no guarantee of success. Together this indicates that is the condition of both possibility and impossibility for approaching unconceal-ment, for if there is a relation between language and the step beyond, then it is only by way of an endless reversal, as the word of transdescendence, the myth of , cannot extricate itself from the transdescendence of the word, the concealment of , which casts it into the darkness of in(de)terminability.

In this regard it is not the impossibly intact Er who captures this aporia of language for Blanchot, but the Presocratic gure of Orpheus; the one who is perpetually haunted by his failure to successfully emerge from the darkness and who thus remains on the threshold, his language forever suspended between here and beyond.22 Th ere is no retrieval of the withdrawal here, but only an unrelieved anguish; no recovery of the loss, but only the recurrence of loss, and in this we nd a precise poignancy that seems to slip into the gap between Heideggers elaboration of the double concealment of truth and his attempts to retrieve this nite grounding. For what Blanchot has isolated is the fact that what has withdrawn may be impossible to recall, but it is also impos-sible to forget. Instead, the double concealment of truth itself recurs as a per-sistent occlusion; it does not withdraw into an oblivion that is itself forgotten, but returns endlessly, not as presence or any present thing, but simply as recur-rence, as a mark of ambiguous erasure, the repeated erasure of the word in its failure to appear or disappear fully that is liter-rature.23

Although Heidegger and Blanchot have both sought to understand the rela-tion of nitude and transcendence by looking at a certain mode of language, they have come to subtly di erent positions. While for Heidegger the relation of nitude and transcendence is one of coherence, for Blanchot it is aporetic. However, each has also recognized that these di erent perspectives are not exclusive, although it is perhaps Blanchot who has thought through the extent of this ambivalence more thoroughly, and this is perhaps because he is more engaged with the particular mode of language at stake. For in realizing that literature bears an ambiguity that is itself ambiguous, he uncovers the fact that any attempt to determine the limits of literature is also suspended in this dou-ble ambiguity, which in reversing or turning on itself undermines any sense of there being a limit that could support the meaning of nitude or transcendence.

22) Blanchot, LEspace littraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 17984.23) On this point I would refer the interested reader to the last chapter of my Ellipsis: Of Poetry and the Experience of Language after Heidegger, Hlderlin, and Blanchot (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007).


Although the same endless reversion occurs between and in Heideggers reading of the myth of Er, his interest in preserving the centrality of means that he shows less interest in drawing out how far the insta-bility of the word stretches, which as we have seen extends inde nitely, thereby leaving the word of perpetually at risk of losing itself in its own self-concealing ambiguity from which there is no protection or escape.

Th us, what is most signi cant in the myth of Er is the recollection it carries of the fact of forgetting; that each person who drinks of the river returns with a mouthful of its forgetting. In this image we nd a gure of the very nature of the mythic word, which as Heidegger pointed out, is the ground or word for the word, which of course cannot be spoken but can only be encountered. Th us the status of the itself is what is most troubling here, for it is a word at the borders of its own demarcation, in that it is poised at the point at which its non- nite and groundless ground turns to the nite word of its saying: As the word is marked and nite, but as it is endless and nameless, essentially and abyssally underpinning . Th is is the singu-larity of the myth of Er, for it is a recollection of the impossibility of recalling, an impossible literary artefact that is the very essence of insofar as it is no-ones word: It is a telling of tale that can (only) be told by no-one. Equally, it is only by way of Blanchots literary retelling that the obscurity of this Heideggerian aporia emerges, but in doing so it becomes wholly other, expos-ing the abyss of the literary that subtends philosophy. For literature reveals the transdescendence of the word: that there is transcendence but it is dead, that it recoils onto itself, leaving the edges of thought permeated by an endlessness, the night of nitude without nitude.

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